Portrait of liberal chaos: RT’s antagonistic strategic narration about the Netherlands

Hostile political actors can use antagonistic strategic narration as a means of marring the image of targeted states in the international arena. The current article presents a content analysis of narratives about the Netherlands that were published by Russian state-sponsored media outlet RT between 2018 and 2020, capturing a period of heightened tension between the states. The authors distil and describe six overarching narratives used to portray the Netherlands as a state of liberal chaos. They analyse them using a framework of strategies underpinning Russian state-sponsored media’s narration, and interpret their strategic functions within the context of recent Dutch–Russian relations. Finally, they provide directions for future research, such as expanding on nuances within Russian media’s negative portrayals of different states or exploring the possible psychological responses this narration may elicit in the Dutch domestic audience.

Verbal processes in the Covid-19 news discourses: An analysis of ‘aswaqpress.com’ coverage on Malaysia

December 2019 marked the emergence of a deadly virus known as Covid-19. Since then, we have been battling the virus, which has infected more than 250 million people and killed 4.5 million globally. The pandemic has become the headline of almost every media outlet, local and international news agency. Hence, this article aims to examine the Arabic online news discourse of the event by focusing on the verbal processes strategically utilised in reporting the pandemic in Malaysia. This study's data consists of Modern Standard Arabic online news published by Aswaq (aswaqpress.com) news portal between January and July 2021. Aswaq provides Arabic news and information on Malaysia to the Arab world. Hence, the information provided by the portal is vital in portraying Malaysia to Arab audiences, particularly in framing the way Malaysia deals with the Covid-19. The study employs corpus linguistics analytical tools using corpus software AntConc 3.5.8 (2019). Then, the quantitative result will be analysed using a qualitative approach based on the textual-oriented Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) of Fairclough (1992). It is shown that Aswaq has strategically utilised various verbal processes to report on the word said and articulated around the pandemic. The diversity of verbal processes usage indicates different connotations that hint at different strategic approaches in reporting the news. Hence, it may lead to uncovering the outlet stance of the event. Finally, the study will present suggestions for other related studies in the future.

Informative campaigning in multidimensional politics: The role of naïve voters

This paper aims to investigate the possibility that electoral campaigning transmits truthful information in a situation where campaigning has a direct persuasive effect on a subset of the electorate called “naïve voters.” To this end, we construct a multi-sender signaling game in which an incumbent and a challenger decide whether to focus on policy or ability in electoral campaigning, and a media outlet then decides whether to gather news. Voters are divided into sophisticated and naïve voters. We demonstrate that a candidate's strategy regarding their issues of focus (campaign messages) can signal his or her private information. Specifically, negative campaigning against the incumbent's ability signals the incumbent's low ability in all separating equilibria. It is also noteworthy that separating equilibria exist only when sophisticated and naïve voters coexist. This implies that a fraction of naïve voters has a non-monotonic effect on the possibility of transmitting truthful information.

TSF radio live - the journalistic coverage of the Chiado fire in Lisbon (1988)

On 25 August 1988, a fire broke out in the Chiado area of Lisbon. It is considered one of the biggest fires in an urban area in Portugal, having destroyed a vast built historical heritage and caused several victims. The Portuguese news radio, TSF, was the first media outlet to report the news by starting a long special live emission putting into practice an innovative model of radio journalism for that time in Portugal which was based on the priority given to live informative reporting. The experience of this long live report was replicated in the following years by TSF in the coverage of other events. In this article, we analyse TSF's live coverage of the fire and reflect on the role of this experience in the journalistic model implemented by the radio in the following years.

Media Trust and Persuasion

This study examines the effect of media use on media trust and persuasion using a large-scale randomized field experiment, which was conducted in collaboration with the nation's most trusted media outlet. By randomly increasing the capacity for viewing its TV programs, we found that this treatment increased support for government policies by increasing program viewing time, which is, as we demonstrate, biased in favor of the government. Furthermore, we determined that the effect is driven mostly by those who trusted the outlet more than other broadcasters and that their levels of trust in the outlet were even *increased* by our treatment, which we call *endogenous persuasion*. By contrast, we did not discover heterogeneous effects with respect to political preferences. To better understand the mechanism underlying these findings, we developed a model of endogenous persuasion.

