Journal of Applied Journalism & Media Studies - Current Issue

Drawing on the hierarchy of influences perspective as analytical lens, this article examines the macro-, meso- and micro-level dynamics that attend the B-Metro’s mediation of child abuse in Zimbabwe. In-depth interviews with B-Metro staff revealed that journalists’ identities, professional ideologies, political meddling, resourcing challenges and a gendered newsroom culture shape the news discourse. Additionally, strategic considerations about the credibility of the news report and the economics of news gathering have led to an overreliance on court sources. Consequently, the reportage is dominated by a legal narrative that eschews meaningful interrogation of the structural conditions that engender child abuse. Findings also reveal that journalists denounce patriarchal violence but espouse its normative ideologies. Ambivalence characterizes journalists’ convictions and actions as they are torn between commercial and public interest imperatives, compassion fatigue and the ethic of care.

This study aims to fill the gap of the practical impediments for journalists properly doing their work during the COVID-19 pandemic over a single country. It is achieved by mapping the situational threats faced by the press in Portugal, as one of the best countries that grant media a free environment to work, which illustrates the challenges faced by media in established democracies. Drawing on the analysis of 34 episodes reported by national and international monitoring bodies over twenty months since the onset of the coronavirus crisis in the country, it concludes that economic threats alongside limitations in accessing information prevailed to the detriment of verbal and physical attacks or smear campaigns and online harassment. Apart from the nuance of the far-right hostility towards the press due to the health restrictions during campaign reporting as a new type of threat manifestation, the remaining threats experienced by the Portuguese media accelerated or aggravated previous trends.

Gender inequalities are linguistically constructed and indexed through the strategic use of language representing the power structure in the physical world. Recently, #MeTooIndia, an Indian version of the global feminist movement, provided a scholarly opportunity to explore the gender stereotypes of emotional expressions. Even though some researchers have studied the sociocultural dimensions of #MeToo, the corpus-based linguistic analysis of this movement has yet to be explored significantly. Therefore, the current study investigated the discursive association of emotional representation of masculine and feminine genders in media texts. Given the societal nature of Indian patriarchal ideologies, power and gender stereotypes, we hypothesize that Indian mass media, as a powerful political actor, may attribute more positive lexicons to the masculine pronoun he and more negative markers to the feminine pronoun she. Textual genres of #MeToo were extracted from the print media by using the corpus framework of collocational and concordance methods. Our results revealed that, though the news of #MeToo heightened the feminine actor and largely produced the pronoun she in the referential position, the narratives of texts assigned more positive emotive markers to the masculine social actors. Overall, this study concludes that #MeToo as a gender movement has faced strategic linguistic resistance against feminine sexual victims, favouring the masculine actors.

This study explores the interaction between journalists’ discourses on values and practices and the regulations affecting them in the shape of public statements, which are considered to be an influential variable in journalistic practice. However, the process of producing such statements requires further attention, in particular the role of newsroom discourses. The case of the Spanish public service broadcaster RTVE illustrates this tendency in relation to the regulations governing it and their impact on newsroom routines and news-making. Over the past fifteen years, RTVE has been subject to contradictory reforms, during which the discourses of TVE journalists have taken the shape of public statements issued by several professional associations calling for a reduction in RTVE’s traditional political dependence. Accordingly, the focus is placed here on the evolution of those discourses from 2006 to 2019, as to (1) the way in which they were transformed into public statements in persuasive campaigns with an influence on regulation, particularly as to the election of the executive board and chairperson of RTVE by public competition, and (2) the interaction and influence of core values such as professional independence and diversity on shaping newsroom discourses and public statements.

Audiences’ shifts to online and interactive engagement have posed numerous challenges to Bangladesh’s media ecology. This descriptive case study examines the current state of digital transition, complexities and competitions faced by the local television industry by putting Ntv Online, one of the first-generation television station’s online portals and convergence pioneers, at the centre of the discussion. It explains how Ntv Online is internalizing and responding to convergence practice from both media market dynamics and organizational perspectives. This study believes that issues other than those raised by media technology are equally important in comprehending the digital transition of Bangladesh’s television industry. The key findings indicate that the hybrid regime’s intervention in free media practices as well as complex market competition from massive tech platforms limit Bangladesh’s trajectory as a competitor in the global digital media arcade. This also implies that existing ownership and corporate structures may not support the required interoperability between management and journalists. However, the digital transitions of the private TV industry may pave the way for the creation of a democratic space for public deliberation, which is essentially demanded in the current hybrid regime’s intervention in actualizing this shift.

Review of: Building Back Truth in an Age of Misinformation, Leslie Stebbins (2023)

Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 206 pp.,

ISBN 978-1-53816-314-6, h/bk, £25.00