York Times Story Research Articles

Election Interference and Online Propaganda Campaigns: Dynamic Interdependencies on Facebook, Google Trends, and the New York Times

The relationship between propaganda campaigns, news outlets, and search patterns is of significant interest to political authorities and academic scholars from various disciplines. We explore these dynamic relationships using 3,500 Facebook propaganda advertisements, 167,000 New York Times stories, and hundreds of Google Trends searches for terms from the advertisements and articles in the two years preceding the 2016 US presidential election. The data indicate that propaganda campaigns utilize random content infrequently and instead follow specific Google search patterns. Depending on the subject matter, Facebook advertisements can anticipate the New York Times. In the contexts of immigration, racism, and the LGBT community, such patterns of content adaptation are more prominent. We use the results to provide policy and research recommendations.

Castro’s victory: An assessment of New York Times coverage of the 1959 Cuban Revolution

This research applies framing theory and basic quantitative content methods to analyze the New York Times coverage of the 1959 Cuban Revolution, in order to examine assertions that New York Times stories contributed to Fidel Castro’s victory. Specifically, the study analyzes datelines, bylines, types of sources and story framing in all the stories about Cuba published on the front page of the New York Times between January 1, 1957, and December 31, 1962. The findings of this research contest long-held claims that the New York Times stories, in particular those written by reporter Herbert L. Matthews, contributed to the success of the Cuban Revolution. Matthews’s three-part front-page scoop in 1957 introduced Castro and the bearded Cuban revolutionaries to the world, but his stories and subsequent New York Times coverage are unlikely to have been decisive in Castro’s overthrow of the Batista regime. This study argues instead that the New York Times coverage of the 1959 Cuban Revolution was written through an aspirational lens, much like the stories about other major political revolutions written by U.S. foreign correspondents, and that stories played an important inter-media agenda-setting role, as evident from the many news organizations that covered the revolution after Matthews’ scoop.

Anti-Communist Bananas: The United Fruit Company versus the Guatemalan Revolution

After a few years working for the United Fruit Company (UFCO), lawyer Thomas Corcoran took a moment to gloat. UFCO President Samuel Zemurray hired Corcoran in mid-1948, hoping to use the lawyer’s vast experience as one of former U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal advisors or ‘fixers’ to lobby on behalf of the company. Between his government connections and his work for companies such as Pan American Airways, Corcoran seemed perfect to convince U.S. officials to defend the company’s interests in Guatemala, where intense nationalism targeted this multinational corporation’s banana-producing empire.1 Writing to Zemurray in early 1952, Corcoran described his recent efforts to convince U.S. politicians and the public that Guatemalan nationalism was nothing more than communism. He boasted, “We have both parties on a bi-partisan basis calling in the House for the ‘elimination’ of the Guatemalan cancer” of communism. Republican and Democratic congresspersons were lecturing “the other Latin American nations that it is to their own interest that the elimination be effected.” Furthermore, he helped place a “good New York Times story,” another “good” one for the United Press newswire throughout Latin America, and one for Newsweek. Now, Corcoran needed Zemurray to encourage the “solid organization of New England through the influence of the First National Bank and elsewhere” and the “solid organization of the Gulf Coast particularly in Louisiana and Texas to keep the excitement concrete in the minds of the Congress.” Finishing his letter, he asked if Zemurray would “consider writing a little note of appreciation to John McCormack,” the Democratic Representative from Massachusetts and House Majority Leader.2

Joseph Fielding Smith's Evolving Views on Race: The Odyssey of a Mormon Apostle-President

Joseph Fielding Smith's Evolving Views on Race: The Odyssey of a Mormon Apostle-President

Violent Exceptions: Children's Human Rights and Humanitarian Rhetorics by Wendy S. Hesford