Institutional citizen journalism outlets as news? News Values comparison between Peopo and Public Television Service in Taiwan

Scholars have been debating the credibility of citizen journalism, with some arguing that it is a legitimate news source and others arguing that it should only be considered user-generated content (UGC). This study seeks to determine whether citizen media should be considered news.This study revisits the relationship tested by Tse and Spiezio (2021) that uses content analysis of 400 news headlines from Taiwanese citizen media outlet Peopo and local media outlet Public Television Service to compare the news values. The findings indicated that citizen media in Taiwan pay different attention to news values than mainstream media. The differences in news values between the two media agencies suggested that citizen media in Taiwan cannot be considered news. However, citizen media has its own unique values, including more stories featuring Common Man, and provides more Good News than the mainstream media. The function of citizen media in Taiwan is seen as complementary to the mainstream media.

The proceedings of Spanish Audiovisual Councils on discriminatory discourse

Mass media, and especially television, are powerful discursive instruments, responsible for the construction of social imagery through ideologically determined content. For this reason, the creation of a regulatory body with authority over the audiovisual sector in countries without one was urged by the Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe in 2000. Spain is the only EU country without an audiovisual council with authority at the state level. Currently, only the Audiovisual Council of Catalonia (CAC), created in 2000, and the Audiovisual Council of Andalusia (CAA), which dates from 2004, operate in Spain. Within an environment increasingly marked by hate speech, this research analyzes the proceedings of the Andalusian and Catalan Audiovisual Councils between 2004 and 2019 as it pertains to discrimination against vulnerable groups. Every pronouncement made by both councils on potentially discriminatory discourses was retrieved (n=156). These were content analyzed by codifying, among others, the following variables: type of action, the source that motivated it, the disseminating media outlet, the evaluated content, the type of discrimination alleged, the decision taken, and the type of sanction imposed by the councils, as the case may be. The results indicate that most of the actions concerned involve discrimination against women, originate from third-party complaints and target content broadcast on public television.

The role of collaborative journalism in West Papua: A Jubi and Tirto case study

In this article, the author explores the collaboration between Tirto and Jubi in reporting on the Wamena and Jayapura riots in September 2019 in what has been described as the Papuan Uprising. The collaboration was greatly influenced by the desire of both media to improve the quality of news on human rights violations in West Papua. Tirto is an Indonesian online media outlet. Its journalists often criticise various government policies and the Indonesian political world through headlines, news and special articles. Tirto won an award as the Most Innovative Cyber Media in the 2017 Adinegoro Journalism Awards organised by the Indonesian Journalists Association. In the following year, Tirto became the only media outlet in Indonesia to receive an award from the International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN). Jubi is a general news media service from West Papua which reports on the West Papuan conflict, especially human rights issues. At the conceptual level, one can expect an accurate and in-depth report resulting from the journalism collaboration between Tirto and Jubi. However, at the practical level, a question arises about what the collaboration means for the life of West Papuan journalists? Research results using qualitative content analysis and interviews suggest that the collaborative journalism they created was able to restore West Papuan journalists’self-esteem. These findings can contribute to the enhancement of the knowledge in the field of journalism and provide valuable information for West Papuan journalists.

Reliable Sources? Correcting Misinformation in Polarized Media Environments

Providing corrective information can reduce factual misperceptions among the public but it tends to have little effect on people’s underlying attitudes. Our study examines how the impact of misinformation corrections is moderated by media choice. In our experiment, participants are asked to read a news article published by Fox News or MSNBC, each highlighting the positive economic impact of legal immigration in the United States. While the news content is held constant, our treatment manipulates whether participants are allowed to freely choose a media outlet or are randomly assigned. Our results demonstrate the importance of people’s ability to choose: While factual misperceptions are easily corrected regardless of how people gained access to information, subsequent opinion change is conditional on people’s prior willingness to seek out alternative sources. As such, encouraging people to broaden their media diet may be more effective to combat misinformation than disseminating fact-checks alone.

The Distorting Prism of Social Media: How Self-Selection and Exposure to Incivility Fuel Online Comment Toxicity

Though prior studies have analyzed the textual characteristics of online comments about politics, less is known about how selection into commenting behavior and exposure to other people’s comments changes the tone and content of political discourse. This article makes three contributions. First, we show that frequent commenters on Facebook are more likely to be interested in politics, to have more polarized opinions, and to use toxic language in comments in an elicitation task. Second, we find that people who comment on articles in the real world use more toxic language on average than the public as a whole; levels of toxicity in comments scraped from media outlet Facebook pages greatly exceed what is observed in comments we elicit on the same articles from a nationally representative sample. Finally, we demonstrate experimentally that exposure to toxic language in comments increases the toxicity of subsequent comments.