A framework for the multimodal analysis of online news galleries: What makes a “good” picture gallery?

The development of digital technology in recent years has led to a revolution in news production and dissemination. In terms of production, we have witnessed a fundamental shift towards visual story-telling. Images dominate the verbal story space and have the potential to become the story themselves. Beyond this, they are also creating unique spaces for themselves (e.g. the online news gallery), with new multimodal genres posing challenges for practitioners and analysts alike. The potential effects of such fundamental shifts on the professional news story-telling practices of the legacy news media provide a rich research opportunity for understanding both how and whether news organisations fulfil their mandate of making sense of the plethora of information that is now available. In this paper, we concern ourselves with one particular innovation in visual news reporting – the online news gallery, or picture gallery in journalism terms. We report on a qualitative analysis of 35 galleries from 12 English-language newspapers with online presence from Europe, North America, Australia and Asia, and interrogate the choices made by institutions in composing this particular type of multimodal “text”, as it is situated in a professional, news story-telling context. In doing so, we explore how a systemic-functional semiotic approach to multimodal news discourse may help us to access the meaning potential of this emerging genre as a vehicle for multimodal digital news reporting, present a framework for the multimodal analysis of online news galleries and consider its implications for the education of media practitioners.     

The Neglected Power of Elite Opinion Leadership to Produce Antipathy Toward the News Media: Evidence from a Survey Experiment

Today, most Americans dislike the news media as an institution. This has led to considerable debate about why people dislike the media and how their public standing could be improved. This paper contributes to this literature by using a survey experiment to test the effect of several different considerations on evaluations of the media. It finds, consistent with the broader literature on political persuasion, that elite partisan opinion leadership can powerfully shape these attitudes. Additionally, it finds that tabloid coverage creates antipathy toward the press regardless of predispositions and that horserace coverage has a negative effect on opinions among politically aware citizens on both sides of the political spectrum. Contrary to some claims in the literature, this study finds no detectable effect of news negativity.     

Use Your Illusion: Televised Discourse on Journalistic Ethics in the United States, 1992-1998

Journalistic ethics are predominantly created and maintained through authoritative discourse, not codification. 'The line' between mainstream and tabloid news media is a ubiquitous discursive formation that is reified and circulated through mass media and vernacular usage. This paper investigates the validity of the 'boundary' that separates the trustworthy from the questionable, through an analysis of the discourse by journalists on television programs in which transgressions are discussed. Results of the analysis show that little evidence exists for rational belief in the impermeability of the boundary, nor any support for the mainstream media claim that tabloid practices are 'contaminating' media practices generally. It is concluded that such arbitrary distinctions legitimize the dominance of mainstream media by creating a veneer of credibility, while continuing to engage in tabloid-style practices.     

Human Rights Reporting: Rights,Responsibilities, and Challenges

This essay critically examines the intersections between news media and human rights in the context of the existing human rights framework. A survey of the fundamental provisions of international human rights law and of the evolving case law of human rights organs relating to media freedom and responsibilities reveals that existing gaps and underspecified obligations render problematic the normative guidance offered by the framework in addressing the pertinent human rights issues. However, this is part of the story. The problems associated with normative guidance are compounded by media practitioners’ contending approaches on the role of the media as “promoters of human rights.” The interplay between these factors is then examined through the prism of the two communities’ converging commitment to “truth-seeking.” This commitment can provide entry points to a more constructive engagement between the news media and the human rights community.     

Religion,globalization and commodification in online world news slideshows: the dis/connection of images and texts

Lately, possibilities of producing and spreading news pictures have increased explosively through online media. Concurrently, religion has become increasingly salient in politics and news. Both processes are connected to globalization. This study encompasses globalization, religion and online images and aims to convey how online world news slideshows represent religion, and more particularly how linguistic and visual parts of picture paragraphs are interrelated, as well as related to representations of different religions. Methodologically multimodal analysis and discourse analysis are combined, focusing on composition of images and (dis-)connection of images and texts. Theories on globalization and possibilities and particularities of online news (pictures) and slideshows, frame the analysis. Tendencies to templates for different religions are found. Many religions appear as aesthetic commodities in images, whereas Islam in texts “sells” images of violence/destruction. Image–text relations are thus crucial both in the creation of meaning and of commodities in online news image culture. Two main image–text types are identified: “Religion in text, (potential) violence/destruction/despair in picture” (Islam) and “Spirituality/worshipping/aestheticism” (other religions). The world news slideshows have crucial roles as containers for these polarized image–text types, where they are related to and defined by each other in the genre's (cl)aim to cover the whole world.     

