Pick a Horse, Ditch the Goat: the Rise of the Spoiler Frame in a Bipartisan Election Discourse

Increasingly, public opinion shows Republican and Democratic presidential candidates are some of the most onerous in recorded history, and Americans want to see third-party options alongside them. Half of Americans use televised news to stay informed, but the two-party horserace leaves little room for the multiple candidates on the ballot. This analysis explores the prominent horserace discourse of the 2012 and 2016 televised coverage of the U.S. presidential races and the “spoiler effect” frame within. Following Jill Stein’s Green Party candidacy through the months surrounding each election, the coverage advanced her portrayal from “nonfactor” to “spoiler” despite the consistency in her campaign platform. During both elections, journalists delegitimized Stein and other third-party candidates with subframes the author calls “undeserved,” “the scarlet Nader,” and the “laughingstock.” These frames are evidence of the intensely partisan two-party political system and corresponding media; their use narrows the election discourse

Media Coverage of Weapons of Mass Destruction

CISSM MonographThe public relies on the media to separate facts and tangible realities from assumptions and spin. Media Coverage of Weapons of Mass Destruction evaluates how well the media has performed this task in regards to the issue of weapons of mass destruction (WMD). The study assesses how the coverage of WMD has changed over time and across geographies " especially since the launch of the "War on Terror" and the positioning of Iraq as the "big" international story. The events of the last year and a half in Iraq " the build-up to the war, the shock-and-awe campaign, the ground combat, the "post-victory" insurgency, the capture of Saddam Hussein, and the ongoing hunt for banned weapons " have dramatically demonstrated the need for greater public understanding of the role that WMD plays in the formulation of and rhetorical justifications for US security policy. With that goal in mind, this study examines three time periods, each lasting three weeks, during which at least two major WMD-related stories were being covered. The specific beginning and ending dates were chosen to include coverage one week before and two weeks after the dates on which a major nuclear proliferation story appeared in the media: India"s nuclear weapons tests in May 1998, the US announcement of evidence of a North Korean nuclear weapons program in October 2002, and revelations about Iran"s nuclear program in May 2003. Iraq was purposely not chosen as one of these reference points because it was already overrepresented in the study relative to other significant countries. The three periods chosen cover major WMD issues during both the Clinton and Bush administrations and include important developments in Iraq and elsewhere. Dr. Susan D. Moeller is Associate Professor at the Philip Merrill College of Journalism, University of Maryland, College Park

AMERICAN JOURNALISM AND THE DEVIANT VOTER: ANALYZING AND IMPROVING COVERAGE OF THE ELECTORATE IN THE TRUMP ERA

This study examined media coverage of the 2016 presidential election to identify whether Trump voters were framed as deviant as defined by Daniel Hallin’s Sphere Theory (1986). In a content analysis of 384 reports produced in the last six weeks of the election by national and local outlets, this study found that journalists framed Trump voters as outside the political norm through the use of delegitimizing cues. Previous scholarship (Luther and Miller 2005; Robinson et. al. 2008; Taylor 2014; Billard 2016) has defined delegitimizing cues as frames that signal negativity to the news consumer. Using a coding system and a qualitative examination of the media reports, this study operationalized deviance through the identification of six delegitimizing cues applied to the Trump voter. The conclusion was that the media framed Trump voters using delegitimizing cues that differed from the coverage of Clinton voters and signaled deviance to the news consumer.Hallin defined three spheres of normative practice for journalists: consensus, legitimate controversy and deviance. Each sphere has different normative practices and goals. According to Hallin’s theory, most political coverage falls into the sphere of legitimate controversy. This study suggests that when journalists were confronted with voters considered a threat to democracy, normative practices shifted and coverage of the Trump voter moved into the sphere of deviance. This framing then contributed to a misunderstanding of the electorate by the media. An examination of differences in national and locally-based reporting in this study found that local media framed voters in a more nuanced manner. In addition, local media reports included details suggesting that political polls were an inaccurate descriptors of local voters. Also included in this dissertation is a summary of the media debate that followed the 2016 election and suggests political reporters were unaware of the shifting roles and practices during the campaign. Finally, this study suggests that framing voters as deviant contributes to the polarization of the U.S. political system. It aims to analyze the media coverage of the 2016 voter with the goal of illuminating current practices and suggesting improvements in the relationship of the media and the voters

