Media Motivation and Elite Rhetoric in Comparative Perspective

The exchange of diverse points of view in elite deliberation is considered a cornerstone of democracy. This study presents evidence that variations in political motivation for media use predict the tendency of politicians to present deliberative rhetoric that considers multiple points of view regarding issues and sees those views as related to one another. We surveyed 111 incumbent Members of Parliament in Belgium, Canada, and Israel and analyzed a large sample of their parliamentary speeches. The findings demonstrate that motivation to attain media coverage and act upon information from the news media leads politicians to strategically display simple and unidimensional rhetoric due to newsworthiness considerations, but only in countries where the media constitute important resources for reelection. The results contribute to extant literature by demonstrating a media effect on elite deliberation and by emphasizing the moderating role of political systems on the nature of elite rhetoric.     

Partisan Bias in Message Selection: Media Gatekeeping of Party Press Releases

Parties try to shape media coverage in ways that are favorable to them, but what determines whether media outlets pick up and report on party messages? Based on content analyses of 1,496 party press releases and 6,512 media reports from the 2013 Austrian parliamentary election campaign, we show that media coverage of individual party messages is influenced not just by news factors, but also by partisan bias. The media are therefore more likely to report on messages from parties their readers favor. Importantly, this effect is greater rather than weaker when these messages have high news value. These findings have important implications for understanding the media’s role in elections and representative democracies in general.     

Introduction: Social Media,Political Marketing and the 2016 U.S. Election

This essay introduces the contributions of the volume “Social Media, Political Marketing and the 2016 U. S. Election.” Using a variety of methodological approaches, the authors investigate the communication strategies of the Democratic and Republican candidates for president together with the responses of their audience. Collectively, this research offers insights into how new communication technologies are changing both political marketing and the ways candidates and voters interact.     

Understanding the Social Media Strategies of U.S. Primary Candidates

This paper examines the social media strategies of candidates seeking their party’s nomination for the 2016 U.S. presidential election. We use textual analysis to understand what candidates focused on. We assess eight themes covered in Twitter posts. For example, Clinton focused on GUN CONTROL, while Sanders focused on climate change. Using Facebook data, we introduce a topic modeling approach, latent Dirichlet allocation, to the political marketing literature. This allows us to uncover what topics the candidates focus on without researcher intervention and, using a dynamic model, show how this changes over time. We note that Clinton’s focus on Trump increases toward the end of the primary campaign.     

Counter-mythologising “media freedom”: including the audience in media freedom discourses and a new normative position for the global south

This article argues for a conscious counter-mythologisation of the popularly utilised term “media freedom” within media political and policy discourses. It further argues for a diversion from understanding this term to refer exclusively to the sphere of media production involving the ability or freedoms of media producers to do their work without hindrances to their independence – whether these stem from state actors, media owners or other external forces. The article contends that a free media should theoretically, and in addition, be considered from the perspective of the audience(s) and its respective prospects of access and accessibility to the entirety of the media landscape. Since challenges of meaningful access and accessibility to media communications persist in much of the Global South, the article concludes by suggesting a newly theorised normative approach to the role of the media in a democracy, which is in keeping with socio-political conditions in historically “Othered” regions of the world. Utilising the example of a counter-mythologisation of media freedom, and adopting an audience-centred approach, the article additionally contends that any attempt at formulating new media theory ought to be contextualised within the global crisis of inequality in order for it to be relevant to the majority audience.     

Questioning the media and democracy relationship: the case of South Africa

This article addresses normative ideas around the role of journalism and the news media's links to the democratic process in South Africa and many other post-colonial societies in the Global South. In particular, the article addresses questions around the news media's role as the Fourth Estate and its claims to public representation, as well as the role that new media and social media in particular play in the media-politics nexus and in the strengthening of democracy (in its many guises). The article assesses the contextual factors that need to be considered in the analysis of media development and the roles and functions ascribed to the news media from within the context of the post-colony and young democracies in the Global South.     

