News content and audience belief : a case study of the 1984/5 miners strike

This study examines the reception of news messages by audiences, with special reference to coverage of the 1984/5 miner's strike. A new methodology is employed, which used groups of people selected to highlight possible differences in the reception of messages. Some groups had a special knowledge of the events of the strike, while a more general sample included people from different occupations and regional areas. The groups were invited to write and texts of their own television news programmes using actual photographs from news reports on the strike. This approach showed what the groups understood the content of the news to be on specific issues. It was then possible to compare this with what they believed to be `true', and to examine the sources of their beliefs, as well as why they either accepted or rejected media accounts. Earlier research with the Glasgow University Media Group had focussed on the content of television news. This showed how the presentation of certain views and explanations together with the embracing and underlining of them by journalists was part of a general process by which the news was structured. The conclusion was that some key themes were highlighted in the news text. The current study indicated which news themes had been retained in the memories of audience members. One notable result was the clarity with which such themes were recalled and the close correspondence between news programmes written by the groups and some actual news bulletins. Some groups were able to reproduce not only the thematic content of news bulletins on issues such as violence, but also the structure and language of actual news headlines. Television news (and to a lesser extent the press) was found to be a major source of information for many people in the groups and had a clear influence on some elements of belief. However, it was also found that direct experience could have a crucial influence on how new information from the media was understood. Such direct contacts, together with political culture, class experience and processes of logic were the most important factors in the relation between the reception of a news message and what was finally believed by the audience

The role of the media in the construction of public belief and social change

The media play a central role in informing the public about what happens in the world, particularly in those areas in which audiences do not possess direct knowledge or experience. This article examines the impact the media has in the construction of public belief and attitudes and its relationship to social change. Drawing on findings from a range of empirical studies, we look at the impact of media coverage in areas such as disability, climate change and economic development. Findings across these areas show the way in which the media shape public debate in terms of setting agendas and focusing public interest on particular subjects. For example, in our work on disability we showed the relationship between negative media coverage of people on disability benefit and a hardening of attitudes towards them. Further, we found that the media also severely limit the information with which audiences understand these issues and that alternative solutions to political problems are effectively removed from public debate. We found other evidence of the way in which media coverage can operate to limit understanding of possibilities of social change. In our study of news reporting of climate change, we traced the way that the media have constructed uncertainty around the issue and how this has led to disengagement in relation to possible changes in personal behaviours. Finally, we discuss the implications for communications and policy and how both the traditional and new media might help in the development of better informed public debate

Bad News for Refugees

Bad News for Refugees analyses the political, economic and environmental contexts of migration and looks specifically at how refugees and asylum seekers have been stigmatised in political rhetoric and in media coverage. Through forensic research it shows how hysterical and inaccurate media accounts act to legitimise political action which can have terrible consequences both on the lives of refugees and also on established migrant communities. Based on new research by the renowned Glasgow Media Group, Bad News for Refugees is essential reading for those concerned with the negative effects of media on public understanding and for the safety of vulnerable groups and communities in our society

Four Weeks of IV Iron Supplementation Reduces Perceived Fatigue and Mood Disturbance in Distance Runners