Reviewed by: Violent Exceptions: Children's Human Rights and Humanitarian Rhetorics by Wendy S. Hesford Alexandra S. Moore (bio) Wendy S. Hesford, Violent Exceptions: Children's Human Rights and Humanitarian Rhetorics ( Ohio State University Press, 2021) ISBN 978-0-8142-1468-8, 260 pages. The recent New York Times story, "A Viral Photo Helps Bring Syrian Refugee Family to Italy," recounts how photojournalist Mehmet Aslan's award-winning photo of a father and son, both maimed by the war in Syria, spurred a successful humanitarian campaign to offer the family asylum and medical care in Italy.1 The photo titled "Hardship of Life" shows Munzir El Nezzel, who lost a leg in the bombing of a market in Idlib and is balanced on his crutch, raising his son Mustafa high in the air. Its caption explains that Mustafa was born without limbs as a result of the medication his mother took while she was pregnant with him to counter the effects of her exposure to nerve gas, and it is the composition and combination of father and son's loving expressions with their physical conditions that give the image its power.2 The photo and celebratory story of the family's arrival in Italy raise the questions driving rhetorical studies scholar Wendy Hesford's Violent Exceptions: Children's Human Rights and Humanitarian Rhetorics: how and why might the photograph mobilize viewers; how does the image of Mustafa combined with the promise of prosthetics in the Global North distract readers of the New York Times from environmental poisoning and violence affecting primarily poor children of color in the US; and, how might the successful humanitarian effort undertaken on behalf of Mustafa and his family deflect attention away from or substitute in public consciousness for the human rights claims of millions of Syrians affected by war? In Violent Exceptions, Hesford analyzes the figure of the "child-in-peril" in contemporary legal and cultural discourses that circulate in the United States. The book has two central aims. First, Hesford develops a material rhetorical methodology to analyze human rights-related case studies concerning children in vulnerable or violent contexts ranging from war and displacement to trafficking to disability to race, gender, and sexual identity. Second, she shows how the figure of the child-in-peril elides collective human rights struggles in favor of humanitarianism on behalf of select victims. In Hesford's words, the book "argues for the recognition of the limits of the humanitarian paradigm of human rights to address systemic violence and scale the magnitude of the risks that imperil the human rights, lives, and futures of children growing up in the midst of violent conflicts, racial dispossession, [End Page 640] and environmental degradation, and in contexts governed by the rise of authoritarian regimes and leaders."3 Hesford grounds the methodological framework of Violent Exceptions in a set of key theoretical concepts: genealogy, material rhetoric, diffraction, and exceptionalism. Drawing on Michel Foucault's genealogical method, she situates normative human rights and the rhetorics that engage them in their historical contexts. Each case study begins with a concise overview of the circumstances from which it arose. That attention to context, including the context of the relevant human rights norms and of the example's social and cultural representations, undergirds her material rhetorical approach. While she makes a sustained argument against humanitarianism when it functions as a neoliberal substitute for collective human rights claims concerning structural and systemic violence, she also considers the multiple, contradictory ways a given text might circulate and be consumed by different local, national, and transnational publics. Employing feminist physicist Karen Barad's concept of "diffractivity" to refer to those differences in meaning and significance, Hesford repeatedly asks how discourses are mobilized, by whom, within what contexts, and with what effects. In probing these questions of which stories and images of the child-in-peril circulate and to what ends, Hesford aims to refigure the idea of agency. The problem of whether children may be direct human rights claimants or require some form of custodial representation rests at the heart of children's human rights. Hesford approaches this problem by redefining agency. Instead of being tethered to the individual (the...

Humanbecoming Hermeneutic Sciencing: A Global Perspective on Presence in "In Harm's Way".

The purpose of this article is to report the details of the humanbecoming hermeneutic sciencing of presence in In Harm's Way. Humanbecoming hermeneutic sciencing is dialoguing with an artform by discoursing with penetrating engaging, interpreting with quiescent beholding, and understanding with inspiring envisaging. The artform explored in this article is the comments and images of 60 nurses from around the world included in The New York Times story titled "In Harm's Way." The report is on the meaning of presence as lived and talked about by nurses on the front lines at the peak of the COVID-19 outbreak.

