“Monitoring” the entire “spectrum” : the influence of Journalism Ideology on the content producers of a South African public radio station’s current affairs programmes

Abstract: More than 20 years after the demise of Apartheid, South African journalists are still in the process of determining their own “journalistic ideology” according to a “Global South” approach. Various scholars argue that this approach should be anchored in African values and philosophies (such as Ubuntu), and take the unique South African context into consideration. In this article, the author has identified certain issues that could influence a reporter’s “journalism ideology”, such as education and training, newsroom routines and the role of the audience. She used these issues as a starting point for open-ended interviews with producers that create and edit content for the Current Affairs shows on RSG, one of the public radio stations at the South African Broadcasting Corporation.1 The media forms part of a network of shifting power relations and in a country where many of its citizens live under the breadline, radio still wields a huge amount of influence. Herman and Chomsky’s propaganda model is used as theoretical framework informing the type of questions the author asks in her qualitative interviews, as she also regards media practitioners’ performance and actions as being strongly influenced by “the basic institutional structures and relationships within which they operate”

Exploring interactive narrative and ideology in war games

Abstract: Given the popularity of information and communication technologies, it is a time of radical change. People are spending more of their time in virtual worlds and a large part of this time is spent playing games. Hence within this paper, the authors explore the concept of ‘identification’ and ‘representation’ within game narrative with specific reference to ‘interactivity’ and ‘character immersion’. Within the interactive realm of video games, players play an active role in determining the flow and outcome of the story. Critics have argued that games can transmit different ideologies to players. By actively identifying with the characters on screen (and determining their ultimate path) one may argue that playing a game set against a historical backdrop may have an active influence on their ideological perception of the historical events and in turn influence their own identity and how they navigate contemporary society. By using two war game case studies, Middle‐Earth: Shadow of Mordor and Anglo‐Boer War, the authors propose that the interactive nature of video game storytelling infers that narrative can be selfconstructed, especially with the right design choices. But can games arguably be used as a tool for psychological warfare? The authors interrogate the ‘interactive meaning making process’ in the two games; and clarifies it by interviewing a developer of one of the games

The mythical Boer Hero : deconstructing ideology and identity in Anglo-Boer War films

Abstract: In this paper the author deconstructs the role of the Hero character in a sample of South African- or Anglo-Boer War1 case study films. The author argues that the Boer soldier, one of the prominent figures of White “Afrikaner” history, has been transformed into a mythical hero during the past century. The key question the author investigates is how the predominant historical myth of a community (in this case that of the White South African “Afrikaner”) influence the narratives told by its popular culture. Starting with the first South African “talkie” film, Sarie Marais, the Boer hero-archetype has been used as a vehicle for ideological messages in an attempt to construct White Afrikaner identity from an Apartheid Nationalist Party perspective. Through investigating the various archetypical guises of the Boer Hero in the films Die Kavaliers, Verraaiers, and Adventures of the Boer War the author reflects on how the various case studies’ historical contexts directly correlate with the filmmaker’s representation of the hero. Therefore, the predominant ideology or the identity that the creator subscribes to directly influences the representation of the hero figure in the story

A 'headless statue' and 'A headless Ghana' – a case study on the role of signs and symbols in creating factual stories

Abstract: “The headless statue of Nkrumah symbolises that we have become a headless Ghana.” These words of a Ghanaian politician became the starting point for a short documentary that explored the mythical image of the first leader of the independent Ghana. However, what began as a few interviews with political members, resulted in much more – as the filmmakers followed the visual signs of this icon all over the city of Accra – and ended up finding an interesting tale about how people reacted to these visuals, and the message one could read between the lines of their words. In visual storytelling, whether it be producing documentaries or television news inserts, we tend to think of the story first and the pictures thereafter. However, the author of this paper found in directing and producing the short documentary “Finding Nkrumah” that sometimes following the visuals will dictate its own angle and create its own story. Furthermore, the author also found that certain visual images (or “signs”) would get the documentary participants/interviewees as well as the viewers to respond to the story in interesting ways by attributing their own symbolism to it. According to many scholars, that is part of the power of the visual image, as Browne (1983:vi) states “Pictures ... are exceptionally effective because, although words lie flat and dormant to some readers, it is difficult to miss messages carried in a motion picture.” Unfortunately, journalists or producers at times tend to forget the visual as a tool of creating meaning and telling its own story. In interviewees with TV journalists, the author has found that these journalists often have a set story in mind, and if they aren’t able to film suitable images, they settle for archive footage and cutaways and use voice over narration to tell the story in the way they wanted to tell it from the initial stages of the production, without keeping their current material in mind. The author of this paper used to have this perception as well – that as a journalist one sets out on a story with a specific angle and that it will only change if an interviewee gives one a so-called “scoop” that changes the direction of the story, or if interviewees’ unwillingness to divulge information or engage with the camera forces one to diverge from one’s original intention in creating the story. However, the specific case study in point, a five-minute documentary filmed in Accra, Ghana, changed her perception. The film initially began as a story about what made Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana’s first leader after gaining independence from Britain, a hero. It progressed from the latter - to recording the heroic signs of Nkrumah in Accra – to investigating how historical heroes become mythical figures and how the visual symbols that represent them in turn enhances their myth inside others’ minds. In Accra there are quite a few statues, monuments and other visual symbols of Nkrumah. As with most iconic statues, their function is to pay tribute to historical figures and cement the heroes of a bygone past into the minds of those who see them. In a time where these types of statues cause a lot of controversy: the most notable case in point is the statue of Cecil John Rhodes at the University of Cape Town in the author’s home country (South Africa) that lead to the start of the #RhodesMustFall-hashtag campaign that, in turn, also sparked debates about a statue of the same figure at the campus of the UK’s Oxford University. However, it was the statue..