To determine the effect of intravenous iron supplementation on performance, fatigue and overall mood in runners without clinical iron deficiency.Fourteen distance runners with serum ferritin 30-100 µg · L(-1) were randomly assigned to receive three blinded injections of intravenous ferric-carboxymaltose (2 ml, 100 mg, IRON) or normal saline (PLACEBO) over four weeks (weeks 0, 2, 4). Athletes performed a 3,000 m time trial and 10 × 400 m monitored training session on consecutive days at week 0 and again following each injection. Hemoglobin mass (Hbmass) was assessed via carbon monoxide rebreathing at weeks 0 and 6. Fatigue and mood were determined bi-weekly until week 6 via Total Fatigue Score (TFS) and Total Mood Disturbance (TMD) using the Brief Fatigue Inventory and Brunel Mood Scale. Data were analyzed using magnitude-based inferences, based on the unequal variances t-statistic and Cohen's Effect sizes (ES).Serum ferritin increased in IRON only (Week 0: 62.8 ± 21.9, Week 4: 128.1 ± 46.6 µg · L(-1); p = 0.002) and remained elevated two weeks after the final injection (127.0 ± 66.3 µg · L(-1), p = 0.01), without significant changes in Hbmass. Supplementation had a moderate effect on TMD of IRON (ES -0.77) with scores at week 6 lower than PLACEBO (ES -1.58, p = 0.02). Similarly, at week 6, TFS was significantly improved in IRON vs. PLACEBO (ES -1.54, p = 0.05). There were no significant improvements in 3,000 m time in either group (Week 0 vs. Week 4; Iron: 625.6 ± 55.5 s vs. 625.4 ± 52.7 s; PLACEBO: 624.8 ± 47.2 s vs. 639.1 ± 59.7 s); but IRON reduced their average time for the 10 × 400 m training session at week 2 (Week 0: 78.0 ± 6.6 s, Week 2: 77.2 ± 6.3; ES-0.20, p = 0.004).During 6 weeks of training, intravenous iron supplementation improved perceived fatigue and mood of trained athletes with no clinical iron deficiency, without concurrent improvements in oxygen transport capacity or performance

Television news and the symbolic criminalisation of young people

This is an Author's Accepted Manuscript of an article published in Journalism Studies, 9(1), 75 - 90, 2008, copyright Taylor & Francis, available online at: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/14616700701768105.This essay combines quantitative and qualitative analysis of six UK television news programmes. It seeks to analyse the representation of young people within broadcast news provision at a time when media representations, political discourse and policy making generally appear to be invoking young people as something of a folk devil or a locus for moral panics. The quantitative analysis examines the frequency with which young people appear as main actors across a range of different subjects and analyses the role of young people as news sources. It finds a strong correlation between young people and violent crime. A qualitative analysis of four “special reports” or backgrounders on channel Five's Five News explores the representation of young people in more detail, paying attention to contradictions and tensions in the reports, the role of statistics in crime reporting, the role of victims of crime and the tensions between conflicting news frames.Arts and Humanities Research Counci

