Indian Country LaPoe, Victoria L; LaPoe, Benjamin Rex
01/2017
eBook
Storytelling has always been an important part of Native culture. Stories play a part in everyday Native life-they are often oral and rich in detail and language and serve as a form of recording ...history. Digital media now allow for the extension of this storytelling. This necessary text evaluates how digital media are changing the rich cultural act of storytelling within Native communities, with a specific focus on Native newsroom norms and routines. The authors argue that the non-Native press often leave consumers with a stereotypical view of American Indians, and aim to give a more authentic representation to Native journalism. With interviews from more than forty Native journalists around the country, this book is essential to understanding how digital media possibly advances the distribution of storytelling within the American Indian community.
It is important to evaluate the media's health coverage of Indigenous communities both because these communities have been hit very hard by health inequities, and because misinformation can ...negatively affect the future health of Indian Country. This study takes the unique angle of examining both Indigenous and non-Indigenous ("mainstream") news publications to evaluate information gaps in health, health policy, and health efficacy coverage. The Indigenous media examined, which covered 14 times more health stories than mainstream media, highlighted health issues in Indian Country through the lens of resilience by using framing to emphasize unequal power, while at the same time providing depth and specificity. Instead of putting Indigenous health stories into historical and cultural context, mainstream media focused on the lack of resources and the chronic struggle of Indigenous communities. Mainstream media often only covered the topic once per outlet; however, those outlets with connections to Indigenous communities did provide more balanced coverage. Instead of promoting change, most mainstream media stories blamed Indigenous people for their situation and offered a doom trajectory for tribes hit hardest by health disparities. This study reveals how embedded framing and mediatization direct non-Native readers' attention away from the systemic deprivation of support to U.S. Indigenous tribes that was guaranteed to them by the U.S. government in tribal agreements. The implications for journalism and policy are discussed.
Resistance Advocacy as News: Digital Black Press Covers the Tea Party examines the Black and mainstream press’s digital interpretations of the Tea Party during President Barack Obama’s first term. ...The Tea Party narrative and the white ideologies disseminated by conservative groups was, and continues to be, an intricate story for journalists to tell. This book tracks coverage of the Tea Party from the modern group’s beginning in early February of 2009 until two weeks after the 2012 general presidential election in November. While many mainstream journalists either fail to recognize, or ignore all together, the racial component that the Tea Party poses to Black solidarity, this book shows that Black reporters working for the Black press absolutely recognize the racial component and provide more thorough discussions than their mainstream counterparts. Historically, the Black press has existed to fill holes of misrepresentation in the mainstream press; to that end, this book addresses questions surrounding the ongoing necessity of the Black press and whether our society is “postracial,” combining a quantitative analysis of implicit racial frames with a qualitative analysis of resonant myth, and providing empirical evidence that Black people still struggle to have their voices heard in the mainstream press
This book presents a series of case studies that evaluate the elevation and suppression of voices within marginalized and minority communities. It examines the use of digital media and its role in ...the construction of reality--specifically who is included, who is left out, and who feels they must remain silent.
As COVID-19 surged in 2020, non-Indigenous media had a chronic disease of its own: sparse pandemic news from Indian Country. Within this inadequate coverage, there was an erasure of sources: ...Indigenous women were missing. This study evaluates the role of gender in U.S. Indigenous news coverage during the early stage of the COVID-19 pandemic. In a qualitative thematic textual analysis, 161 Indigenous media news articles were analyzed to examine gendered news coverage themes from the time the United States instituted a nationwide quarantine until the autumn of 2020. U.S. Indigenous media amplified voices of the Indigenous women on the COVID-19 frontlines. This study focuses on Indigenous media as the benchmark for telling ethical diverse Indigenous community-focused stories, illustrating how women's voices led media coverage and amplified issues. U.S. tribes are often matriarchal. As Europeans wielded disease and genocide as extermination tactics on these communities, women's voices served as medicine to guide narratives to community solutions and healing. As such, this study seeks to add to current theoretical understanding of how Indigenous women's roles were portrayed in COVID-19 coverage.
This study grounds 45 interviews with media scholars in liminality theory and analyzes how scholars use social media as they transition to combined offline and online communication. Scholars employ ...highly personal strategies to decide if and how to integrate social media into their professional lives for peer and public communication. Scholars struggle with a double bind of needing to be social media savvy while worrying about career consequences of posting publicly. Few best practices exist.
Oil and Water Andrea Miller; Shearon Roberts; Victoria LaPoe
04/2014
eBook
Along the Gulf Coast, history is often referenced as pre-Katrina or post-Katrina. However, the natural disaster that appalled the world in 2005 has been joined by another catastrophe, this one ...man-made--the greatest environmental and maritime accident of all time, the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill. In less than five years, the Gulf Coast has experienced two colossal disasters, very different, yet very similar. And these two equally complex crises have resulted in a steep learning curve for all, but especially the journalists covering these enduring stories.
InOil and Water, the authors explore the media-fed experiences, the visuals and narratives associated with both disasters. Katrina journalists have reluctantly had to transform into oil spill journalists. The authors look at this process of growth from the viewpoints not only of the journalists, but also of the public and of the scientific community. Through a detailed analysis of the journalists' content, the authors tackle significant questions. This book assesses the quality of journalism and the effects that quality may have on the public. The authors argue that regardless of the type of journalism involved or the immensity of the events covered, successful reportage still depends on the fundamentals of journalism and the importance of following these tenets consistently in a crisis atmosphere, especially when confronted with enduring crises that are just years apart.
Using a Qualtrics survey of 338 Twitter and Facebook users, the authors explore the effect that the 2016 U.S. presidential election had on people’s political posts both before and after the election ...and whether or not people actually experienced harassment and threats during the election cycle. If trolling causes people—particularly women, LGBTQIA community members, and people who identify with a disability—to censor themselves because they feel their opinion is in the minority or that they will be attacked for speaking, then it would follow that trolling is changing our digital public sphere, which is affecting our political conversations.
This study seeks to identify the most memorable visual imagery of the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill by comparing a content analysis of television images and a survey of the most-remembered images. The ...study compared visuals from weeks 1 and 6 of the disaster to a survey conducted a year later that asked respondents to freely recall the most memorable images of the disaster. The comparison showed respondents did indeed choose as the most memorable images the visuals coded with greatest frequency in the content analysis. However, the emotions evoked by the oil-soaked animals elevated that set of images to the most memorable-chosen by almost half of respondents. This set of images was number one with the respondents yet number eight in frequency in the content analysis. This study shows a visual agenda-setting effect heightened by emotion.
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