Birth and Death(?) of the Anti-Fracking Movement: Inferences from Quantity of Coverage Theory

Public opposition to fracking is one of numerous movements expressing concern about health or environmental risks of a (usually) new technology. These have at their core an esoteric dispute between technical experts, but laypeople also become actively involved, usually as volunteers. They may live close to pertinent sites, motivated by fears for their families and property, or they may be people living farther away, attracted to the opposition for ideological reasons. (Opposition to fracking is a politically liberal position.) Activism is increasingly motivated when the issue is “hot” and diminishes when it cools down. According to Quantity of Coverage Theory (QCT), the “hotness” of an issue – therefore the degree of activism -- largely depends on its presence in the mass media. The American anti-fracking movement arose fairly quickly around 2010–11. News coverage peaked during 2012–14 and is now diminishing. Similar peaks and declines are observed in British and German news media, consistent with the power of central American media to influence news coverage in other industrial nations. Inferentially, from declining news coverage, the anti-fracking movement is waning, perhaps dying. Lacking direct measures of activism, QCT provides a lens through which to see the rise and fall of the movement.     

“Are You Thinking What We're Thinking?” Immigration,Multiculturalism and the Disavowal of Racism in the Run-up to the 2005 British General Election

The overt expression of racist discourse in the public realm is today—even in the case of far-right organizations like the British National Party—avoided at all costs. Yet approaches by competing political parties to the “populist” issue of asylum/immigration in the months preceding the 2005 General Election were clearly informed by negative ideas of racial difference.

This article sets out to describe the conceptual logic and rhetorical structures of political discourses of cultural pluralism underwritten by the spectre of racism. This “official multiculturalism” is in large part shared by mainstream political parties and national news media, and is predicated on the self-conscious disavowal of racism and racist intent, while simultaneously serving to attack or problematize the existence or behaviour of certain racialized groups, both within and without the nation.

I argue that such interventions increasingly circulate around definitions of legitimate cultural citizenship; that is, on ideas of civil society predicated on normative models of belonging to multicultural Britain. I will consider how the electoral campaigns of both Labour and Conservative parties were carefully constructed with a view to their reporting in the news media, and the extent to which such discourses of (multi)cultural citizenship publicly disavow—yet remain strongly marked by—exclusionary concepts of racialized difference.     

The Speed of Global Flows and the Pace of Democratic Politics

The claim I want to make in this article is, in short, first, that democratic theory for the most part has seriously neglected the temporal preconditions of liberal democracy and, second, that it therefore fails to adequately grasp some fundamental aspects of the crisis of democratic self-determination in the contemporary global age. In its first part, the article seeks to demonstrate that the history of modernity is an ongoing process of social acceleration and that most of the phenomena we currently grasp under the concept of “globalization” can in fact best be understood as instances or consequences of the latest wave of social acceleration. In the second and main part of this article, the consequences of this acceleratory character of modernity for the plausibility, legitimacy and possibility of political democracy are systematically explored. The main argument is that the speed-up of society at first enabled and supported democratization, but beyond a certain critical threshold, the reverse effect occurs: the speed of social change and the dynamics of socioeconomic development threaten to undermine the proper functioning of democracy. Thus, it is my claim that democracy only works properly within a certain time- or “speed-frame” of social change. From this, I conclude that what is called for in the Age of Globalization is a new critical theory of acceleration, the contours of which I briefly sketch out in the third and last part of this essay.     