Chaotic reimbursement models put patients at risk

The last thing that pharmacists want to do is harm a patient. They go to school to improve the health of society. But misaligned incentives have turned pharmacies into factories. A series of journalistic investigations—starting with the Chicago Tribune in 2016 and most recently a July New York Times story reporting that the Oklahoma State Board of Pharmacy had fined four CVS pharmacies in the state for poor staffing and medication errors—exposed how the profit-over-patients payment model puts the public in danger. Any pharmacist or technician who’s worked in a high-volume pharmacy knew it was only a matter of time before either authorities took notice or we reached an unacceptably high number of injured patients. Thankfully, in Oklahoma, we’re seeing the former. Much of the scrutiny is on chain pharmacies, but blaming chains alone is an oversimplification of the problem. They are businesses, and they exist to make money. The cause of our upside-down priorities is how our health care system pays for prescription drugs and patient care. CVS pharmacists and their peers in other high-volume chains are giving 150%. That’s especially noticeable during the pandemic as pharmacy staff put themselves at risk every day to ensure patients get the care they need. So, what will straighten out this twisted system? Nothing less than a total restructuring of pharmacy payment mechanisms. First, patient care in pharmacies needs to become profitable: Pharmacists’ services must be covered under Medicare Part B through provider status. Next, PBMs must be tamed and held accountable. And finally, vertical mergers must be policed to ensure they actually benefit patients and don’t make care less accessible. You may have heard me on the Pharmacy Podcast Network or on social media saying some things that could be considered controversial, confrontational, or brash. Sure, I came out against the way high-volume chains treat their pharmacists and technicians. But I also tied it to our warped reimbursement system. I believe that if there is an opportunity for our pharmacy chain partners—who employ most pharmacists—to make money providing patient care, they’ll take advantage of it. You can expect more of this candid talk from me. This is a new day for APhA and for pharmacy. As long as I am CEO, APhA will be playing offense, and we will call out bad behavior (and we’ll also call out good behavior, like Walgreens protecting pharmacist, tech, and patient well-being by ensuring pharmacy staff get a half-hour break). Quite simply, we’ve all had enough of PBMs stealing from pharmacies and deprofessionalizing pharmacists. Join us as we take this fight to them.

Social Media and the Changing Information Environment

Abstract There is reason to believe that an increasing proportion of the news consumers receive is not from news producers directly but is recirculated through social network sites and email by ordinary citizens. This may produce some fundamental changes in the information environment, but the data to examine this possibility have thus far been relatively limited. In the current paper, we examine the changing information environment by leveraging a body of data on the frequency of (a) views, and recirculations through (b) Twitter, (c) Facebook, and (d) email of New York Times stories. We expect that the distribution of sentiment (positive-negative) in news stories will shift in a positive direction as we move from (a) to (d), based in large part on the literatures on self-presentation and imagined audiences. Our findings support this expectation and have important implications for the information contexts increasingly shaping public opinion.

Qualitative Quotes: The Prevalence and Effects of Survey Respondent Exemplars in Political News Coverage

National newspapers regularly report on public opinion as part of their political coverage. In addition to covering aggregate survey trends, journalists occasionally conduct follow-up interviews with respondents from those surveys to present the views of real people in news stories. The practice of reporting these “qualitative quotes” has existed for decades, yet, there has been little scrutiny of the voices that appear in news stories or their effect on public opinion. We examine this phenomenon in the context of the United States with a historical examination of New York Times stories and other major U.S. outlets that contain polling information and follow-up interviews. Consistent with past work on exemplars, there is considerable evidence for the nonrandom nature of the people invited to comment for news stories. In particular, the use of qualitative quotes reinforces some of the biases that exist in news sourcing more generally. Finally, we demonstrate in an experiment that qualitative quotes influence policy attitudes as least as much as aggregate polling figures.