Justice wide open: working papers

These working papers mark the launch of the Centre of Law, Justice and Journalism’s new initiative, "Open Justice in the Digital Era", which aims to make recommendations for the way judicial information and legal data are communicated in the 21st century

Curtin’s Circus : the Prime Minister and Canberra news correspondents, 1941-1945

While the Australian wartime Prime Minister, John Curtin, has been the subject of intensive biographical and historical material, particularly during World War II, very few publications have focused on his relationships with journalists. Certainly, there is a distinct absence of a comprehensive study of his mass media strategies that would give us a detailed insight into his leadership in a critical period. Major forces converged with the commencement of another global war, the rapid expansion of relatively new radio and film industries, along with the appointment as prime minister of a skilful Labor communicator, well-known for his passionately anti-conscription views during World War I.This thesis investigates Curtin’s success in persuading the predominantly conservative news media to promote his wartime views. First, it identifies the prime minister’s mass media strategies to influence the Canberra Parliamentary Press Gallery journalists and their editors to accept his wartime policies and portray them positively in the media.The thesis argues that Curtin revealed a genius for initiating, developing and overseeing mass media strategies that made the best use of the latest technology to persuade journalists to communicate his government’s policies. In doing so, he extended the Australian public sphere, and his impact on political communications remains evident today. Curtin also bestowed a permanent legacy to benefit the parliamentary press gallery, contributing to our understanding of contemporary political journalism

A Computational Model of Non-Cooperation in Natural Language Dialogue

A common assumption in the study of conversation is that participants fully cooperate in order to maximise the effectiveness of the exchange and ensure communication flow. This assumption persists even in situations in which the private goals of the participants are at odds: they may act strategically pursuing their agendas, but will still adhere to a number of linguistic norms or conventions which are implicitly accepted by a community of language users. However, in naturally occurring dialogue participants often depart from such norms, for instance, by asking inappropriate questions, by avoiding to provide adequate answers or by volunteering information that is not relevant to the conversation. These are examples of what we call linguistic non-cooperation. This thesis presents a systematic investigation of linguistic non-cooperation in dialogue. Given a specific activity, in a specific cultural context and time, the method proceeds by making explicit which linguistic behaviours are appropriate. This results in a set of rules: the global dialogue game. Non-cooperation is then measured as instances in which the actions of the participants are not in accordance with these rules. The dialogue game is formally defined in terms of discourse obligations. These are actions that participants are expected to perform at a given point in the dialogue based on the dialogue history. In this context, non-cooperation amounts to participants failing to act according to their obligations. We propose a general definition of linguistic non-cooperation and give a specific instance for political interview dialogues. Based on the latter, we present an empirical method which involves a coding scheme for the manual annotation of interview transcripts. The degree to which each participant cooperates is automatically determined by contrasting the annotated transcripts with the rules in the dialogue game for political interviews. The approach is evaluated on a corpus of broadcast political interviews and tested for correlation with human judgement on the same corpus. Further, we describe a model of conversational agents that incorporates the concepts and mechanisms above as part of their dialogue manager. This allows for the generation of conversations in which the agents exhibit varying degrees of cooperation by controlling how often they favour their private goals instead of discharging their discourse obligations