Journalism ethics and Levinas' Third: interruption in a world of multiple Others

This paper develops a theory of journalism ethics centered on the concept of interruption. Interruption provides a space in which the “Other” can speak; an instance in which those with whom we have no other contact but through news media can disrupt us. While steeped in Levinasian philosophy, the theory of journalism ethics developed here challenges some of its key tenets: unlimited responsibility for the Other and the single passive ethical imperative “interrupt me.” In a world inhabited by a multitude of others, a dogmatic reading of Levinas cannot foster a “community of interruption” in which the news media play a crucial role. Ultimately, to achieve such a community, the “Third” (the Other's other) must be privileged over the Other and the passive ethical imperative requires a complementary active imperative best stated as “let me interrupt!”     

US Media and Post-9/11 Human Rights Violations in the Name of Counterterrorism

This article adds to earlier research revealing that the American news media did not discharge their responsibility as a watchdog press in the post-9/11 years by failing to scrutinize extreme and unlawful government policies and actions, most of all the decision to invade Iraq based on false information about Saddam Hussein’s alleged weapons of mass destruction arsenal. The content analyses presented here demonstrate that leading US news organizations, both television and print, did not expressly refer to human rights violations when they reported on the torturing of foreign detainees during “enhanced interrogations” in US-run prison facilities abroad and the killing of civilians, including children, in US drone strikes overseas and outside theaters of war. Moreover, by framing torture and the “collateral damage” caused by drone-launched missile attacks episodically rather than in the context of human rights, the news media failed to alert the American public to the grave humanitarian violations in the so-called war on terrorism during the George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations.     

Public Support for Referendums: The Role of the Media

Previous research is unclear about which citizens support the use of referendums and how a referendum campaign can affect support for direct democracy. This study investigates, first, the factors that determine support for referendums and, second, the role of the campaign in changing support. This is done in the context of the 2005 Dutch EU Constitution referendum. A media content analysis of national media (N = 6,370) is combined with panel survey data (N = 1,008). The results suggest that those who felt more politically disaffected were more supportive of referendums. Furthermore, higher levels of exposure to tabloid style campaign news led to increased approval of referendums. In a second step, the mechanism behind this effect was tested using an experiment (N = 580). When exposed to negative tabloid style news about a referendum proposal, opponents perceive the assumed consequences as more of a threat. This threat perception increased their support for a referendum on the issue at stake as a means to prevent the proposal. The article concludes with a discussion about the conditions under which a dynamic like this is likely to unfold and when alternative explanations for referendum support apply.     

On the Fragility of the Western Achievement

The weight of evidence from evolutionary psychology suggests that human behavior is largely self-regarding. This implies that social structure will change as do the prevailing patterns of opportunities to pursue self-interested goals. Throughout the greater part of history the most rewarding opportunities have involved the coercive extraction of surplus production, “takers” living off “makers”. The Western achievement, the huge explosion of production and creativity that marks modernity, is the result of a highly anomalous set of circumstances whereby Western “makers” were able to throw off the “taking” yoke and make theirs the most successful strategy. This, however, created a further set of anomalies which have been progressively undermining the institutions of classical liberalism that the triumphant “makers” put in place. “Taking”, in revamped guises, may be on the way to reasserting its long-time hegemony as a life strategy, thus threatening the Western achievement.     

Check Out My Moves

Building on earlier assessments of visual representation in air and missile defenses, and on investigations of the role of representation and perception in warfare more generally, this article offers a semiotic analysis of the signifying practices and processes that are a necessary part of America's Ballistic Missile Defense systems. The argument is made that missile defense – a range of projects aimed at protecting the United States by intercepting enemy missiles in flight – provides a recurrent site of contestation of the image. To illustrate this, examples of the use and testing of missile defense technology to date are analysed from a broadly social semiotic perspective, with specific emphasis on the concepts of signs, codes and modality. Taking this approach indicates that, in the supposedly routine process of representing “threats” in a visual format, even the most sophisticated missile defense systems in use today still encounter severe difficulties, with potentially deadly consequences. This potential for misperception is itself an inherent part of the process of coding and decoding spatial data, represented in a visual format involved herein, which raises significant questions about the vision of nuclear security promised by ballistic missile defense.     

