The Role and Responsibility of the Public

It\u27s the title of the conference—the court of public opinion—and the topic of this panel. Professor Christopher Schroeder of Duke Law School is joined by media and public policy professor Kim Gross, senior attorney for the Institute for Justice Scott Bullock, and litigation director of the ACLU Steve Shapiro to contemplate both the influence of the media on public opinion and ways to use the media as an advocacy tool. Gross discusses her research into the influence of media coverage on the public, followed by Bullock and Shapiro who explain the ways in which public interest law may choose to incorporate a media strategy into a larger legal battle. Questions/themes/discussion topics Media framing How media coverage can influence public opinion Factors that influence the media\u27s power How the Duke lacrosse case differs from typical crime coverage Legal strategies of public interest organizations Winning in the court of law, but losing in the court of public opinion Losing in the court of law, but winning in the court of public opinio

Newspaper attention and policy activities in Spain

Spain"s newspapers are characterised by strong partisan identities. We demonstrate that the two leading newspapers nonetheless show powerful similarities in the topics of their coverage over time. The media system is strongly related to the policy process and it shows similar levels of skew (attention focuses on just a few topics) and friction (attention lurches rapidly from topic to topic) as others have shown for policy processes more generally. Further, media attention is significantly related to parliamentary activities. Oral questions in parliament track closely with media attention over time. Our assessment is based on a comprehensive database of all front-page stories (over 95,000 stories) in El Paı´s and El Mundo, Spain"s largest daily newspapers, and all 7,446 oral questions from 1996 to 2009. The paper shows that explanations of friction and skew in governmental activities should incorporate media dynamics as well. Political leaders are clearly sensitive to media salience

Computational Controversy

Climate change, vaccination, abortion, Trump: Many topics are surrounded by fierce controversies. The nature of such heated debates and their elements have been studied extensively in the social science literature. More recently, various computational approaches to controversy analysis have appeared, using new data sources such as Wikipedia, which help us now better understand these phenomena. However, compared to what social sciences have discovered about such debates, the existing computational approaches mostly focus on just a few of the many important aspects around the concept of controversies. In order to link the two strands, we provide and evaluate here a controversy model that is both, rooted in the findings of the social science literature and at the same time strongly linked to computational methods. We show how this model can lead to computational controversy analytics that have full coverage over all the crucial aspects that make up a controversy.Comment: In Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Social Informatics (SocInfo) 201

Comparing international coverage of 9/11 : towards an interdisciplinary explanation of the construction of news

This article presents an interdisciplinary model attempting to explain how news is constructed by relying on the contributions of different fields of study: News Sociology, Political Communications, International Communications, International Relations. It is a first step towards developing a holistic theoretical approach to what shapes the news, which bridges current micro to macro approaches. More precisely the model explains news variation across different media organization and countries by focusing on the different way the sense of newsworthiness of journalists is affected by three main variables: national interest, national journalistic culture, and editorial policy of each media organization. The model is developed on the basis of an investigation into what shaped the media coverage of 9/11 in eight elite newspapers across the US, France, Italy and Pakistan

Activation of Rho-associated coiled-coil protein kinase 1 (ROCK-1) by caspase-3 cleavage plays an essential role in cardiac myocyte apoptosis

Rho-associated coiled-coil protein kinase 1 (ROCK-1) is a direct cleavage substrate of activated caspase-3, which is associated with heart failure. In the course of human heart failure, we found marked cleavage of ROCK-1 resulting in a 130-kDa subspecies, which was absent in normal hearts and in an equivalent cohort of patients with left ventricular assist devices. Murine cardiomyocytes treated with doxorubicin led to enhanced ROCK-1 cleavage and apoptosis, all of which was blocked by a caspase-3 inhibitor. In addition, a bitransgenic mouse model of severe cardiomyopathy, which overexpresses Gq protein and hematopoietic progenitor kinase-/germinal center kinase-like kinase, revealed the robust accumulation of the 130-kDa ROCK-1 cleaved fragment. This constitutively active ROCK-1 subspecies, when expressed in cardiomyocytes, led to caspase-3 activation, indicating a positive feed-forward regulatory loop. ROCK-1-dependent caspase-3 activation was coupled with the activation of PTEN and the subsequent inhibition of protein kinase B (Akt) activity, all of which was attenuated by siRNA directed against ROCK-1 expression. Similarly, ROCK-1-null mice (Rock-1(−/−)) showed a marked reduction in myocyte apoptosis associated with pressure overload. These data suggest an obligatory role for ROCK-1 cleavage in promoting apoptotic signals in myocardial hypertrophy and/or failure

Media(ted) discourses and climate change : a focus on political subjectivity and (dis)engagement

