The problem of realist events in American journalism

Since the nineteenth century, more kinds of news outlets and ways of presenting news grew along with telegraphic, telephonic, and digital communications, leading journalists, policymakers, and critics to assume that more events be-came available than ever before. Attentive audiences say in surveys that they feel overloaded with information, and journalists tend to agree. Although news seems to have become more focused on events, several studies analyzing U.S. news content for the past century and a half show that journalists have been including fewer events within their cover-age. In newspapers the events in stories declined over the twentieth century, and national newscasts decreased the share of event coverage since 1968 on television and since 1980 on public radio. Mainstream news websites continued the trend through the 2000s. Instead of providing access to more of the “what”, journalists moved from event-centered to meaning-centered news, still claiming to give a factual account in their stories, built on a foundation of American re-alism. As journalists concentrated on fewer and bigger events to compete, audiences turned away from mainstream news to look for what seems like an abundance of events in digital media

Local Narrative-Making on Refugees: How the Interaction Between Journalists and Policy Networks Shapes the Media Frames

AbstractCity narratives are crucial in shaping public attitudes and perceptions, and in defining the viable policy options and cities' responses to hot issues, such as migration and asylum. Nevertheless, the literature on relations between media and political actors is scarce and often unable to account for the complex local mechanisms leading to the production of media frames. This chapter investigates two urban crises: the rapid increase of transit refugees at the Central Station of Milan, and refugees' illegal occupation of four buildings in the ex-MOI area (former Olympic village) in Turin. Both events started in 2013 and have been studied from their beginnings up to mid-2016 by using qualitative techniques and media frame analysis. By matching the media and policy analysis, the authors show the central role that the local institutions can play in shaping media narratives on migrants and how the cohesion of the policy networks strengthens their ability to affect the local media frames. The dynamics of local journalism also matter: the presence of reporters with specific expertise, a commitment to migration and stable engagement in the issue, as well as collaboration within and between newsrooms, namely the existence of a sort of local media community, contribute to the development of consistent narratives over time and the prevalence of humanitarian rather than security frames

Visibility as Paradox: Representation and Simultaneous Contrast

Since the 1960s, queers have become increasingly visible in the media. Queer identities in community life and politics may rely in the twenty-first century on the prevailing media landscape. And yet visibility, like other semantic and semiotic forms, contains its own contradictions. The paradoxes of visibility are many: spurring tolerance through harmful stereotyping, diminishing isolation at the cost of activism, trading assimilation for equality, and converting radicalism into a market niche. Signaling the existence of queer persons may aim for inclusion in public discourse, but, through simultaneous contrast, the assertion contains its inevitable opposition:Queers are different and cannot go unremarked

Contradictions in news epistemology: how modernism failed mainstream US journalism.

Contradictions in news epistemology: how modernism failed mainstream US journalism