The Media and Human Rights: Mapping the Field

The Routledge Companion to Media and Human Rights offers a comprehensive and contemporary survey of the key themes, approaches and debates in the field of media and human rights. Organised into five parts - Communication, Expression and Human Rights, Media Performance and Human Rights: Political Processes, Media Performance and Human Rights: News and Journalism, Digital Activism, Witnessing and Human Rights, and Media Representation of Human Rights: Cultural, Social, and Political – and forty-nine original chapters, this volume examines the universal principals of freedom of expression, legal instruments, the right to know, media as a human right, digital activism, witnessing, and media representation of human rights, including the role of media organisations and journalistic work. With coverage of an array of topics, including mass-surveillance, LGBT advocacy, press law, freedom of information, and children’s rights in the digital age, this Companion offers both an interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary approach to media and human rights allowing for international comparisons and varying perspectives. This volume is also the first to bring together scholarship examining media as a human right and essays examining media coverage of human rights. With its scope and ambition, The Routledge Companion to Media and Human Rights sets out to chart the field and define the agenda for future research

Shifting journalistic roles in democratic transitions: Lessons from Egypt

While in the case of the Arab Spring the focus of research and debate was very much on the role of social media in enabling political change both during the uprisings and in their immediate aftermath, the impact of traditional national mass media and journalism on framing this political change has been less addressed. In this article, we investigate the role of Egyptian journalists in shaping Egypt’s complex and fast-moving political transition. Based on a thematic analysis of in-depth interviews and a conceptual framework building on Christians et al.’s normative roles of the media, it can be concluded that the monitorial and facilitative roles, which were prevalent in the early stages of the post-Mubarak era, were quickly overturned in favor of a radical and collaborative role. Egyptian journalists working in private media thus demonized their political adversaries, mainly the Islamists, transforming this political ‘other’ into the ultimate enemy. At the same time, the new military regime was being revered and celebrated. This arguably contributed to further destabilize the fragile transition to democracy. It is furthermore concluded that for democracy to succeed in an Egyptian context, antagonistic political conflicts need to be transformed into agonistic ones both at the level of political culture and media culture

Journalism Studies

This entry traces the history of journalism studies and asks whether journalism studies are a discipline or field or research method. Different interests involved in journalism studies – journalists, journalism educators and journalism scholars - make it difficult to find a single vision of what it entails. As a new field it requires its own methodologies even though these may be borrowed from other disciplines. It also requires its own body of literature. The origins of journalism studies are somewhat imprecise but we can identify five phases of evolution: normative, empirical turn, sociological turn, global-comparative turn, and digital turn. Journalism studies also encompass the education of journalists. Many journalism scholars now reside in journalism departments side by side with their practitioner colleagues. Historically the study and practice of journalism was entwined over the debate of whether the occupation of journalism should be regarded as a craft or a profession and indeed its place in the academy

Seminar Users in the Arabic Twitter Sphere

We introduce the notion of "seminar users", who are social media users engaged in propaganda in support of a political entity. We develop a framework that can identify such users with 84.4% precision and 76.1% recall. While our dataset is from the Arab region, omitting language-specific features has only a minor impact on classification performance, and thus, our approach could work for detecting seminar users in other parts of the world and in other languages. We further explored a controversial political topic to observe the prevalence and potential potency of such users. In our case study, we found that 25% of the users engaged in the topic are in fact seminar users and their tweets make nearly a third of the on-topic tweets. Moreover, they are often successful in affecting mainstream discourse with coordinated hashtag campaigns.Comment: to appear in SocInfo 201

Data journalism beyond majority world countries:Challenges and opportunities

© 2019, © 2019 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This commentary reflects on the state of research on data journalism and discusses future directions for this line of work. Drawing on theory in international development and postcolonial studies, we discuss three critical pitfalls that we encourage future scholarship in this area to avoid. These include using a linear model of progress, in which journalists in Majority World nations struggle to ‘catch up’ to their Minority World counterparts because of the ‘obstacles’ they face; reproducing a simplistic split between the ‘West and the Rest’, thus missing the complex interaction of structures operating at different levels; and failing to examine journalistic agency due to an overemphasis on the technical structuring of the ‘tools’ used in data journalism. We also encourage scholars to engage in more comparative work rather than single case studies; increase dialogic communication between scholarship produced in, or about, different parts of the world; and incorporate more diverse methodologies with the aim of building theory. More broadly, we advocate for greater critical reflection upon—if not the challenging of—our dominant modes of thought in order to build more nuanced frameworks for explaining the complex causes, and potentially mixed effects, of data journalism around the world

Digital volunteer networks and humanitarian crisis reporting

Digital technologies and big data are rapidly transforming humanitarian crisis response and changing the traditional roles and powers of its actors. This article looks at a particular aspect of this transformation – the appearance of digital volunteer networks – and explores their potential to act as a new source for media coverage, in addition to their already established role as emergency response supporters. I argue that digital humanitarians can offer a unique combination of speed and safe access, while escaping some of the traditional constraints of the aid-media relationship and exceeding the conventional conceptualizations of citizen journalism. Journalists can find both challenges and opportunities in the environment where multiple crisis actors are assuming some of the media roles. The article draws on interviews with humanitarian organizations, journalists, and digital volunteer networks about their understanding of digital humanitarian communication and its significance for media coverage of crises