Research has shown that the media are the main source of information and the main factor shaping people’s awareness and concern in relation to climate change and therefore have an important role in setting the public agenda. As a key forum for the production, reproduction and transformation of the meaning of public issues, the media influence understandings of risks, responsibilities, as well as of the functioning of democratic politics. This article argues that the media also matter to citizens’ perception of their (potential) political agency or their political subjectivity. Media representations construct particular ‘subject positions’ for individuals and cultivate dispositions to action or inaction. The article discusses the importance of citizens’ political engagement with climate change and points out some aspects of media(ted) discourses that may constrain the perceived possibilities of participation in the politics of climate change. While engagement with climate change has multiple dimensions and a number of barriers have been identified through empirical studies, this article offers a critique of the role of the media in political engagement with the problem and suggests avenues for future research.The author is grateful to the Portuguese Funda A, o para a CiIncia e a Tecnologia for funding the project 'The Politics of Climate Change: Discourses and Representations' (POCI/COM56973/2004), to Jan Zienkowski for relevant comments on this paper, and to the reviewers who provided detailed feedback

C4b-Binding Protein Is Present in Affected Areas of Myocardial Infarction during the Acute Inflammatory Phase and Covers a Larger Area than C3

BACKGROUND: During myocardial infarction reduced blood flow in the heart muscle results in cell death. These dying/dead cells have been reported to bind several plasma proteins such as IgM and C-reactive protein (CRP). In the present study we investigated whether fluid-phase complement inhibitor C4b-binding protein (C4BP) would also bind to the infarcted heart tissue. METHODS AND FINDINGS: Initial studies using immunohistochemistry on tissue arrays for several cardiovascular disorders indicated that C4BP can be found in heart tissue in several cardiac diseases but that it is most abundantly found in acute myocardial infarction (AMI). This condition was studied in more detail by analyzing the time window and extent of C4BP positivity. The binding of C4BP correlates to the same locations as C3b, a marker known to correlate to the patterns of IgM and CRP staining. Based on criteria that describe the time after infarction we were able to pinpoint that C4BP binding is a relatively early marker of tissue damage in myocardial infarction with a peak of binding between 12 hours and 5 days subsequent to AMI, the phase in which infiltration of neutrophilic granulocytes in the heart is the most extensive. CONCLUSIONS: C4BP, an important fluid-phase inhibitor of the classical and lectin pathway of complement activation binds to jeopardized cardiomyocytes early after AMI and co-localizes to other well known markers such as C3b

Bad news from Fallujah

This study uses the thematic analysis developed by the Glasgow University Media Group to explore how the US, UK and German national press covered the US/Coalition assault on the Iraqi city of Fallujah in November 2004. The study relies on quantitative and qualitative full text content analyses to assess 428 news, editorial and commentary items. The article suggests that, while government and military officials of the US/Coalition had argued the military ‘operation’ was necessary to secure Iraq and defeat an ‘insurgency’, organisations and actors from Iraqi society refer to the ‘operation’ as ‘collective punishment’ and a ‘massacre’ that targeted the Iraqi population. The article investigates how the press represented each of these perspectives. The findings suggest that the press overemphasised the US/Coalition perspective despite striking counter evidence. Critical aspects of coverage largely focused on tactical elements of the military dimension of the event. The article concludes that such findings are in accord with hegemonic models of media performance

Ethics, politics and migration: Public debates on the free movement of Romanians and Bulgarians in the UK, 2006–2013

Public debates on immigration have become the subject of much concern, particularly in the UK. This article applies an ethical lens to assess changes in public debates over intra-EU migration in six UK national newspapers during 2006 and 2013. It finds an almost complete dominance of communitarian justifications, mainly based on welfare chauvinism, but a notable increase in security-related arguments and a decrease in economic nationalist ideas. Alternative cosmopolitan arguments about immigration go from rare to virtually absent. The discussion links these shifts to a failure of the UK centre-left to overcome historic difficulties in presenting a coherent narrative on immigration policy

Asymmetric Perceptions of the Economy: Media, Firms, Consumers, and Experts

This article sheds light on the interaction of media, economic actors, and economic experts. Based on a unique data set of 86,000 news items rated by professional analysts of Media Tenor International and survey data, we first analyze the overall tone of the media, consumers', firms', and economic experts' opinions on the state and outlook of the economy. Second, we assess the protagonist's ability at correctly predicting GDP. Third, we use Granger causality tests to uncover who is influencing whom when it comes to the formation of opinions on the economy. We find that media reports have a significant negative bias. The economic sentiment of the media, consumers and firms does not reflect the actual situation. Finally, we find that media sentiment is not influenced by any other actor. In contrast, media appear to affect all other actors