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

Effective Lagrangians and Parity-Conserving Time-Reversal Violation at Low Energies

Using effective Lagrangians, we argue that any time-reversal-violating but parity-conserving effects are too small to be observed in flavor-conserving nuclear processes without dramatic improvement in experimental accuracy. In the process we discuss other arguments that have appeared in the literature.Comment: Revised manuscript, 11 pages, RevTex, epsf.st

Impacts of organic and conventional crop management on diversity and activity of free-living nitrogen fixing bacteria and total bacteria are subsidiary to temporal effects

A three year field study (2007-2009) of the diversity and numbers of the total and metabolically active free-living diazotophic bacteria and total bacterial communities in organic and conventionally managed agricultural soil was conducted at the Nafferton Factorial Systems Comparison (NFSC) study, in northeast England. The result demonstrated that there was no consistent effect of either organic or conventional soil management across the three years on the diversity or quantity of either diazotrophic or total bacterial communities. However, ordination analyses carried out on data from each individual year showed that factors associated with the different fertility management measures including availability of nitrogen species, organic carbon and pH, did exert significant effects on the structure of both diazotrophic and total bacterial communities. It appeared that the dominant drivers of qualitative and quantitative changes in both communities were annual and seasonal effects. Moreover, regression analyses showed activity of both communities was significantly affected by soil temperature and climatic conditions. The diazotrophic community showed no significant change in diversity across the three years, however, the total bacterial community significantly increased in diversity year on year. Diversity was always greatest during March for both diazotrophic and total bacterial communities. Quantitative analyses using qPCR of each community indicated that metabolically active diazotrophs were highest in year 1 but the population significantly declined in year 2 before recovering somewhat in the final year. The total bacterial population in contrast increased significantly each year. Seasonal effects were less consistent in this quantitative study

Media events, spectacles and risky globalization: a critical review and possible avenues for future research

We review the research conducted to date on media events and media spectacles. We posit that the main phenomena challenging the current conceptualizations of media event and media spectacle are (1) the understanding of risk, (2) the context of disasters and (3) globalization and the mediation of news in the context of transnational and transitional societies. We suggest that more research on disruptive events is needed. In the context of the new media landscape in particular, the ritual researcher may need to take into account the concepts of temporality and unpredictability as inherent features of media events and rituals – the traumatic events researcher may benefit from the concept of global risk society. Finally, we argue that more research needs to be carried out on transitional societies, as we need to learn more about the role of mediation, events and spectacles in democratization processes and in contemporary revolutions. Overall, our findings indicate that in the context of global risk society, constant disruptions and unplanned events, together with the changes in news transmission, need to be taken as a starting point also in the research frames used to understand the mediation of events in contemporary society

Bad news from Fallujah

This study uses the thematic analysis developed by the Glasgow University Media Group to explore how the US, UK and German national press covered the US/Coalition assault on the Iraqi city of Fallujah in November 2004. The study relies on quantitative and qualitative full text content analyses to assess 428 news, editorial and commentary items. The article suggests that, while government and military officials of the US/Coalition had argued the military ‘operation’ was necessary to secure Iraq and defeat an ‘insurgency’, organisations and actors from Iraqi society refer to the ‘operation’ as ‘collective punishment’ and a ‘massacre’ that targeted the Iraqi population. The article investigates how the press represented each of these perspectives. The findings suggest that the press overemphasised the US/Coalition perspective despite striking counter evidence. Critical aspects of coverage largely focused on tactical elements of the military dimension of the event. The article concludes that such findings are in accord with hegemonic models of media performance

Reporting and the Transformations of the Journalistic Field: US news media, 1890-2000

How have journalistic ideals of public service arisen? To what extent do journalists live up to these ideals? Can we make any claims as to the social conditions that this performance depends on? Using Bourdieu’s theory of fields of cultural production, this article addresses these questions with evidence from the history of journalism in the United States. What is most distinctive about modern journalism is a specific practice: active news-gathering or reporting. This practice became common in the 1860s and 1870s with the emergence of journalism as a field with its own stakes, relatively independent from political advantage or literary merit. The power of field-specific capital to organize practices in the media has varied since then. The field consolidated in the era from 1890 to 1914, with the newspaper industry expanding. In the interwar years, the boundary between PR and journalism became blurry and the institutional basis for active news-gathering declined. Under favorable economic and political conditions reporting practices, including local and investigative reporting, flourished between 1945 and1970 across media forms. In the past 40 years the importance of active news-gathering has declined

Behavioural and educational outcomes following extremely preterm birth : current controversies and future directions

As a consequence of improved survival rates for extremely preterm (EP; <28 weeks of gestation) births, there is a growing body of evidence detailing the impact of extreme prematurity on outcomes throughout childhood and adolescence. Historically, attention first focused on documenting rates of sensory impairments and severe neurodevelopmental disabilities. However, over recent years, there has been growing interest in the impact of EP birth on long term mental health and educational outcomes. In this chapter we review literature relating to the impact of EP birth on attention, social and emotional problems, psychiatric disorders and educational outcomes. We also outline current controversies in the field. In particular, we present emergent research exploring developmental trajectories to determine whether the sequelae associated with EP birth represent a developmental delay or persistent deficit, and we consider what approaches to intervention may be most fruitful in improving behavioural and educational outcomes in this population