Being There in the Midst of the Story: How Immersive Journalism Affects Our Perceptions and Cognitions.

Immersive journalism in the form of virtual reality (VR) headsets and 360°-video is becoming more mainstream and is much touted for inducing greater "presence" than traditional text. But, does this presence influence psychological outcomes of reading news, such as memory for story content, perceptions of credibility, and empathy felt toward story characters? We propose that two key technological affordances of VR (modality and interactivity) are responsible for triggering three presence-related cognitive heuristics (being-there, interaction, and realism), which influence news readers' memory and their perceptions of credibility, empathy, and story-sharing intentions. We report a 3 (storytelling medium: VR vs. 360°-video vs. Text) × 2 (story: "The displaced" and "The click effect") mixed-factorial experiment, in which participants (N = 129) experienced two New York Times stories (that differed in their emotional intensity) using one of the three mediums (VR, 360°-video, Text). Participants who experienced the stories using VR and 360°-video outperformed those who read the same stories using text with pictures, not only on such presence-related outcomes as being-there, interaction, and realism, but also on perceived source credibility, story-sharing intention, and feelings of empathy. Moreover, we found that senses of being-there, interaction, and realism mediated the relationship between storytelling medium and reader perceptions of credibility, story recall, and story-sharing intention. These findings have theoretical implications for the psychology of virtual reality, and practical applications for immersive journalism in particular and interactive media in general.

The Mismeasure of Mammon: Uses and Abuses of Executive Pay Data

On April 7, 2016, the Wall Street Journal ran an article headlined “CEO pay shrank most since financial crisis,” while on May 27, 2016, a similar New York Times story declared “Top CEO pay fell – yes, fell – in 2015.” Unfortunately, both the Journal and the Times mismeasured the actual take-home pay of each and every one of these CEOs in 2014 and 2015. The reason for this mismeasure is that both articles relied on “fair value” estimates of the stock-based pay of these CEOs as reported in the Summary Compensation Table of the definitive proxy statement (Form DEF 14A) that each publicly listed company files annually with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Yet the very same proxy statements also report the actual realized gains of these CEOs in the Option Exercises and Stock Vested Table. It is the realized gains on stock-based pay, not fair-value estimates, that enter into the total compensation that a CEO actually takes home and reports as income in his or her income-tax return.Moreover, including actual realized gains instead of estimated fair value of stock– based pay in the measure of total executive compensation can make a big difference. In 2015 the average total compensation of the 500 highest-paid executives named on corporate proxy statements based on actual realized gains was $32.6 million, with 82 percent coming from stock-based pay. But average total compensation of the 500 highest paid based on estimated fair value was $17.1 million, with 62 percent attributable to stock- based pay. The excess of total actual realized-gains compensation over total estimated fair-value compensation was greatest in those years when the stock market was booming.Why would the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times report estimates of executive pay when they could be reporting the CEOs’ actual pay? In this paper, we answer this question by explaining the origins of the “fair value” estimates of stock-based pay and how the obsession with these estimates by the SEC, relying on the business-run Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB), has relegated to statistical obscurity executives’ readily available, accurate, and actual realized gains from stock-based pay. We use Standard & Poor’s ExecuComp database to document that a) stock-based pay, in the forms of realized gains from stock options and stock awards, dominates both the size of and the changes over time in the total compensation of the highest-paid senior executives; and b) the fair-value estimates of stock-based pay tend to understate, often substantially, the realized gains from stock-based pay that these executives actually receive.An irony is that even critics of excessive executive pay, most notably the AFL-CIO on its Executive Paywatch website, use the fair-value estimates when the actual CEO compensation numbers would reveal a much larger ratio of CEO pay to the earnings of the average worker. Indeed, as we discuss in the conclusion to this paper, as mandated by the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2010, this mismeasure of executive pay has become institutionalized in U.S. government policy in the SEC’s Pay Ratio Disclosure Rule, which beginning in 2017 requires every company to publish the ratio of CEO to median-worker pay. Under this rule, the SEC requires companies to use the fair-value measure of CEO pay. The Pay Ratio Disclosure Rule is supposed to provide the public with a company-level indicator of income inequality. Instead it will tend to underestimate inequality, substituting fictitious estimates for actual known amounts of income that CEOs put into their bank accounts and declare in their income-tax returns.

