International Journal of Media & Cultural Politics - Volume 16, Issue 2, 2020

Anti-Americanism is a growing tendency among people in Turkey, and the media is one source of this negative sentiment. After the failed military coup attempt in Turkey on 15 July 2016, more than 150 domestic media outlets were shut down, including television channels, daily newspapers, radio stations, news websites, and even social media. Local affiliates of international media companies such as Deutsche Welle Turkish, however, have remained immune to such government interventions to some extent. Considering the difference in the level of independence from Turkish government influence, this study aims to explore how the anti-American sentiment in the news varied across different media outlets. With the content of 690 online news reports, a sentiment analysis compared the pro-government Sabah and Yeni Şafak daily newspapers with two internationally owned and more independent media outlets, BBC News Turkish and Deutsche Welle. The results showed a significant discrepancy between the two groups in terms of how they framed news related to the United States. The domestic media framed and reported the US-related news with a more negative slant, including the use of offensive and pejorative narratives about the United States and its politics. BBC Turkish and Deutsche Welle, however, reported news about the United States with a relatively more neutral and objective language.

Although panel reviewing is frequently used in the allocation of public cultural funds, the internal functioning of artistic panels has received little attention in cultural and sociological studies. This article examines panel reviewing in the field of theatre. Based on in-depth interviews with panel experts, it analyses factors that are influential in terms of procedural and substantive aspects of decision-making. Our investigation deals with: (1) individual critical approaches of members and how they come into play in panel deliberations, (2) group composition and diversity, (3) group and leader influence on individual and collective decisions and (4) the meaning of consensus as a decision rule. The article sheds light on how collective judgements are formed, shared and constrained by the procedural (e.g. group diversity, decision rules), social (e.g. group pressure) and personal (e.g. individual approaches and tastes) aspects of group decision-making.

While a discourse of difference has routinely been used as a marker of national identity, such an approach is premised on exclusion. By contrast, this article considers how inclusion or diversity may be employed in nation-building discourse, and its impact on the citizenry, as embodied in the omnivore – one who appreciates a wide range of cultural artefacts and, in doing so, evokes a high status. Using a Verstehen approach to critical discourse analysis, we analyse one kind of state media – the Singapore Tourism Board’s food-related webpages – to assess how they represent citizens and tourists as culinary omnivores, and how this may be interpreted to reveal mechanisms of hegemonic state control.

The study adopts approaches in linguistics and critical discourse analysis to interpret media speeches and public statements of the Biafra secessionist movement leader, Nnamdi Kanu, as hate speech. The study shows that hate speech in discourses produced by the separatist Indigenous People of Biafra appears as language aggression, such as insults and verbal attacks, as well as threats. Discourse structures such as the use of interrogation and metaphor also appear in the hate narratives. Compared with the Rwandan case, the study argues that hate speech could result in similar incitement and violence. While hate speech caused genocide in Rwanda, it did not work in Nigeria, largely because of the division among the Biafra campaigners and the Igbo political elite about the Biafra independence campaign.

This article examines the dynamics of representation between cultural and economic forms of gender inequality on Nigerian female blogs. Through a thematic analysis of 253 comments retrieved from five female-authored blogs, I draw on prominent cases of gender inequality in Nigeria, such as ‘President Muhammadu Buhari’s position on his wife’ and the ‘rejection of the Gender and Equal Opportunities Bill’. The analysis showed that blog discussions among females in Nigeria suggest extensive intolerance to cultural change, especially in comparison to the more positive attitude towards redistribution. To tackle this complexity, I argue that gender equality advocacy in Nigeria should commence mainly from a redistributive standpoint. This needs to be accompanied by the ulterior aim of achieving recognition. Overall, the study contests the idea that identity politics is threatening to replace the issue of redistribution on the global political agenda by highlighting the primacy of redistributive politics in blog discourse. It enriches media studies and gender research by providing rare insight into the practical connections between cultural and economic politics of gender inequality in an online discursive context.

Based on ethnographic research in Nagaland, a north-eastern state in India, this article critically examines the engagement of Naga youth with Korean media focusing on its popularity, meaning-creation and negotiation, against the larger context of Indo-Naga political issues. Naga youth, denied time and space by the Indian mainstream media, have found in Korean media an alternative way to engage themselves. It also examines the complex process of reception of Korean media by the Nagas to re-negotiate the broader terrains of modernity, identity and national culture. The reception process also illuminates the political tensions between the centre and periphery and reflects the political status and identity of the Naga vis-à-vis the mainstream Indian identity. The tension between Naga nationalistic sentiments and de-indianization comes out in this transnational media engagement. And as they carve out an identity in this complex matrix from the local across the global, it is an expanded identity that is highly mediated with remnants of the memories of past injustices and struggles, an identity that goes beyond the borders of Nagaland.

Review of: The Media, European Integration and the Rise of Euro-journalism, 1950s–1970s, Martin Herzer (2019)

London: Palgrave Macmillan, 357 pp.,

ISBN 978-3-03028-777-1, h/bk, €82.49, ISBN 978-3-03028-778-8, e/bk, €64.19