977 research outputs found
Comparing international coverage of 9/11 : towards an interdisciplinary explanation of the construction of news
This article presents an interdisciplinary model attempting to explain how news is constructed by relying on the contributions of different fields of study: News Sociology, Political Communications, International Communications, International Relations. It is a first step towards developing a holistic theoretical approach to what shapes the news, which bridges current micro to macro approaches. More precisely the model explains news variation across different media organization and countries by focusing on the different way the sense of newsworthiness of journalists is affected by three main variables: national interest, national journalistic culture, and editorial policy of each media organization. The model is developed on the basis of an investigation into what shaped the media coverage of 9/11 in eight elite newspapers across the US, France, Italy and Pakistan
What makes for prize-winning television?
We investigate the determinants of success in four international television awards festivals between 1994 and 2012. We find that countries with larger markets and greater expenditure on public broadcasting tend to win more awards, but that the degree of concentration in the market for television and rates of penetration of pay-per-view television are unrelated to success. These findings are consistent with general industrial organisation literature on quality and market size, and with media policy literature on public service broadcasting acting as a force for quality. However, we also find that ‘home countries’ enjoy a strong advantage in these festivals, which is not consistent with festival success acting as a pure proxy for television quality
Detecting the direction of a signal on high-dimensional spheres: Non-null and Le Cam optimality results
We consider one of the most important problems in directional statistics,
namely the problem of testing the null hypothesis that the spike direction
of a Fisher-von Mises-Langevin distribution on the -dimensional
unit hypersphere is equal to a given direction . After a reduction
through invariance arguments, we derive local asymptotic normality (LAN)
results in a general high-dimensional framework where the dimension goes
to infinity at an arbitrary rate with the sample size , and where the
concentration behaves in a completely free way with , which
offers a spectrum of problems ranging from arbitrarily easy to arbitrarily
challenging ones. We identify various asymptotic regimes, depending on the
convergence/divergence properties of , that yield different
contiguity rates and different limiting experiments. In each regime, we derive
Le Cam optimal tests under specified and we compute, from the Le Cam
third lemma, asymptotic powers of the classical Watson test under contiguous
alternatives. We further establish LAN results with respect to both spike
direction and concentration, which allows us to discuss optimality also under
unspecified . To investigate the non-null behavior of the Watson test
outside the parametric framework above, we derive its local asymptotic powers
through martingale CLTs in the broader, semiparametric, model of rotationally
symmetric distributions. A Monte Carlo study shows that the finite-sample
behaviors of the various tests remarkably agree with our asymptotic results.Comment: 47 pages, 4 figure
Tax avoidance as an anti-austerity issue: the progress of a protest issue through the public sphere
Theorists of left and right agree that periods of crisis are fertile times at which to precipitate change. However, protesters on the periphery of the public sphere must overcome barriers, or what Habermas called ‘sluice gates’, if their discourse is to be publicly and politically influential. This study of newspaper discourse and activity in parliament and the public sphere over a six year period takes tax justice campaigning in the UK as a case study, and in particular protest group UK Uncut’s attempt to mobilize opposition to austerity by advocating a crackdown on tax avoidance as an alternative to cuts. It finds that whilst UK Uncut successfully amplified existing arguments previously raised by experts, trade unions and the left-leaning press, austerity barely figured in debate about tax avoidance once it was picked up by other actors in the public sphere on the other side of the 'sluice gates'. The reasons for this were structural and discursive, related to the role and interests of receptive actors at the institutional centre of the public sphere, and their ability, along with the conservative press, to transform the moral framing of tax avoidance from the injustice of making the poor pay for the financial crisis through cuts, into the 'unfairness' of middle class earners paying higher taxes than wealthier individuals and corporations. The latter reifies the 'hardworking taxpayer', and implies a more instrumental and clientalistic relationship to the state, and an essentially neoliberal sense of fairness. Where neoliberal ideology was challenged, it was in social conservative terms – nationalist opposition to globalisation, framing multinational corporations as a threat to the domestic high street – rather than protesters’ social democratic challenge to market power and social injustice. This indicates how a progressive message from the periphery can be co-opted into the currently resurgent right-wing populism
Complete one-loop analysis of the nucleon's spin polarizabilities
We present a complete one-loop analysis of the four nucleon spin
polarizabilities in the framework of heavy baryon chiral perturbation theory.
The first non-vanishing contributions to the isovector and first corrections to
the isoscalar spin polarizabilities are calculated. No unknown parameters enter
these predictions. We compare our results to various dispersive analyses. We
also discuss the convergence of the chiral expansion and the role of the delta
isobar.Comment: 4 pp, REVTE
Fixed-t subtracted dispersion relations for Compton scattering off the nucleon
We present fixed- subtracted dispersion relations for Compton scattering
off the nucleon at energies 500 MeV, as a formalism to extract
the nucleon polarizabilities with a minimum of model dependence. The subtracted
dispersion integrals are mainly saturated by intermediate states in the
-channel and intermediate states
in the -channel . For the subprocess
, we construct a unitarized amplitude and find a
good description of the available data. We show results for Compton scattering
using the subtracted dispersion relations and display the sensitivity on the
scalar polarizability difference and the backward spin
polarizability , which enter directly as fit parameters in the
present formalism
The media use of diaspora in a conflict situation : A case study of Venezuelans in Finland
Many Venezuelan emigrants have an emotional connection and/or they have family members and friends in the country of origin, and that is why they seek to find reliable information on the conflict situation in Venezuela. Therefore, they keep in touch with family members, read mainstream news and use different social media platforms. Thus, what kind of impact the conflict has on the media use and how events reported in the media are interpreted is investigated in this study of Venezuelan diaspora in Finland by using social media ethnography. There are internal and external factors behind the media use. External factors come from societies of the host and origin countries. Internal factors rise from family connections and identity construction concerning personal national identity or political activism.Peer reviewe
Substantiating a political public sphere in the Scottish press : a comparative analysis
This article uses content analysis to characterize the performance of the media in a national public sphere, by setting apart those qualities that typify internal press coverage of a political event. The article looks at the coverage of the 1999 devolved Scottish election from the day before the election until the day after. It uses a word count to measure the election material in Scottish newspapers the Herald, the Press and Journal and the Scotsman, and United Kingdom newspapers the Guardian, the Independent and The Times, and categorizes that material according to discourse type, day and page selection. The article finds a number of qualities that typify the Scottish sample in particular, and might be broadly indicative of a political public sphere in action. Firstly, and not unexpectedly, it finds that the Scottish newspapers carry significantly more election coverage. Just as tellingly, though, the article finds that the Scottish papers offer a greater proportion of advice and background information, in the form of opinion columns and feature articles. It also finds that the Scottish papers place a greater concentration of both informative and evaluative material in the period before the vote, consistent with their making a contribution to informed political action. Lastly, the article finds that the Scottish sample situates coverage nearer the front of the paper and places a greater proportion on recto pages. The article therefore argues that the Scottish papers display features that distinguish them from the UK papers, and are broadly consistent with their forming part of a deliberative public sphere, and suggests that these qualities might be explored as a means of judging future media performance
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