Gays, Cross-Dressers, and Emos

Gays, Cross-Dressers, and Emos

What Makes “Good” News Newsworthy?

To combat the constant supply of negative news, some online news outlets focus solely on “good” news. But what is the value of “good” news? A content analysis was conducted to determine which traditional news values (timeliness, conflict, impact, etc.) appear in stories on Web sites dedicated to positive news. The researcher compared “good” news sites to the New York Times. Results indicated that the majority of “good” news stories were entertaining and emotional, whereas the majority of New York Times stories involved authority figures and conflict. Good news stories were less committed to journalism’s core functions, such as holding power accountable and providing the public with information necessary for creating an informed electorate.

The Passing of an Era

The Passing of an Era

An Extended Presidential Honeymoon? Coverage of Barack Obama in the New York Times during 2009 and 2010

Content analysis of front page New York Times stories during the first and second years of the Barack Obama presidency revealed news coverage that was far more positive in tone than the norm for recent U.S. presidents, particularly with respect to foreign policy coverage. While coverage of Obama was somewhat less positive during 2010 when compared to 2009, the Obama findings overall reveal a much longer honeymoon than seen in the past. Coverage of specific problematic policy areas, like offshore drilling issues in the wake of the BP oil spill, was particularly negative. Coverage of arms control matters was very positive in tone in 2010 for Obama, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009.Related Articles Farnsworth, Stephen J, and S. Robert Lichter. 2012. “.” Politics & Policy 40 (): 69‐91. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1747‐1346.2011.00338.x/abstract Bode, Leticia, and Valerie M. Hennings. 2012. “.” Politics & Policy 40 (): 221‐257. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1747‐1346.2012.00350.x/abstract Fogarty, Brian J. 2011. .” Politics & Policy 39 (): 1053‐1076. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1747‐1346.2011.00326.x/abstract Related Media Balz, Dan, and Jon Cohen. 2010. “.” . July 13. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp‐dyn/content/article/2010/07/12/AR2010071205453.html Calderone, Michael. 2009. “.” Politco.com. March 4. http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0309/19570.html Shear, Michael D. 2010. “.” . February 15. http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2010‐02‐15/politics/36853927_1_congressional‐leaders‐white‐house‐advisers‐president‐obama/2