The media and the Kennedy assassination: the social construction of reality

The research problem was to take a major political event in American history---the John F. Kennedy assassination---explore major media coverage of the event, and then examine media construction of social issues;The assassination of President John F. Kennedy has two official versions in our nation\u27s history. The Warren-Ford-Dulles Commission came to the conclusion that, without assistance, a man in a building shot a man in a car. In 1979, pursuant to post-Watergate cynicism in government, the House Select Committee on Assassinations concluded there was a conspiracy and a second gunman fired from a different direction. However, high school textbooks have reified only the first version of history---that of a single lone assassin;A content analysis of CBS and Time-Life coverage is made using Lasswell\u27s methodology of surveillance, correlation, and transmission. CBS produced the most television assassination documentaries and Time-Life owned the Zapruder film which was crucial evidence. Of the four perspectives on media coverage (the Fourth Estate, Mirror Approach, Marketing, and Hegemony), only hegemony fits the consistent pattern of the media coverage;Berger and Luckman\u27s (1967) social construction of reality involves reification, legitimization, and institutionalization. As Kuhn (1962) notes in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, normally when the number of anomalies to a theory becomes too great, we are forced to switch to another explanation. However, this did not happen with the Kennedy Assassination. We must ask why. The Fourth Estate would predict the media pursue the story with a check and a balance of government by responsible investigative reporting, as the Marketing Approach would give the consumers what they want. The Mirror Approach is where the media represents a neutral transmission of information while with Hegemony, the major media would dissipate the greatest possible doubt of a conspiracy in order to create the impression that the political structure was secure and legitimate to create an image of the stable institution of government. The study concludes that hegemony best explains media coverage of the event

Regressive Media Model: The Rise and Fall of Press Freedom in Bulgaria (2000-2020). Exploring Journalistic Cultures in Post-Communist Eastern Europe.

Global media system literature is still by and large heavily dominated by the idealistic comparative western-centered normative tradition, focusing on what media ought to be and how it should act across different cultural and political settings, instead of what it actually is. How is it changing, where, and why? This work suggests a shift away from the long tradition of overgeneralization, towards a more historically and culturally grounded analytical approach, that delves with the emergence of new media structures, institutions, and conventions, and evaluates their impact on media performance and public behavior. This study looks at the dynamics happening within a specific media system, trying to explain and predict the factors contributing to the phenomenon of interest- the experienced deterioration of press freedom and quality journalism. This inside perspective focusing on indigenous qualitative exploration of local journalistic and societal social cultures is a much-needed change of optics, and one global media theory has been calling for over the last decades. The study introduces and tests the Regressive Media Model in a way of explaining media systems that have been certified to have a freer, more independent, more professional media system, engraved in the Western ideal of the Fourth Estate, but have over the recent years begun to regress- collapsing or backsliding or decaying, according to the literature, into different types of non-democratic, neo-authoritarian, politicized and overall – more repressed media systems. How is this decline happening? Why? And can it be bettered? The proposed theoretical model is developed and tested here using the grounded theory approach and drawing on qualitative data from Bulgaria. The country notoriously stands as the European democracy with the lowest press freedom ranking, dubbed “the black sheep of Europe” and also “the worst place for press freedom, where it can prove dangerous to be a journalist”, according to the annual press freedom index developed by Reporters Without Borders. Though constitutional democracy, the post-communist Eastern European state as the only EU member, categorized in the “red zone” in terms of press freedom, alongside dictatorships such as Turkey, Russia, and Belarus. The proposed dissertation develops a theoretical model that helps understand the decaying media system in Bulgaria- once fast-tracking towards democratization and media independence in the early 2000s and currently experiencing an abrupt regression. The regressive media model as applied in this work could be used to draw a better understanding of the broader regional press freedom decline experienced in Eastern and Central Europe circa 2020. Simply said, the suggested exploration of Bulgaria and its press freedom disintegration is a pilot study with potentially greater implications for our broader understating of theories of press freedom and its experienced global decline

Justice wide open: working papers

These working papers are part of an initiative at the City University London Centre of Law, Justice and Journalism entitled "Open Justice in the Digital Era", which aimed to make recommendations for the way judicial information and legal data are communicated in the 21st century

Broadcasting modernity: eloquent listening in the early twentieth century

This thesis, ‘Broadcasting Modernity’ is an account of sound technology, namely wireless, as a feature of early twentieth century literature. If modernism is a historical-specific movement, and language a repository of time, then the advent of radio broadcasting cannot be ignored - a medium which inscribed itself into the pages of books. The present study is original, in that it establishes radio as a portal through which to regard the wider cultural mentality, cross-cutting, or ‘crashing’ the written word, and thus producing the effect of two wires instantly reacting to one another. Therefore, just as radio may be accessed through literature, certain texts between 1900-1945 may be reinterpreted acoustically. To qualify this argument, a select group of writers are discussed individually, and at length – figures who allowed radio to affect their creative output, at various levels, in a period of rapid technological change