Newspaper Representation of the Debates in the 2007 Jamaican General Election Campaign

This article deconstructs the newspaper representations of three debates held in 2007 during the Jamaican General Election campaign. The theory of social representation is used in this article to explain political behaviour and outcomes. Representations are the images, words, symbols or phrases that are generated from people's dialogic interaction that signify meanings. Content analysis of relevant articles covering the electoral campaign in the main print media in Jamaica forms the empirical basis for study. The majority of representations of the three main debates were negative, revealing that political manifestos were largely ignored and policy funding was not addressed. Significant issues such as crime, education, health, garrison politics, corruption and unemployment were inadequately addressed, and the wider global context of these matters was ignored. The consensus was that the Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) won two of the three debates, notably the leadership debate in which the Leader of the Opposition, Bruce Golding MP, performed more effectively than the then current Prime Minister, Portia Simpson‐Miller of the People's National Party (PNP). Social representation theory is used to assess the types of political meanings generated by media coverage during the General Election. It is suggested that the perceived success of the JLP candidates in the main debates was an important contribution to the party's overall electoral victory.     

Images of terrorism in the media: 1966–1985

Abstract

This paper examines the classification of terrorism articles in two newspaper indexes, the New York Times Index and the London Times Index, and two periodical indexes, the Reader's Guide to Periodical Literature and the British Humanities Index, from 1966 to 1985. The indexes are compared in several ways: by the year in which the category terrorism first appeared; by the changing nature and number of headings and related headings; by the changing number of articles under each heading; and by the different tactics, regions, targets, and other themes emphasized in these articles for each year. The changing patterns in these quantitative and qualitative parameters over the 20‐year period are analyzed in terms of regional differences (United States versus United Kingdom) and index differences (newspapers versus periodicals). The results are also compared with other research on media and terrorism that shows that images of terrorism in the media do not represent an accurate picture of the nature and extent of terrorism in the real world.     

How Does the Business of News Influence Terrorism Coverage? Evidence From The Washington Post and USA Today

Observers argue that the business of news is responsible for worsening the coverage of terrorism, but exactly how economic considerations influence coverage is controversial. Based on an analysis of over 1600 articles from The Washington Post and USA Today, we find that concerns about the effects of economic pressures on terrorism reporting are exaggerated. The business climate affects coverage, but the long-term impact of market pressures on coverage is modest. Articles about terrorist violence are increasingly prominent, but coverage of counterterrorism remains robust. Efforts to inoculate the press against the worst excesses of the market are unnecessary.     

Media Matter: How Newspapers and Television News Cover Campaigns and Influence Voters

The conventional wisdom in political communications research is that the media play a dominant role in defining the agenda of elections. In Bernard Cohen's words, the media do not tell us what to think, but they tell us what to think about. The present article challenges this conclusion. We present data on media coverage of the 1992 presidential election from the first nationally representative sample of American newspapers and compare these to the issue interests of the American public. We conclude that past claims that the media control the agenda-setting process have been overstated. Candidates messages are well represented in press coverage of the campaign, and coverage is even independent of a newspaper's editorial endorsement. We argue that agenda setting is a transaction process in which elites, the media, and the public converge to a common set of salient issues that define a campaign.     

Leveson Past,Present and Future: The Politics of Press Regulation

As a result of the phone‐hacking scandal and evidence of other serious journalistic abuses by some newspapers, the government set up the Leveson Inquiry to hear evidence from victims and to make recommendations for a new and effective system of press regulation. Leveson's recommendations for independent self‐regulation overseen by a “recogniser” was seen as a moderate solution which would uphold the principle of an unfettered press while providing appropriate protection from unscrupulous or unethical press behaviour. After historic cross‐party agreement, Parliament passed a resolution accepting a Royal Charter which adopted the great majority of his recommendations. In response, Britain's main national newspapers have pursued a campaign of systematic misinformation and distortion, aimed at discrediting the inquiry, its supporters and the cross‐party Charter, while promoting a different system which would remain almost wholly controlled by the industry and would in practice be little different from the discredited Press Complaints Commission. After decades of ineffectual political response to press abuse and press power, there is now a historic opportunity for Parliament to assert its sovereign power. Over the next 12–18 months, we will see whether we have reached a genuine milestone in British public life or whether the British press will remain the last bastion of unaccountable power.     