An Icarian Fall

An Icarian Fall John W. Crowley (bio) Death of a Rebel: The Charlie Fenton Story by Scott Donaldson (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2012. x + 188 pages. $65) To learn the meaning of his leap to death What need to know the wounds he carried down To his crushing sleep? These are the opening lines of Karl Shapiro’s in memoriam for F. O. Matthiessen, whose death leap in 1950 shocked his contemporaries and still resonates among older scholars of American literature. Charles Fenton clipped the New York Times story on the incident and tucked it in his copy of Matthiessen’s masterwork, American Renaissance (1941). In 1960 Fenton jumped off the roof of the tallest hotel in Durham, North Carolina, where he was a rising star in Duke’s department of English. His momentum launched him beyond the sidewalk and into the street. Fenton’s death occurred only a year before the shotgun suicide of his literary idol, Ernest Hemingway. Aghast at Arthur Mizener’s probing biography of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Hemingway vowed to repel any such encroachment upon his own psychic depths. Fenton was among the young academic Turks planning to do just that in their Ph.D. theses. When discouraging letters did not deter them, Hemingway threatened to withhold permission to quote from his work—a prohibition that would have wrecked their careers. Hemingway ultimately relented, [End Page iii] and Fenton promised to confine himself to the author’s juvenilia. After publishing The Apprenticeship of Ernest Hemingway in 1954, Fenton proved to be a promising and prolific critic. But, despite publishing some essays, a biography of Stephen Vincent Benet, plus a volume of his letters, he was denied tenure at Yale. Nevertheless he still seemed poised for a fine academic career. Why?—the inescapable question posed by every suicide, especially when a literal failure of life trumps ostensible success. William Styron asserts in Darkness Visible (1990) that depression involves so many interlocking factors in “fathomless permutations” that determining a definitive cause is impossible. Scott Donaldson agrees, but he does adduce some of the likely factors in Fenton’s death. In the psychological literature Styron found consensus on a single point: “Loss in all of its manifestations is the touchstone of depression—in the progress of the disease and, most likely, in its origin.” Along these lines Donaldson traces Fenton’s recurrent dark spells to a childhood trauma he never revealed and then to his desertion from the Royal Canadian Air Force during World War ii. (See “Bomber Boy” in this issue.) By convicting himself of cowardice, Fenton lost for himself the respect his peers so willingly accorded him. William Faulkner would later invent a head wound he supposedly sustained in the RCAF: his steel badge of putative courage. Fenton, for his part, would inflate the count of his combat missions. But, in doing so, he sold short the true measure of his heroism: on bomber runs that amounted to suicide missions—only five of the forty men who had trained with him survived. Nowadays Fenton would be diagnosed as suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. But, had a medical palliative existed in his time, Fenton would have renounced it; for he attributed the lesion on his conscience to purely moral causes. The paradox, as Donaldson suggests, is that only an exceptionally principled man would have taken on the full weight of responsibility for betraying his principles. Although Fenton settled down after the war into midcentury American conventionality, embracing the work ethic and the homely domesticity expected of a man when maturity was the watchword, his rebellious streak eventually overcame his self-restraint. He went rogue in 1960, when he fell in love with a graduate student. In the generation before feminism, such an affair, if discreet, was generally tolerated, and often it was normalized by divorce and remarriage. But sanctions against conspicuous adultery were strongly enforced, and their imposition on Fenton precipitated a second major trauma. Like his desertion it centered on loss, the loss of whatever faith in his own moral fiber he had regained since the war. Fenton plunged into the same “gray drizzle of horror” that Styron describes: a species of despair that, “owing to...

A Little Like Reading: Preference, Facebook, and Overwhelmed Interpretations

Somehow, of late I had got into the way of involuntarily using the word “prefer” upon all sorts of not exactly suitable occasions. And I trembled to think that my contact with the scrivener had already seriously affected me in a mental way. And what further and deeper aberration might it not yet produce?—Herman Melville, “Bartleby the Scrivener” (22-23)His brain was jerking forward likea bad slide projector. Hesaw the doorwaythe house the night the world andon the other side of the world somewhere Herakles laughing drinking gettinginto a car and Geryon'swhole body formed one arch of a cry—upcast to that custom, the human customof wrong love.—Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red (75)Like eyes that looked on Wastes—Incredulous of OughtBut Blank—and steady Wilderness—Diversified by Night—Just Infinites of Nought—As far as it could see—So looked the face I looked upon—So looked itself—on Me—I offered it no Help— Because the Cause was Mine—The Misery a CompactAs hopeless—as divine—Neither—would be absolved—Neither would be a QueenWithout the Other—Therefore—We perish—tho' We reign——Emily Dickinson, poem 693Herman Melville, Anne Carson, and Emily Dickinson. These authors' bits of language just claimed me as I stared at some books on my office shelf, and I'm not sure exactly what to make of these passages except that I like them. So I'm listing them for you. You might also like them. I like many things, and in no particular order. For instance, here's what I “liked” one day, not long ago, on Facebook: a picture of the word Puppies! scrawled on a sidewalk; a New York Times story about the disorganization of the bicentennial of the War of 1812 (that war has a huge, nearly comical significance in my adopted country of Canada—did you know that Canadians burned down the White House?); an audio clip of Justin Bieber, featuring Busta Rhymes, singing “Little Drummer Boy”; my friend and colleague Jordan Stein's “vegan homo Thanksgiving” photo album; a posting by my “friend” “Emily Dickinson”; numerous updates about and images of the November 2011 pepper spraying of protesting students on the University of California, Davis, campus. I could go on and on, which is probably one of the reasons I, and millions of others, go on and on Facebook. Disorderly is the right word, but the likes are not quite random. People have generated these items, these virtual objects of interest, for rapid public consumption and, with the ubiquity of the “Like” button, for rapid public response. They (we) put stuff out there in part because we're showing off our preferences, or if not our preferences (even though they will be acknowledged with our liking) then at least things that interest us and (we hope) others. It's hard to know exactly what liking something on Facebook means because a like is nearly the same thing as an acknowledgment, something that says, “Yes, I clicked on this item, and it did not displease me.” And often people complain in comments that they wish there were variations on the “Like” button (“I want to express my anger with this piece of information—I wish there were a ‘Hate’ button”). Whatever our motivations or the nature of our interest in what we curate for the world on Facebook, these objects for consumption often go under the heading of like; so, like it or not, we're reading for like—we're doing a little like reading.