“Journalism ideology” and its influence on the producers of RSG Radio Current Affairs

Abstract: In the same way that a person can have a political or a personal ideology, professional identities and how a craft or occupation is practiced may be influenced by what can be labelled as a “professional ideology”. Through interviews with producers of the Afrikaans radio programmes Monitor, Spektrum, and Naweek-Aktueel, this research shows that there is indeed such a thing as a “journalism ideology”. The interviews focused on how “internal influences” such as a journalist’s background and training, newsroom routines and “external influences” such as the audience influenced the decisions they made in choosing news stories and producing content. This “journalism ideology” influences the producers and in turn the news content of these current affairs programmes that are listened to daily by almost two million listeners. The conclusion drawn from the study is that, although the participants’ “journalism ideology” largely determines the news stories for their programmes, structural forces, newsroom routines and organisational constraints often dictate their actions. Finally, although all the participants saw themselves as “watchdogs of democracy” internal pressures within the SABC could endanger that role

Reweighting towards the chiral limit

We propose to perform fully dynamical simulations at small quark masses by reweighting in the quark mass. This approach avoids some of the technical difficulties associated with direct simulations at very small quark masses. We calculate the weight factors stochastically, using determinant breakup and low mode projection to reduce the statistical fluctuations. We find that the weight factors fluctuate only moderately on nHYP smeared dynamical Wilson-clover ensembles, and we could successfully reweight 16^4, (1.85fm)^4 volume configurations from m_q = 20MeV to m_q = 5MeV quark masses, reaching the epsilon-regime. We illustrate the strength of the method by calculating the low energy constant F from the epsilon-regime pseudo-scalar correlator.Comment: 17 pages, 8 figure

Strategic Intelligence Monitor on Personal Health Systems Phase 3 (SIMPHS3). INAA (The Netherlands) Case Study Report

The aim of INAA is to improve the quality of life (reducing feelings of loneliness, maintaining a meaningful life, creating a feeling of solidarity) and autonomy of frail elderly people living independently, allowing them to maintain a high level of physical functioning. In addition, this approach also aims to reduce the burden on informal caregivers who can benefit from the expertise of active elderly people (social/community participation) and contribute to enhancing cohesion in the suburb/neighbourhood. INAA aims to reinforce the coordination between residents, the social care and the healthcare systems at a neighbourhood level, improving the social network around frail older people and their informal caregivers in order to detect potential problems early on.JRC.J.3-Information Societ

Fake narratives, dominant discourses : the role and influence of algorithms on the online South African land reform debate

Abstract: Within this paper the authors explore the discourse surrounding algorithmic processes, by examining the way a search engine’s result influenced an online debate about land reform in South Africa. The article begins by reflecting on the rise of the internet contributing to issues around fake news. Then it continues to discuss the incident that serves as case study for this paper. In June 2018 Twitter users criticised the search engine Google for only displaying photos of white people when one type the words “squatter camps in South Africa” into the Google Image search bar. In the debate that followed, many of the online users accused Google of propagating a biased narrative to destabilise land reform. The paper’s purpose is to explain the role of algorithms to readers from the fields of humanities and social sciences without a technical background in computer science. Through exploring the “squatter camps in South Africa”‐case study, the authors intend to reveal to the reader the power online search engines have in shaping the public debate. Yet, through conducting their own search on different international search engines, but using the same key words, they prove that it is not in fact the algorithms that are biased, but rather the online data that is generated by internet users themselves