Objective but Not Impartial: Human Events,Barry Goldwater,and the Development of the “Liberal Media” in the Conservative Counter-Sphere

This article contends that we have little understanding of why the idea of the “liberal media” became an article of faith among conservatives. This study looks to the past by examining the construction of the “liberal media” in conservative thought to understand the present state of right-wing populism. The objective is not to determine whether the news media has a liberal bias, rather it is to understand the origins and development of this political and rhetorical project. It is argued that the liberal media critique was developed in the “conservative counter-sphere,” a public sphere for right-wing activists and thinkers. Based on a content analysis of the conservative publication Human Events from 1957–1965, this study finds that the presidential campaign of 1964, and the political actors and issues surrounding it, played a critical role in solidifying the right-wing critique of the liberal media.     

Developing a rhetorical analysis of racist humour: examining anti-black jokes on the Internet

Racist humour is frequently the subject of media and public debate in relation to issues of offence and acceptability. Despite this, little has been done to analyse it or its relationship to other forms of racism. I argue that an analysis of racist humour needs to account for the rhetorical structures of humour – to consider humour as a rhetorical device similar to metaphor or metonym – that has a persuasive potential. Using jokes from four US websites, the rhetorical aspects of humour are unpacked through the use of rhetorical discourse analysis and semiotic theories of humour. I then identify an important effect of racist humour. Zygmunt Bauman's ideas on the problem of ambivalence for dichotomous discourse and category formation are employed to argue that racist humour expresses racist dichotomies and has the potential, among others, to “hide” the ambivalence to which such dichotomies are prone. The article then considers the meaning and ambivalence of less severe racist joking.     

Media proliferation and partisan selective exposure

The number of Internet news media outlets has skyrocketed in recent years. We analyze the effects of media proliferation on electoral outcomes assuming voters may choose news that is too partisan, from an informational perspective, i.e., engage in partisan selective exposure. We find that if voters who prefer highly partisan news—either because they are truly ideologically extreme, or due to a tendency towards excessive selective exposure—are politically “important,” then proliferation is socially beneficial, as it makes these voters more likely to obtain informative news. Otherwise, proliferation still protects against very poor electoral outcomes that can occur when the number of outlets is small and the only media options are highly partisan. Our model’s overall implication is thus that, surprisingly, proliferation is socially beneficial regardless of the degree of selective exposure.     

The Tea Party and the Crisis of Neoliberalism: Mainstreaming New Right Populism in the Corporate News Media

Within months of Barack Obama's election, a putatively grass-roots conservative uprising emerged to challenge the Democratic Party's agenda. In this article, we analyze the role of cable news in the rise of the Tea Party during the current “crisis of neoliberalism”—a moment of political-economic volatility brought about by the Great Recession. We argue that the Tea Party's political purpose is to hold together the New Right coalition of business elites and white working- and middle-class Americans that undergirds the neoliberal political project. In the context of a deregulated corporate mass media, we show that both “right-wing” and “moderate” cable networks mainstreamed the Tea Party by framing it as a legitimate social movement, enabling the widespread projection of right-wing populist discourse in support of neoliberalism. In light of our study, we suggest that democratizing the mass media is crucial for a sustained progressive political response in the United States.     

Seeing the unseen: The Chernobyl imprint on the Hungarian public sphere

This research article analyzes the influence of the “Chernobyl factor” on the nuclear power discourse in Hungary. Despite its temporal distance, the geographical proximity of the Chernobyl disaster has significantly influenced the lives and perceptions of current Hungarian generations. The research examines two layers of public communication regarding the Chernobyl disaster—political discourse and Hungarian online news media—and matches these with the online representation of the catastrophe. This study finds that despite Chernobyl's significant impact on the cultural memory of Hungarian society, it is considered an event of the past with limited relevance for the future. The contemporary representation of Chernobyl reflects the aspirations and expectations of current society, manifests highly mediatized content, nurtures elements of infotainment, symbolizes danger and negligence, and socially reconstructs meaning through alienation from its original connotation. The Chernobyl factor does not appear significantly in current nuclear discourse in Hungary.