Torture and the UK’s “war on asylum”: medical power and the culture of disbelief

When the now ‘iconic’ images of shackled, humiliated and dehumanised detainees in the Abu Ghraib prison complex in Iraq were broadcast globally, in the mid-2000s, the relationship between medical power and torture in the “war on terror” was also thrust sharply into focus. Graphic images of coalition troops photographing and posing in front of hooded, naked prisoners forced into a “human pyramid”, and of people made to wear animal collars, indicated a regime in which degradation had a defining role. The photograph of a soldier gloating over the corpse of a man who had died as a result of torture was just one picture of a network of interrogation camps in which detention by coalition forces could be fatal. Yet if there were any expectations that the presence of medical personnel may have checked this violence, these were shattered by the fact that clinicians – in some cases at least – were integral to its practice. «It is now beyond doubt that Armed Forces physicians, psychologists, and medics were active and passive partners in the systematic neglect and abuse of war on terror prisoners», wrote Steven Miles in 2009 (Miles 2009, X). And as he continued, this involved providing interrogators «with medical information to use in setting the nature and degree of physical and psychological abuse during interrogations». It involved monitoring «interrogations to devise ways to break prisoners down or to keep them alive». It involved pathologists holding back death certificates and autopsy reports in order to minimise the number of fatalities or cover up torture-related deaths as deaths by natural causes (Ibid). Procedures including «cramped confinement, dietary manipulation, sleep deprivation, and waterboarding» were among the practices that were «at times (…) legally sanctioned due to medical supervision» in the context of the “war on terror”, according to Hoffman (2011, 1535). He continued to suggest that doctors are not just important to «modern torture methods», they are «irreplaceable». In this context, the “war on terror” is no aberration. As the revolutionary psychoanalyst and philosopher Frantz Fanon documented in 1959, for example, certain medical practitioners had an integral role in the military occupation of Algeria, and «There are, for instance, psychiatrists … known to numerous prisoners», he suggested, «who have given electric shock treatments to the accused and have questioned them during the waking phase, which is characterized by a certain confusion, a relaxation of resistance, a disappearance of the person's defences.» (Fanon 1959/1965, 138). Indeed, in his analysis of the Algerian revolution, he discussed how resistance to and struggles over the meanings of medical power were integral to the revolution itself. However, while the role of medical power in the practice of torture has been subjected to sustained critique in the context of the “war on terror”, what follows examines the relationship between medical power and torture in the context of what has been depicted – metaphorically – as another (although to some extents related) “war”: the “war” on asylum. According to the UNHCR (2017, 3), between 5 and 35 per cent of those asylum seekers who have been granted refugee status have survived torture. And focusing on the UK as a case study, this chapter examines the institutional and legal structures prohibiting torture and inhuman and degrading treatment, particularly as they apply to those subject to immigration control in this context. But further, it also examines the ideological and political conditions within which claims by those seeking asylum that they have been subjected to torture prior to arrival can be (and have been) ignored, downplayed and denied. It examines how medical expertise has frequently been undermined in the asylum process when this expertise is utilised to add weight to asylum seekers’ claims to have experienced torture. It examines how there have been attempts to narrow the definition of torture in ways which exclude people from the protections to which torture survivors are entitled. But it also explores the ways in which segments of the medical profession have been complicit in riding roughshod over existing safeguards to prevent further harm to those who have experienced torture, thus potentially compounding its effects. In particular, it examines claims that in certain contexts clinicians have administered dangerous “care” in order to ensure the removal of people from the UK, despite them claiming that they – or their family members – face serious harm and persecution on arrival as a result of this. In a historical discussion of medical involvement in torture, Giovanni Maio (2001, 1609) has noted that from its earliest incarnations one of the features of torture has been its use as an «oppressive instrument used in the preservation of power». Furthermore, whilst methods of torture have certainly «developed», and continue to do so, he argues, this «function» of torture is «especially relevant today». This chapter argues that the (mis)treatment of those in the UK who say they have been tortured, preserves and is bound up with a particular manifestation of state power: the aims, rationale and dictates of immigration control. Its claims are perhaps much more mundane than the forms of direct medical complicity in torture alluded to above. But they are nonetheless important. For it is argued that the acts of omission and commission documented in this chapter expose the tensions between the rights of certain “categories” of migrants to be afforded adequate clinical care on the one hand, and the goals and aims of immigration control itself on the other. This poses profound questions about the functions of clinical care and the ethical duties, responsibilities and obligations of clinicians, it is suggested. But as this chapter also crucially explores, this is a form of power that many within the medical profession have historically challenged, and continue to do so

Refugee and Asylum News Coverage in UK Print and Online Media

The representation of asylum is important, yet there is little research of how this topic is reported online. This article addresses this gap through a study of UK print and online media (N = 2018). Articles were examined for their soft and hard news focus. Results show both partisanship and the medium play an important role. Online news covered more soft and hard news topics regardless of partisanship. However, examining the focus and style, right-leaning print and online publications focused more on criminality, while left-leaning publications focused on victimisation. These findings question the received wisdom that partisanship is the most significant variable shaping when reporting asylum. We purport that both the medium and partisanship are important to consider

The Role of the Media in the Construction of Public Belief and Social Change

The media play a central role in informing the public about what happens in the world, particularly in those areas in which audiences do not possess direct knowledge or experience. This article examines the impact the media has in the construction of public belief and attitudes and its relationship to social change. Drawing on findings from a range of empirical studies, we look at the impact of media coverage in areas such as disability, climate change and economic development. Findings across these areas show the way in which the media shape public debate in terms of setting agendas and focusing public interest on particular subjects. For example, in our work on disability we showed the relationship between negative media coverage of people on disability benefit and a hardening of attitudes towards them. Further, we found that the media also severely limit the information with which audiences understand these issues and that alternative solutions to political problems are effectively removed from public debate. We found other evidence of the way in which media coverage can operate to limit understanding of possibilities of social change. In our study of news reporting of climate change, we traced the way that the media have constructed uncertainty around the issue and how this has led to disengagement in relation to possible changes in personal behaviours. Finally, we discuss the implications for communications and policy and how both the traditional and new media might help in the development of better informed public debate