The ‘Othering’ of ‘Red Ed’, or How the Daily Mail ‘Framed’ the British Labour Leader

This article takes as its starting point the attack on the late Ralph Miliband, the left‐wing intellectual and father of the current Labour leader Ed Miliband, by the Daily Mail in late 2013. It argues that this attack was a response by the Mail to its failed campaign to dub the Labour leader ‘Red Ed’. The article demonstrates that ever since Miliband won the Labour leadership in 2009, the Mail has sought to ‘other’ him by presenting him as ‘alien’—this by constant references to his Jewish background, his upbringing in a wealthy North London intellectual milieu, his supposed extreme left‐wing views and his ineffable ‘oddness’—at least, an oddness as characterised by the newspaper. The paper will conclude by asking why the Daily Mail's ‘Red Ed’ moniker failed to catch on, while noting that their ‘Odd Ed’ moniker seems to have had more resonance.     

Setting the tabloid agenda: What two Afrikaans-language tabloids offer their readers

Abstract

South African tabloids generally thrive while mainstream newspapers struggle to compete with the current front-runners, Afrikaans-language tabloid Son and the English-language Daily Sun. However, not all South African tabloids are success stories: the Afrikaans-language tabloid Sondag has struggled since its inception, in particular prior to Ingo Capraro's takeover in 2009. This article consequently aims to establish why Kaapse Son and Sondag, two Afrikaans-language tabloids from the same media stable, have been received so differently. Why has Son hit the mark so impressively and why has Sondag been unable to succeed in terms of circulation and readership? In an attempt to answer these questions, this article explores the content and presentation of these two tabloids in the period just before Capraro took over the editorship in an attempt to save the newspaper from its dwindling circulation, i.e. the period in which Willem Pretorius was editor of Sondag. This comparative content analysis of the newspapers is conducted against a background of the nature of tabloid newspapers in South Africa, and within the framework of the agenda-setting theory. The background is explored by means of a literature review and conversations with editors from both newspapers. The analysis shows that Son has a strong community focus and provides its audience with relevant and up-to-date information they can apply to their everyday lives. In comparison, Sondag (under Pretorius’ editorship) resembled a supermarket tabloid, with a focus on celebrities. It is suggested that, in order to survive, an Afrikaans-language tabloid should provide local, community-focused stories that pertain to the everyday lives of its readers.     

Presence to Press: How Campaigns EarnLocal Media

Today’s campaigns have ample resources with which to influence the media, while plummeting revenue, readership, and reporting staffs make local newspapers more vulnerable than ever. This imbalance raises an important question: if a campaign invests more resources in an area, can it earn positive media coverage? In this article, I propose a strategic relationship between campaigns and local media. Newspapers offer campaigns credibility and exposure, while campaigns offer local newspapers easy-to-report stories that will appeal to their readers. Campaign messages are more impactful when communicated through the local press, so campaigns will try to influence local news coverage (when they have the resources to do so) by establishing a local presence. When newspapers are vulnerable, they should be more likely to accept campaign prompting and provide campaigns with positive earned media. I employ an original data set of newspaper content and campaign investment from the 2004 and 2008 elections. I utilize a within-state matched-pairs design of newspapers from the state of Florida and a detailed content analysis of stories from 21 randomly selected days from each election cycle. I find that regional campaign presence generates positive earned media, but only in smaller newspapers. This article contributes to the fields of campaign and media effects by demonstrating how campaigns’ calculated decisions influence the construction of local political news. It is the first study to describe the connection between the voter contact and campaigns’ earned local media strategy.     

Political Parallelism in Media and Political Agenda-Setting

This article investigates whether agenda-setting relations between newspapers and political parties are influenced by political parallelism. Our case is the Netherlands, a country characterized by high levels of journalistic professionalization and independent media. We focus on newspaper coverage and oral parliamentary questions and use time series analysis to inspect influence both of parliament on newspapers and of newspapers on parliament. The results show that parties respond only to issues raised in newspapers their voters read, and that newspapers only respond to the agenda of parties their readers vote for. This demonstrates that even in mediatized, professionalized media contexts, parallelism is still of importance to understand the relationship between media and politics.     

Media discourse and pathos: sketching a critical and integrationist approach – Greek and French headlines before the Greek referendum of 2015

This paper examines media discourse and emotions in discourse (pathos) during the week before the Greek Referendum of 2015. Drawing on the framework of Critical Discourse Analysis, we study the interrelation between macro-level (dominant) values and views, and the micro-level of media positioning, as retrieved from newspaper headlines. The headlines come from three Greek and two French newspapers of differing political, economic, and ideological standpoints. Focusing on the micro-level, we sketch an integrationist framework of analysis: We conduct a systemic functional analysis to scrutinize the transitivity structures of headlines, and an analysis of pathos in order to track constructed emotions. Among our main findings is that the newspapers, despite their different positionings and interests, converge on a dense discursive and emotional construction that favours the dominant values of a free market and the doctrine of austerity.