Do mass media bias content in favor of advertisers? If so, what market conditions limit or exacerbate this bias? We examine the relationship between advertising by auto manufacturers in U.S. ...newspapers and news coverage of car safety recalls between 2000 and 2014. This context allows us to separate the influence of advertisers, who prefer less coverage, from that of readers, who prefer more information about the safety risks associated with the recalls. Consistent with theoretical predictions, we find that newspapers provide less coverage of recalls issued by manufacturers that advertised more regularly on their pages over the previous two years. The effect is especially pronounced for more severe recalls, which are more likely to hurt manufacturers’ reputations. Competition for readers from other newspapers mitigates proadvertiser bias, and competition for advertising by online platforms exacerbates it. We also present suggestive evidence that less news coverage of recalls is associated with more fatal car accidents.
This paper was accepted by Joshua Gans, business strategy.
Journalists who cover rural areas in the United States say they are afraid to report on hate groups, and this fear is exacerbated by close community ties and limited resources among rural ...journalists. We examine the concept of "hate speech" as a boundary object, analyzing in-depth interviews with U.S. journalists reporting in rural communities (n = 33) to better understand how rural journalists report on hate. We find that rural journalists articulate a clear definition for hate speech but struggle to apply that definition to events within their communities, even as they articulate numerous forms of hate. Journalists often dismissed acts of hate using the residual category of "not hate, but ... " to signal something that they felt was out of place or unsuitable but did not rise to the legal definition of hate speech and thus was not worth reporting on. This approach ends up challenging journalists' normative commitments to their communities and exemplifies their desire to avoid an objectivity trap.
Through scrutiny of academic research in the context of ethnic conflict, the present article advances the agenda of critical policy studies. To that end, it conducts a case study of representations ...of the Kurds in Turkish scholarship and aims to highlight a nexus between nationalism, state policy, and scholarship. Two arguments are advanced herein. First, Turkish scholars who adhere to the dominant nationalist ideology in Turkey represent the Kurds in accordance with the dictates of this ideology and justify sovereign power in the maintenance of relations of ethnic domination and subordination. Second, while Turkey no longer denies the physical existence of the Kurds, the state and Turkish scholars persist in withholding recognition of Kurdish identity. The scholars in question do so under pretenses of scientific objectivity, political universalism, and a commitment to peace. However, the lingering of the policy of denial and the justification of it constitute a fundamental hurdle to a peaceful resolution of the Kurdish issue. A critical approach to state policy and scholarship not only makes it possible to debunk pretenses of scientific objectivity and political universalism, but may also be more conducive to scholarly autonomy and commitment to peace in societies marked by ethnic conflict.
The argument for this article rests on exploring the significance of emotions and emotion-related forms of journalism that have historically been dismissed as improper reporting and flawed ...journalism. So far the emerging research on emotionality in the media, marking the so-called "affective turn" in communications, has mostly analysed emotional media performance in relation to its influences on the public. This article complements the existing research by exploring journalists' own views and narrations on emotions with the aim of unravelling emotionality as a vital emerging journalistic practice in a hybrid media environment. Results of semi-structured interviews with journalists in Slovenia, where the media developed at the cross-roads of fierce commercialization and political instrumentalization, show how they craft emotionality as professional journalistic conduct, articulating emotions as "special effects" with potential for motivation and engagement, but also revealing criticism in using emotions when their only purpose is to boost a commercial interest, thus feeding the attention economy model of media development.
The goal of advocacy is commonly used to distinguish journalism from public relations practice. At the same time, there is a strong tradition of advocacy reporting in journalism that weakens this ...point of distinction. In an attempt to reconcile this apparent contradiction, this article draws on the concept of a continuum to explain extremes in journalism practice and ‘contingency theory’ in public relations, which posits a range of variables can influence the degree of advocacy adopted by public relations practitioners when dealing with an organization’s target publics. This article contends that the degree and type of advocacy present in journalism is also dependent on a range of macro, organizational, journalism production, source and personal factors. It argues that each work of journalism falls along a continuum of advocacy, ranging from subtle displays at one end to overt at the other, where some stories might be hard to distinguish from public relations.
Abstract
This article presents findings from an exploratory in-depth qualitative research project with seventeen child welfare professionals exploring their permanency decisions with regards to ...Looked after Children. Thinking aloud-protocols and semi-structured interviews, in conjunction with a specifically constructed vignette were used to explore the permanency decisions of child welfare workers. Findings from this innovative research suggest that different decisions were taken by participants based on viewing the same vignette. However, even though the decisions differed, they clustered around the more interventionist options with most favouring adoption and foster care despite viable alternatives offered. There was broad consistency related to the rationale for the decisions taken, but this did not translate into a consistent permanency option being chosen. Possible reasons to account for this are that the decisions were heuristically constructed, idiosyncratic to individual inclinations and influenced by factors other than the individual needs of the service user. The implications of this are that children and families do not get a consistent and reliable response to their permanency needs. We therefore recommend the greater use of structured decision-making tools in permanency decisions to increase their objectivity and consistency.
In our study on current views on the position of power in politics, we were based on a number of modern political theories, where the fundamental aspect of modern power and politics is conflict and ...the aim of politics is to gain and retain power. The constitutional position of power in these theories is characterized as a "goal about itself. Power is a goal, it is not an instrument of politics. Political philosophy from Hobbees to Nozick rejects theories that give politics (or political power) higher goals. We analysed new concepts of the position of power in political relations (Badiou, Oakeshott, Balibar, Ranciere, Shapiro), leading to a new concept of politico. We have concluded that the perception of power is gradually taking shape, which represents a categorical turnaround compared to the understanding of modern power and politics as conflict. The basis for the new perceptualisation of power is the change in its existing constitutional position within political relations - as an objective. The new concepts of power and politics represents a power that has undergone conversion on the basis of a new understanding of political objectivity and does not involve conflict between opposites and coercion or violence.
This paper asks, and seeks to answer, the question: what makes mapping critical? I argue that most examples of 'doing' critical mapping tend to fall into one of two camps with very different ...manifestations, goals and assumptions, whether from Donna Haraway's invocation of – and desire to counteract – what she calls the "god trick", or from the spirit of "strategic positivism" advocated by the geographer Elvin Wyly. The rest of the paper argues, however, that these two positions are not mutually exclusive, and that practitioners of critical mapping need not choose between the twin imperatives of destabilizing our understanding of the objectivity of cartographic knowledge and taking advantage of such a pervasive understanding in order to produce a more socially and spatially just world. Instead, I argue that it is possible to simultaneously use maps to prove that inequality exists, while also demonstrating that the ways we conventionally think about such inequalities through maps are insufficient to understand the complex realities of the processes that we are mapping. Using examples from my own research on mapping the relational geographies of vacant and abandoned properties in Louisville, Kentucky, I demonstrate one possible example of what such an approach to situated mapping might look like.
There are various differences in the rules and regulations that were formulated or suggested for the procedure of making name entries in citations and bibliographies regarding writers associated or ...working in Urdu language especially Pakistani writers. Due to which the sense of uniformity and objectivity could not be attained in the entries of these names. This article summarizes and highlights the key issues regarding the current research hurdles and difficulties faced by Urdu scholars while citing names of Pakistani authors.
The paper addresses a current problem not only for legal research, but also for practitioners. Thus, we resume a subject on which other authors have analyzed, namely the concession contract, thus ...highlighting, based on the analysis and comparison, certain particularities of the principles that underlie the awarding of the concession contract of public property assets. The principles established in the Administrative Code, namely transparency, equal treatment, proportionality, non-discrimination, and free competition are intended to ensure objectivity and efficiency in this procedure.
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