News Coverage, the Expansion of Discourse, and Conflict

The universe of news cultures--comprising providers and consumers-has never been static. It perpetually evolves, sometimes in small increments, sometimes with dazzling leaps. We are now in one of the latter phases, with new technologies driving change at high speed. This alteration of the news universe is a mix of reshaping and expansion, and it has a profound effect on social and political life throughout much of the world. It has particular impact on how policy makers and the public evaluate and respond to conflict

Soft power, hard news:How journalists at state-funded transnational media legitimize their work

How do journalists working for different state-funded international news organizations legitimize their relationship to the governments which support them? In what circumstances might such journalists resist the diplomatic strategies of their funding states? We address these questions through a comparative study of journalists working for international news organizations funded by the Chinese, US, UK and Qatari governments. Using 52 interviews with journalists covering humanitarian issues, we explain how they minimized tensions between their diplomatic role and dominant norms of journalistic autonomy by drawing on three – broadly shared – legitimizing narratives, involving different kinds of boundary-work. In, the first ‘exclusionary’ narrative, journalists differentiated their ‘truthful’ news reporting from the ‘false’ state ‘propaganda’ of a common Other, the Russian-funded network, RT. In the second ‘fuzzifying’ narrative, journalists deployed the ambiguous notion of ‘soft power’ as an ambivalent ‘boundary concept’, to defuse conflicts between journalistic and diplomatic agendas. In the final ‘inversion’ narrative, journalists argued that, paradoxically, their dependence on funding states gave them greater ‘operational autonomy’. Even when journalists did resist their funding states, this was hidden or partial, and prompted less by journalists’ concerns about the political effects of their work, than by serious threats to their personal cultural capital

Capturing Saddam Hussein: How the full story got away, and what conflict journalism can learn from it

The capture of Saddam Hussein in December 2003 was reported with a sense of triumph which must have greatly satisfied the United States forces occupying Iraq. This was the victory they had been looking for; the seminal moment which signalled that the invasion had been a success. But the reporting of that event was also a missed opportunity: an example of incomplete story telling. In this article, I use my personal experience of reporting on the event for the BBC as a starting point to examine what it, and the way it was covered, tell us about the omissions which are frequently a feature of conflict reporting. The article argues that the way in which reporters had to work in Iraq then meant that they did not convey all of the event’s wider implications, and suggests how that might be improved

Reinventing ‘Many Voices’: MacBride and a Digital New World Information and Communication Order

The MacBride Commission Report was arguably one of the most significant multilateral interventions in the history of international communication. This article charts its emergence at the time of deeply contested Cold War politics, coinciding with the rise of the southern voices in the global arena, led by the non-aligned nations. Thirty-five years after the report's publication, has the global media evolved into a more democratic system, demonstrating greater diversity of views and viewpoints? Despite the still formidable power of US-led western media, the article suggests that the globalisation and digitisation of communication has contributed to a multi-layered and more complex global media scene, demonstrating the “rise of the rest”

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe

Viewpoint: The Virtual Ummah; Strategic Insights, v. 5, issue 8 November 2006

This article appeared in Strategic Insights, v.5, issue 8 November 2006Approved for public release; distribution is unlimited