844 research outputs found
A multidisciplinary understanding of news: Comparing elite press framing of 9/11 in the US, Italy, France and Pakistan
Political Communications, International Communications, News Sociology, all claim to offer an explanation for what shapes the news, but provide extremely different, if not contradictory suggestions. Political communications almost takes for granted the fact that official actors have a major role in shaping news stories at the national level. International Communications points at several possibilities: structural economic imbalances lead to unidirectional news flows from rich countries towards poor countries; globalization causes news to become homogenised on a worldwide scale; news is geared to the tastes of local audiences by national news producers. News sociology, instead, argues that the news product of each media organization is the unique output of patterns of social interactions among media professionals.
An international comparative study of the elite press framing of 9/11 in the US, Italy, France, and Pakistan reveals the limits of these approaches: none of them alone is able to explain the patterns of news contents that were detected in the empirical investigation.The analysis suggests that the content of press coverage in the newspapers under analysis is more effectively explained in terms of selection of newsworthy sources, guided by national interest, journalistic culture, and editorial policy. The study points to the benefit of adopting international comparative research designs and fundamentally argues that, if we want to explain news in the information age, we need to approach its study in a multidisciplinary perspective
Are the media globalizing political discourse? The war on terrorism case study
The paper challenges the claim that an increasingly global media is creating a homogenisation of political
discourses at the international level. In particular, it explores the extent to which the U.S. government managed
to affect global perceptions of the War On Terrorism through the media in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11
events.
The research starts from the consideration that the U.S. government created, through the repetition of consistent
messages, a very specific interpretation of the 9/11 events (a War On Terrorism frame) and attempted to export
it globally in order to support its own foreign policy objectives. The analysis then focuses on the comparison
between the War On Terrorism frame as delivered by the U.S. government and its reproduction within both the
political and media discourses in a range of local cases at the international level. They include the U.S., France,
Italy and Pakistan.
The research questions current literature on globalisation by drawing on political communicationsâ framing
theory. More specifically, it suggests first that there is no evidence of an on-going globalisation of either political
or media discourses; secondly that the local nation-state level plays a key role in understanding the mechanisms
of framesâ spreading at the global level; and thirdly that national culture is a major determinant in defining
local political and media discoursesâ contents, even in presence of a strong persuasion attempt by a powerful
international actor such as the U.S. government
Rebranding terror
Ten years after its most devastating attack, al-Qaeda has turned into a franchiser, publisher, and occasional climate-change activist. Can the worldâs most deadly terrorist group go mainstream and keep its edge
Unamerican Views: Why US-developed models of press-state relations don't apply to the rest of the world
The article shows the limitations of the 'indexing' hypothesis, an influential conceptualization of state-press relations based on the notion that the media tend to reproduce the range of debate within political elites. The hypothesis, as confirmed by an international comparative investigation of the elite press coverage of 9/11 in the US, Italy, France, and Pakistan, cannot be applied outside the American context. The analysis finds that the variation in the levels of correlation between elite press coverage and governmental discourse are explained by previously neglected variables: national interest, national journalistic culture, and editorial policy within each media organization. The article argues that more international comparative research and multidisciplinary approaches are needed in order to renew old paradigms, especially at a time when the distinction between foreign and domestic politics is disappearing
Reoptimization of Some Maximum Weight Induced Hereditary Subgraph Problems
The reoptimization issue studied in this paper can be described as follows: given an instance I of some problem Î , an optimal solution OPT for Î in I and an instance IâČ resulting from a local perturbation of I that consists of insertions or removals of a small number of data, we wish to use OPT in order to solve Î in I', either optimally or by guaranteeing an approximation ratio better than that guaranteed by an ex nihilo computation and with running time better than that needed for such a computation. We use this setting in order to study weighted versions of several representatives of a broad class of problems known in the literature as maximum induced hereditary subgraph problems. The main problems studied are max independent set, max k-colorable subgraph and max split subgraph under vertex insertions and deletion
"Journalism and the city: Redefining the spaces of foreign correspondence"
Place matters a great deal in journalism, even in the era of the âdeath of geography.â Yet space never produces effects through its existence alone. To understand the relevance of location beyond its most immediate assigned role of âlogistic constraintâ we must rework not only our understanding of journalism, but of the whole social world. This article presents a comparative analysis of foreign correspondentsâ practices in London and Oslo. The foreign journalistsâ experiences in the case studies are analytically dissected through the lens of Bruno Latourâs Actor Network Theory (ANT). The analysis shows the utility of the application of Latourâs framework to the study of international journalism in two respects. First, by mapping how local practicesâidentities, newsgathering routines and story outputsâare relationally constructed through the interactions of social actors, technologies, and material infrastructures, ANT provides an understanding of the role of location that transcends the merely physical and geographical dimensions. Second, by showing how situated practices are the outcomes of unique network configurations, ANT questions the validity of any generalized one-size-fits-all statements about the current state of foreign correspondence
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