‘Cashing In’ on curiosity and spectacle: the forensic patient and news media

Health and social care professionals are gatekeepers to, and custodians of, confidential service user information. In the United Kingdom (UK), police investigations have unveiled cases of payments being made to public service officials by journalists in return for service user information. The purpose of this discussion is to investigate such cases in the context of high-security forensic care. This paper provides a discussion drawing upon two UK-based case studies of prosecutions of public service workers relating to the sale of confidential information. The analysis presented here illuminates upon the salient and connected issues at work that have led to the transgression of legal obligations and professional responsibilities/principles of confidentiality. A fuller reading of the context in which these transgressions occur, and motivations that exist, may well serve to inform policy, training, guidance or vigilance in relation to the preserving of service user information in the future.     

我国农村新闻边缘化问题分析

农村新闻传播不仅是农村政治发展的推动器、农村经济发展的促进器,同时也是农村文化的转型器。在建设社会主义新农村中,加强农村新闻的传播不仅是时代的需要,也是农村社会全面和谐发展的需要。研究如何摆脱农村新闻传媒的边缘化问题,让其发挥最大的效能,具有十分重要的现实意义。     

Citizen journalism as a contestant in the history of journalism

This article looks at citizen journalism as a contestant in the history of journalism. It reports on a study that employed a qualitative research approach through a qualitative questionnaire and a focus group discussion (FGD). Through purposive sampling, the participants in the study were drawn from the citizen journalists contributing news content to the citizen journalism websites Sahara Reporters and Iindaba Ziyafika from a Nigerian and a South African perspective, respectively. For diversity purposes, other participants were drawn from the Global Voices online, which is popular for engaging citizen journalists from different parts of the African continent: Tanzania, Cameroon, Ghana, Mozambique and Kenya, to mention a few. The questionnaire was distributed through the technical teams of the websites for self-completion by the citizen journalists. The FGD participants were drawn from those who contributed news content to Iindaba Ziyafika in South Africa where the researchers are based. The questionnaire and the FGD were addressed in English. The study findings showed that mainstream journalism acknowledges the importance of the phenomenon of citizen journalism and the people involved, but it still stands firm that objectivity is a precondition of journalism. The study aimed to cultivate an appreciation of the relationship between traditional and citizen journalism as the field of journalism endures major transformations.     

Attention as a Valuable Resource

Keeping up with the news and monitoring public affairs are typically considered civic obligations. Yet there is a great deal of competition for people’s limited attention. Some studies explore when people tune in to the news and what sorts of public affairs content attract our time, but these topics warrant more research. Scholars concerned with the news media’s political role must better understand what leads people to the news in the first place. The practical import of this work is pronounced in an era where news organizations struggle to make ends meet. The purpose of this essay is to categorize what we know about what motivates people to tune in to news and then to propose a research agenda for analyzing attention to public affairs content.     

The Nonlinear Effect of Information on Political Attention: Media Storms and U.S. Congressional Hearings

Agenda-setting scholars have claimed that the typical punctuated pattern of governmental attention is a consequence of disproportionate information processing. Yet these claims remain unsubstantiated. We tackle this challenge by considering mass media coverage as a source of information for political actors and by examining the relationship between preceding media information and subsequent governmental attention. Employing data capturing U.S. media attention and congressional hearings (1996–2006), we find that the effects of media attention on congressional attention are conditioned by the presence of “media storms”—sudden and large surges in media attention to a given topic. A one-story increase in media attention has a greater effect on congressional attention in the context of a media storm, since media storms surpass a key threshold for catching policymakers’ attention. We find evidence that the influence of media attention on political attention is nonlinear; agenda-setting operates differently when the media are in storm mode.     

The Backbone Structure of Audience Networks: A New Approach to Comparing Online News Consumption Across Countries

Measures of audience overlap between news sources give us information on the diversity of people’s media diets and the similarity of news outlets in terms of the audiences they share. This provides a way of addressing key questions like whether audiences are increasingly fragmented. In this article, we use audience overlap estimates to build networks that we then analyze to extract the backbone—that is, the overlapping ties that are statistically significant. We argue that the analysis of this backbone structure offers metrics that can be used to compare news consumption patterns across countries, between groups, and over time. Our analytical approach offers a new way of understanding audience structures that can enable more comparative research and, thus, more empirically grounded theoretical understandings of audience behavior in an increasingly digital media environment.     

试论完善公安新闻发布工作的新思路

公安新闻发布是建立在公民知情权的基础之上,是警务信息公开化的重要形式。在对公安新闻发布工作的意义、指导原则及主要形式进行阐释的基础上,分析、研究我国公安新闻发布工作已取得的成效和存在的问题,进而探寻新形势下我国公安新闻发布工作的新思路,无疑将增进媒体和公众对公安机关的理解,进一步密切警民关系。     

Exploring the Paradox of Liberal Democracy: More Political Communications Equals Less Public Trust

Francis Fukuyama asks: ‘Is liberal democracy prey to serious internal contradictions, contradictions so serious that they will eventually undermine it as a political system?’ This paper argues that one of these ‘internal contradictions’ is the political communications process and it can be sufficiently serious to undermine the democratic system—but such an undermining is not inevitable.     

新时代主流意识形态感性传播的样式探析

意识形态作为抽象的理论体系,必须通过感性传播才能转化为可感知、易认识乃至能观看的象征形象,从而便于广大民众理解和认同。在信息技术飞速发展和网络社会加快变迁下,我们党高度重视主流意识形态的感性传播,借助图像、仪式和沉浸式新闻等形式,实现了主流意识形态由抽象性向现实性具象转化,极大增强了主流意识形态的凝聚力和引领力。适应时代和社会的发展变化,深入探究主流意识形态感性传播的典型样式,对于推进新时代主流意识形态落地生根和广泛认同具有重要的理论意义和现实意义。     

From Church and Mosque to WhatsApp—Africa Check’s Holistic Approach to Countering ‘Fake News’

False claims and misinformation spread in Africa not only on Facebook, in WhatsApp groups or on the dark web, but also in political meeting rooms, churches, mosques, and community gatherings. To reduce the harms caused by misinformation, Africa Check, the leading independent fact-checking organisation on the continent, believes a four-pronged, or holistic approach is needed: identifying and reducing the circulation of harmful misinformation; ensuring accurate information is more widely available; ensuring a more accurate understanding of topics it covers; and fostering fact-checking skills among the public. To achieve this, it reaches out and engages with a wide range of on- and offline communities and networks. The UK could learn from this approach to tackle the ways that misinformation continues to spread offline today.