Stephen Colbert spreads some Higgs boson "truthiness"

The TV news satirist cites a New York Times story to josh physicists. The TV news satirist cites a New York Times story to josh physicists.

Verifying greenhouse gas emissions of Annex I parties: Methods we have and methods we want

Despite the hopeful prediction in the New York Times story, we are very far from being able to use satellites to verify compliance with the Kyoto Protocol’s caps on greenhouse gas emissions of Annex I states. The problem is not only one of insufficiently developed or installed technology. “Satellite verification” would also mean changing the current system of reporting-and-review of state emissions, opening it up to independent scrutiny, and making it less forgiving of state evasiveness and ambiguity about emissions than it is now. Some states will be interested in this proposal and others will not. In any event, the current MRV system, built on bottom-up state reporting, will remain the dominant framework of international GHG emissions knowledge for the foreseeable future. To safeguard its own credibility, it must progressively be strengthened. In this article I outline the existing verification regime’s main shortcomings and argue that the most efficient way around them is to incorporate into the current MRV system top-down (satellite and surface) measurements, resolved by modeling software at the state level, and produced by independent scientific experts in cooperation with the UNFCCC.

English newspapers in the United Arab Emirates: Navigating the crowded market

Dubai’s rapid growth has made the United Arab Emirates a global household name in the space of a few short years. A recent New York Times story referring to the country’s star emirate, perhaps put it best: "You name it, Dubai has it. Or if it doesn’t have it, it’s building it. Or if it’s not building it, it's dredging up an island to put it on.” Dubai’s growth has helped turn the United Arab Emirates, a country not yet forty years old, into a symbol of economic development for the rest of the region. But as the country debates its place in the global financial and political arena, there is another field in which the UAE will be tested, sooner rather than later: media development. As the country finds itself more tied to the global economy, English daily newspapers are realizing that the old system of uncritically reporting news in deference to political and business elites is no longer adequate if the papers want to be considered a player in the media market. They are realizing that timid reporting can no longer be washed off with a sea of advertising revenue and that good reporting is becoming more and more essential for earning respectability. This paper is based on first-hand interviews conducted with editors of all six daily English newspapers in the United Arab Emirates. As such, it is the most comprehensive research carried out on the topic to date. In addition, the paper relies on random but continuous analysis of the content of each of the six dailies over a six-month period between July 2007 and January 2008. The exception was The National, which is new to the market and thus the content analysis on it was carried out for a period of two months. The analysis included examining the quantity of various types of news (national, regional, and international), the news selection process (particularly which type of news received more prominent placement), quality of reporting and writing, and editing standards. The findings were then judged against central concepts of the role of the press, including news values, censorship, self-censorship, and ability to set the news agenda.