Unruly Women and Carnivalesque Countercontrol: Offensive Humor in Mediated Social Protest

At the Women’s March in January 2018, many protest posters featured offensive jokes at the expense of Trump’s body and behavior. Such posters were shared widely online, much to the amusement of the movement’s supporters. Through a close analysis of posts on Instagram and Twitter, we explore the role of “vulgar” and “offensive” humor in mediated social protest. By highlighting its radical and conservative tendencies, we demonstrate how we can understand these practices of offensive humor as a contemporary expression of “the carnivalesque” that is complexly intertwined with social change

Newspapers, Impartiality and Television News

Drawing on a content analysis of television news and newspapers during the 2015 UK General Election along with semi-structured interviews with the heads and/or senior editors of news or politics from each broadcaster examined, we explore the intermedia agenda-setting influence of the national press during the campaign. Overall, we found similar policy-orientated agendas, with more stories emanating from right-wing newspapers and moments when front-page splashes dominated television news coverage. Many broadcasters were editorially comfortable with covering stories originating from newspapers if further context was supplied. Our findings do not point towards any deliberate political bias among broadcasters. We suggest instead that a range of structural constraints and professional routines encouraged broadcasters to feed off stories that were more likely to be supplied by right-leaning newspapers. Since news values are not politically neutral, we argue that if journalists or editors routinely rely on newspapers to help shape the political agenda it compromises their ability to make impartial judgements about news selection. Combining quantitative and qualitative analysis, we conclude, could help to better understand the editorial processes behind the selection of news and to more carefully interpret intermedia agenda-setting than large N studies can supply

Why context, relevance and repetition matter in news reporting: Interpreting the United Kingdom’s political information environment

This study develops a multi-method approach to analysing political information environments, exploring how media and political systems help shape people’s understanding of news. In doing so, we ask a question fundamental to democratic citizenship: how well do news media communicate political responsibility and policy differences across political systems? Our study examines the United Kingdom’s political information environment, where significant power is devolved to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, with different political parties in control. Drawing on a content analysis of 17,765 news items, a representative survey of 3272 respondents and 15 semi-structured interviews, we examine the dominant information sources about UK politics by longitudinally tracing coverage of devolved issues from 2007 to 2016, and gauging how well it was understood by television news viewers. Our results suggest that while BBC news is more sensitive to communicating the devolved relevance of news than more commercial outlets, there remains a democratic deficit in the supply of political information and audience understanding of where power and responsibility lies. If news coverage more regularly communicated the relevance and context of devolved issues, we argue it could open up democratic opportunities for citizens to consider a wider range of policy options debated in all four political institutions

Interpreting the Media Logic behind Editorial Decisions

This article enters into debates about media logic in political coverage by way of a case study of the 2015 U.K. General Election. We quantitatively and qualitatively examine two dominant themes of coverage—news about campaign rallies and horse-race reporting—as both are widely seen in political communication scholarship as symptomatic of a media logic. We draw on a content analysis of BBC, ITV, Sky News, Channel 4, and Channel 5 U.K. national television newscasts and semi-structured interviews with their heads of news and/or senior editors to help interpret how far a media logic was the editorial driving force behind coverage. At face value, our content analysis appears to support the media logic thesis, with all broadcasters—in particular commercial television newscasts—covering more process than policy issues. But our case study questions the antecedents of media logic and shines a light on a political logic that may have remained in the dark in large-scale content analysis studies. In following a political logic, we argue that this promoted the horse-race narrative, and naturalized the parties’ highly stage-managed rallies and walkabout

The sound of silence: European news coverage of refugees in Greece and what is left unreported

When covering migration and its challenges, the news media often turn to politicians as accredited sources and rarely represent refugee voices. These sourcing habits create strategic areas of silence meaning that the public is not presented with a satisfactory nor accurate coverage of refugees. This research explored what could be situated in these strategic areas of silence. It analysed 395 articles from France, UK and Germany to establish the overall patterns of reporting, these findings draw parallels with existing research examining the representation of refugees. It is, therefore, the nine qualitative interviews conducted with volunteers and refugees on the Greek island Lesbos that offer a powerful alternative perspective to academic and news representations of refugees. The research highlights a need for journalists to utilise a broader range of sources, and to challenge the current discourse in their reporting of refugees in Greece

Satire for sanity: An examination of media representation and audience engagement with The Daily Show’s Rally to Restore Sanity

This thesis examines the media representation of The Daily Show’s ‘Rally to Restore Sanity’ and the way the rally participants engaged with it. This was a unique event because of the speculation and ambiguity that surrounded it which included characterisations of activism for civil discourse, advocacy for Democrats in the run up to the Congressional mid-term election, to those labelling it as a mass comedy/music event. Also, given that The Daily Show was shifting from its television platform to the field of public protest, this was an opportunity to examine whether the rally could push the boundaries of satire by instigating a more civilised tone in America’s political news discourse. The rally would also be an opportunity to better understand the type of people that engaged with this hybrid satire event and whether their attendance was an act of civic participation