Journal of Applied Journalism & Media Studies - Online First

During the 2020 lockdown, news outlets played an important role on the public perceptions on public health crisis. Through framing, news outlets shape a given reality, present possible interpretations, exclude certain persons and organizations while providing visibility to others. In that sense, media influence public perceptions of expertise. In the case of COVID-19, experts’ views were crucial in raising public awareness as well as promoting appropriate and effective ways with addressing the crisis. Present research considers as an expert any person or organization who was deemed capable by news outlets to consult the audience on how to protect themselves from COVID-19. This study focuses on major news outlets in the Greek media system and their framing of expertise from 1 February 2020 to 30 April 2020. This period begins with the emergence of COVID-19 as the dominant issue in news stories. The sample consists of 2389 news items from six websites and six television (TV) stations. The research aims to understand whether news outlets frame (or not) certain organizations and persons as experts. By employing quantitative content analysis, general tendencies in framing are analysed. The results infer that public officials were framed as the main category of experts. Greek news outlets in most cases avoided framing World Health Organization (WHO) representatives as experts, especially after the first death by COVID-19 in Greece (12 March 2020). In general, the reference period was proven to be a crucial factor as expertise frames were differentiated before and after the first death in Greece and the implementation of lockdown measures. Moreover, research also confirmed that during health crises journalists prefer the thematic frame.

This study examines the attitudes of four Independent Press Standards Organisation (IPSO)-regulated UK newspapers towards redressing inaccuracies in their print editions. It analyses the ways in which the Daily Mail, the Daily Telegraph, The Times and The Sun dealt with complaints in order to assess their attitudes towards the editorial standard of accuracy. Further, this study aims to evaluate IPSO’s impact on the newspapers’ complaints-handling processes throughout 2016, more than a year after its establishment, at a time when its regulatory arsenal had been consolidated and put into practice. We found that there was no evidence of any binary opposition in a spectrum of quality/popular press reflected in the sample newspapers’ respective attitudes and responses toward IPSO’s complaints-handling standards on matters of inaccuracy. Furthermore, our evaluation of the position, timing and wording of the published corrections of all four newspapers did not confirm a marked difference in the extent to which they were prepared to demonstrate their accountability to their readers by drawing published inaccuracies to their attention. IPSO has contributed to more systematic complaints handling but more needs to be done. Our findings are of wider relevance beyond the specific period under investigation.

This article explores a new style of journalism identified in the contents of 21 public Telegram channels from the second half of 2020. The case follows the poisoning of the Russian oppositionist Alexei Navalny as part of a broader research programme on the Russian public sphere. The qualitative analysis of the data provides insight into the use of Telegram as a source for ‘insider news’. This article distinguishes the linguistic peculiarities of the texts, such as markers of orality, and contrasts them with various modes of virtual journalism. The article proposes a model of a three-way proximity-building as a feature of a new journalism style. The article contributes to understanding the dynamics of the Russian public sphere and its overspill beyond the Russian territory and the institutional media outlets.

Memes have successfully disseminated various information on social media, albeit in a humorous tone. Journalism and journalists, however, remain uncertain in using memes as part of news work. Previous studies have revealed that variables related to journalism such as news values, participatory culture, public opinion, disinformation and credibility may be relevant in decisions to use memes in journalistic work. This survey from the Philippines employed partial least squares–structural equation modelling (PLS-SEM) to determine the factors that Filipino journalists (N = 138) consider in using political memes as a journalistic tool. This study is theoretically anchored on the theory of planned behaviour and the multilevel model of meme diffusion. It was found that the variables public opinion, news values, participatory culture and disinformation indirectly affect the production of political memes through mediation by intention. However, credibility was found to be insignificant. As well, results show that intention has a direct effect on the production of political memes. These results indicate that regardless of the degree of the variables’ existence, journalists still carry some intentions to produce political memes. Study results can provide reflections should journalists and their news organizations employ memes as a tool for credible news production, not as tools for disinformation.

Stormchasing is the practice of following storm systems and storms in progress over land. Though a critical part of research into meteorology by providing on the ground data for comparison with remote radar, satellite and/or other mechanized sources, stormchasing has more recently become part of the journalistic and digital media landscape. Despite its importance, stormchasing media has not been studied as either a media form and industry in its own right or in regard to reception by its audience. This article will begin to redress this absence through a pilot study encompassing the analysis of stormchasing texts, industrial context(s) and audience reception.

Review of: Material Media-Making in the Digital Age, Daniel Binns (2021)

Bristol: Intellect Books, 194 pp.,

ISBN 978-1-78938-349-2, h/bk, GBP 80

This article scrutinizes the frames that are deployed by the Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau about the Russia–Ukraine event and the actors who are involved in this event. Accordingly, the corpus consists of 108 English text-only original tweets retrieved from the Twitter account of Trudeau (@JustinTrudeau) between 23 February and 30 April 2022. This timeframe covers the beginning and the early stages of the Russia–Ukraine event that has captured the attention of mainstream and social media. Qualitative content analysis is conducted on the selected tweets, guided by framing theory and critical discourse analysis. The findings reveal that Trudeau utilized different frames to label and portray the current event. He also used ‘authoritarian’ frames to depict Russia and pro-Russia actors as outgroup members, who are directly responsible and should be held accountable for their actions, whereas ‘freedom’ frames are employed to represent Ukraine and pro-Ukraine actors as ingroup members, who have common values with Canada and need all kinds of support and assistance.

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.

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.

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.