234 research outputs found
How Influential Are Chinese Media in Africa? An Audience Analysis in Kenya and South Africa
The increased presence of Chinese media in Africa has been the focus of much debate since the early 2010s. Discussions tend to revolve around issues of production and content, providing little evidence on the way audiences decode media messages aimed at extending Chinaâs âsoft power.â This article uses data from seven focus groups with media and communication university students in Kenya and South Africa to explore the efficacy of Chinese-mediated public diplomacy. We show that Chinese media have little impact on studentsâ information habits, demonstrate that attitudes toward China are predominantly negative, and argue that this stereotyping affects opinions about Chinese media. We also suggest that some studentsâ favored news values overlap with those associated with Chinese media. This may indicate a potential affinity between the journalistic practice of Chinese media in Africa and that of future Kenyan and South African media professionals, which could increase the chances of Chinaâs media engagements having an impact in the long term
Creating connections: Exploring the intermediary use of ICTs by Congolese refugees at tertiary educational institutions in Cape Town
The development of information and communication technologies (ICTs) has been seen as a boon for groups that
occupy a marginal position in the mainstream commercial media or that have limited access to such media. ICTs such as the
Internet have optimistically been seen as potentially providing a communicative space where community movements, activists
and social interest groups might share information more freely and with fewer of the space limitations and distribution problems
than in traditional media. In the South African context, one such marginalised community is the refugees from other African
countries who have made South Africa their home. Several opinion surveys and research projects into the representation of
refugees in South African media have raised concerns about how refugees are treated in the mainstream media. Against the
background of such problems, one could ask the question of whether the benefits that new media technologies have proven to
hold for other marginal groups will also apply to refugees. If this is the case, how do refugees use new media technologies to
their benefit, and how should this usage be theorised? This article seeks to explore these questions through a study of a specific
South African refugee community, namely the Congolese refugee community in Cape Town. The article presents both
preliminary indications of the uses of ICTs by this community and initial theoretical reflections on these findings
Chinese Media Engagement in South Africa: What is its impact on local journalism?
Chinaâs footprint in Africaâs media sector over the last decade has reached dimensions that make it impossible to go unnoticed. In South Africa, one of the countries where this imprint is most diversified, Chinese media have been engaged in a varied range of activities, including content production and distribution, infrastructure development, direct investment in local media and training of journalists. Building on previous exploratory studies by the authors, this paper addresses an unresolved question in the study of Chinaâs media internationalization: the impact on journalism. Using data from 20 semi-structured in-depth interviews with editors, journalists and policy makers, we investigate how much influence Chinese media exercise on journalism in South Africa. We present responses along three dimensions: consumption of and attitudes towards Chinese media, impact on local journalism and views about South AfricaâChina relations. Our data offer evidence that, despite having substantially increased their presence, Chinese media are far from having a profound impact on media professionals. While some interviewees report the adoption of some Chinese media in their daily news consumption, scepticism towards China, and by extension its media, dominates. We discuss these findings in the context of Chinese state-owned mediaâs attempts to increase their discursive power globally
Journalism in a new democracy : the ethics of listening.
[Conclusion] I started this lecture by recalling how, as a youngster, it was stories that helped me to understand the country I was growing up in, and helped me imagine the lives of others that I did not read about in the media of that time. For journalism in a new democracy such as South Africa to serve more than an elite, for it to enable citizens to actively practice their citizenship through media, for it to treat all South Africans with dignity, it would have to learn to listen across the different lines that continue to keep South Africans apart â journalists would have to learn to listen to the stories of those on the other side of the railway line, the breadline, the picket line, the barbed wire fence. What would this listening mean for journalists in practice? Let me end by returning to the coverage of the Marikana massacre. In a recent interview with Greg Marinovich, the journalist that did the investigation that cast doubt on the official accounts of the events, he was asked if what was needed for better journalism was more investment of resources. âDo we need a team (or teams) of journalists to get to the bottom of this?â he was asked. Marinovich responded as follows: âI wouldn't say that. I think other journalists have been spending more time there than I have (âŠ) It's about opening your eyes and looking at what people are telling you, looking at their stories.
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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 â broadly shared â legitimizing narratives, involving different kinds of boundary-work. In, the first âexclusionaryâ narrative, journalists differentiated their âtruthfulâ news reporting from the âfalseâ state âpropagandaâ of a common Other, the Russian-funded network, RT. In the second âfuzzifyingâ narrative, journalists deployed the ambiguous notion of âsoft powerâ as an ambivalent âboundary conceptâ, to defuse conflicts between journalistic and diplomatic agendas. In the final âinversionâ narrative, journalists argued that, paradoxically, their dependence on funding states gave them greater âoperational autonomyâ. Even when journalists did resist their funding states, this was hidden or partial, and prompted less by journalistsâ concerns about the political effects of their work, than by serious threats to their personal cultural capital
Optimizing an Organized Modularity Measure for Topographic Graph Clustering: a Deterministic Annealing Approach
This paper proposes an organized generalization of Newman and Girvan's
modularity measure for graph clustering. Optimized via a deterministic
annealing scheme, this measure produces topologically ordered graph clusterings
that lead to faithful and readable graph representations based on clustering
induced graphs. Topographic graph clustering provides an alternative to more
classical solutions in which a standard graph clustering method is applied to
build a simpler graph that is then represented with a graph layout algorithm. A
comparative study on four real world graphs ranging from 34 to 1 133 vertices
shows the interest of the proposed approach with respect to classical solutions
and to self-organizing maps for graphs
Meeting the challenges of information disorder in the Global South
The research was conducted collaboratively, with regional reports provided by local teams from Research ICT Africa, InternetLab (Latin America and the Caribbean), LIRNEasia (Asia), and Arab Reporters for Investigative Journalism (Middle East and North Africa). This detailed study provides an overview of the entities that are active in the fight against information disorder in the MENA region, and the methods and responses they use. It also discusses and analyzes legal and human rights issues and the context of freedom of opinion and expression in which they operate
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