Mapping AI Arguments in Journalism Studies

This study investigates and suggests typologies for examining Artificial Intelligence (AI) within the domains of journalism and mass communication research. We aim to elucidate the seven distinct subfields of AI, which encompass machine learning, natural language processing (NLP), speech recognition, expert systems, planning, scheduling, optimization, robotics, and computer vision, through the provision of concrete examples and practical applications. The primary objective is to devise a structured framework that can help AI researchers in the field of journalism. By comprehending the operational principles of each subfield, scholars can enhance their ability to focus on a specific facet when analyzing a particular research topic

Misinformation in countries with limited technological literacies: How individuals in sub-Sahara Africa engage with fake news

In an event where the problem of information access is almost terra incognita, the derivate challenge is whether too much information is bad. Most research suggests so, yet very few attempts have been made to examine the digital inequalities and literacies that shape how an individual is exposed, consumes, shares, and ends up believing in fake news. This study builds upon focus group data from six sub-Saharan countries to examine how people in sub-Saharan Africa engage with misinformation. This study focuses on variations in digital access and literacy, which indicate how individuals in Africa are exposed to, consume, spread, and believe in misinformation. The findings suggest that access is not an impediment to fake news exposure, consumption, or sharing. However, the presumed news-literate individuals did not seem to believe in misinformation, except in events that compromised their moral fiber. Because of eco-chambers, news-literate people were more susceptible to misinformation. The overall findings question the notion of news literacy and whether it is indeed a panacea for fighting misinformation

China in African Newsrooms: Harnessing The Effects of Pro-and-Counter Attitudinal Chinese News Agenda in The Zambian Media

This study examines the influence of Chinese news content and journalistic performance in the Zambian media. It does so by measuring the quantity of Chinese news content in Zambia, the position it takes within the news content, and how it influences journalistic performance. The study hinges on two main questions explored through five research questions:1. To what degree and how is China's investment in Zambia reflected in ZNBC coverage of news? 2. Does ZNBC's coverage of China influence how other Zambian-based media organizations cover China? Using framing and agenda-setting theories, I was able to demonstrate that China&rsquo;s implicit and explicit investment in ZNBC has led to the dominance of the Chinese news agenda in the entire Zambian media environment. A time-series also indicate an increase in Chinese stories and agenda in the Zambian media. Most of these stories were routine and episodic, implying that they came from press releases or news events as opposed to investigative feature stories. Variations were observed within each media category with government-owned having more routine stories respectively followed by private, community, and religious media. Further, most news content was characterized by political issues, with less emphasis on stories pertaining to health, social, education, and agriculture. Most of all, China has moved from being the object of the news in the Zambian media to the subject. Data from 2012 suggests that China was mostly used as an object in the news. But by 2016, China had become the subject of the story.</p

Are Late Night TV Shows Polarizing Society? Examining the Ambivalence of New Version of Political Partisanship in the United States

This study examines the role that Late-Night Television shows (LNTV) play in the United States. The study used qualitative content analyses to generate themes emerging from 87 respondents from an online survey conducted with 23 LNTV show hosts in the United States. The findings suggest three main things: LNTVS hosts have a partisan affiliation that is contagiously infused into their audience; that LNTV hosts have less freedom to create their own content, therefore, providing less ethical consideration for their audience; and that LNTV shows rank politics as providing most newsworthy content than any other event.</p

Bruce Mutsvairo (Ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Media and Communication Research in Africa

To many scholars around the world, African media and communication research is either a terra incognita or an amalgamation of Western thought. The theories that underpin media and communication research in Africa are deeply rooted in the frameworks of Western thought. And it is through these lenses that African scholars execute and operationalize Communication Research in Africa. This book, therefore, provides new approaches for undertaking media and communication scholarship in the postcolonial era. It highlights a number of approaches adopted to navigate and interrogate issues that Western theoretical frameworks are incapable of answering. It further suggests new frontiers for rethinking media and communication research in Africa while providing empirical evidence as to why some of the methods conceptualized in the West will not work in African scenarios. The result is a thorough appraisal of crucial issues of controversy about the fluidity of the media and its identity in Africa

When party policies do not matter: Examining the ambivalence of voting behaviors in the Zambian presidential elections

Debates on whether people in Zambia cast their votes for a presidential candidate based on the good policies of the party or the qualifications of their candidate are peppered with tales of ethnicity, tribalism, corruption, and the education levels of the voters. These problems have undermined the credibility of the winning candidates as being put into office based not on their qualifications, but on the desire for individual voters to have someone of their tribe as president. While some scholars have argued that people are not naïve to vote for a candidate irrationally, others hanker on the fact that party policies are barely known to the Zambian voter who takes different forms of communal identities. The two approaches underscore the nascent debates of voting behaviors in Zambia today. Therefore, the aim of the study is to examine the voting behaviors of Zambians in the 2011 Zambian presidential election. Quantitative evidence suggests that party policies and manifestos in the Zambian elections do not matter because people base their votes on ethnic alignments.</p

Social media and catharsis in Africa: Examining the role of WhatsApp in venting stress in women

This paper investigates the role that social media, and particularly WhatsApp mobile applications plays in venting stress and other related aggressive behaviors among African couples. It seeks to examine the relationship that exists between WhatsApp usage and being happy, or rather catharsis. It leverages the existing datasets from the Afro-barometer (Africa Tracking Internet Progress-ATIP) website. Essentially the website maintains archives for all African network development and telecommunication datasets. Therefore, this study uses the aforementioned to argue that married women belonging to WhatsApp social groups in Africa have higher levels of catharsis. In other words, the finding of this study indicates that there was a strong and significant correlation between the time spent on social media (Duration-Drt) and the feeling of belonging (Bln) and therefore, catharsis (Eph).</p

Digital footprints in non-digital environments: How publicly displayed information invades the right to privacy

  This study explored the relationship between publicly displayed information and the right to privacy in Zambia and Tanzania. The purpose was to examine whether the behavior displayed by individuals in public environments reveals and undermines their quest for the right to privacy. I asked participants to observe and document the type of clothing an individual wore, the logos or monograms on their clothing or bags, and words spoken in public. This information was then used by Google to identify individuals online. Findings suggest that there is still a disconnect between what people display in non-digital and what they post on social media. However, there is also a growing trend of people leaving a trail of digital footprints that relate to their publicly displayed behaviors

News Believability & Trustworthiness on African Online Networks: An Experimental Design

The aim of this experimental study is two-fold: First, it seeks to find out what kind of news source is most believable in Africa between those generated by the West and those generated within the African continent. Second, it measures the levels of contagion within those news stories from two different continents. Using Zambian and Tanzanian online news sources, the study employs experiments to determine the acceptability of a news story, and its level of contagion. The main significance of this study is to examine NWICO and the McBride Commission’s arguments on the imbalance flow of information, and whether there is a difference in the level of contagion among Africans between the news emanating from the West, that barely has an effect on them, and that from within Africa with a proximity impact. Findings indicate that the 1978 debates are still relevant in today’s digital age when African media can create their own image and rebrand their images