“TO ME ITS [SIC] REAL LIFE”: Secondary Victims of Homicide in Newer Media

This article explores what happened when two people personally affected by a 1999 homicide participated in an online forum in which the homicide was being discussed. The two individuals in question were the younger brother of the victim and the elder brother of the man convicted of her murder. The case had been the subject of a 12-part audio podcast called Serial. An online forum—the Serial Subreddit—had been set up independently of the podcast and its producers as a space for listeners to discuss their views on the case. We analyzed the contributions of the two aforementioned individuals and the responses they received. We argue that new media spaces like the Serial Subreddit break down the traditional barriers between those personally affected by homicide and consumers of mediated representations of homicide. As such, they raise important questions for criminologists.     

Sacrifice for the family: representation and practice of stay-at-home fathers in the intersection of masculinity and class in Hong Kong

With changing socio-economic conditions, some men choose to become stay-at-home fathers in Hong Kong. Although they constitute only about .5% of the total male population, they have captured widespread media attention in recent years. This paper is an exploratory study on the gender representation of stay-at-home fathers in newspapers, and their identity and practice in real life in relation to the construction of masculinity in the Asian context, with particular focus on the intersection of masculinity and social class. Although stay-at-home fathers have given up their traditional breadwinner role, the media continue to portray them in terms of conventional masculinity. Contrary to the findings in Western society, this paper, which is based on Bourdieu’s practice theory, reports that middle-class men in Hong Kong with social and cultural capital are less reflexive in their gender habitus to accept their carer identity, whereas working-class fathers, who lack the appropriate capital to resume their provider status, define themselves as carers who are responsible to the family. As the identity of provider is still central to men, the emergence of this new fatherhood is only a refashioning of the traditional role of fathers and thus does not challenge the existing gender structure.     

Three dilemmas of hybrid regime governance: Russia from Putin to Putin

This article investigates how hybrid regimes supply governance by examining a series of dilemmas (involving elections, the mass media, and state institutions) that their rulers face. The authors demonstrate how regime responses to these dilemmas – typically efforts to maintain control while avoiding outright repression and societal backlash – have negative outcomes, including a weakening of formal institutions, proliferation of “substitutions” (e.g., substitutes for institutions), and increasing centralization and personalization of control. Efforts by Russian leaders to disengage society from the sphere of decision-making entail a significant risk of systemic breakdown in unexpected ways. More specifically, given significantly weakened institutions for interest representation and negotiated compromise, policy-making in the Russian system often amounts to the leadership's best guess (ad hoc manual policy adjustments) as to precisely what society will accept and what it will not, with a significant possibility of miscalculation. Three case studies of the policy-making process are presented: the 2005 cash-for-benefits reform, plans for the development of the Khimki Forest, and changes leading up to and following major public protests in 2011–2012.     

Pulses from the multitude: virtuosity and black feminist discourse

Using a dialogic format this conversation between two authors uses political theorist Paolo Virno's conception of the “multitude” to examine and compare two different arenas of black feminist protest that took place on social media in the latter half of 2013. As a performative article, it offers historical and theoretical background to the terms “multitude,” “public intellect,” and “virtuosic labor” in racialized capitalist formations, situating them to provide an alternative to the power of the State – an alternative that unlike the State does not claim to confer rights. The article looks at the Facebook response to a call from the Crunk Feminist Collective to white feminists to speak out on the verdict exonerating Trayvon Martin’s killer and offer counter images to those that describe Martin's killing as justified. It then looks at the public dialogue around the applicability of the term “feminism” to Beyoncé's self-titled “visual album.” Through aesthetic inquiry, the authors look at the form these examples of protest take to situate and propose the active viewing of these aesthetic forms by others on social media, as well as by the authors of this article, as a kind of virtuosic labor. The article concludes with a series of poems created using the “cut-up” technique designed to transmit feeling through subjective action and a task manifesto for white feminists to use as a guide.