Media framing helps to shape our understanding of the meaning of news events, often problematically. This study examines how this process interacts with the phenomenon of familicide-suicide, where a ...person kills one or more family members before taking their own life. A social constructionist analysis of the print media coverage of three high-profile cases in Ireland highlights framing and discursive patterns, contributing to an explanatory framework that is misleading and lacking in an evidence base. As well as a tendency towards broad and poorly supported claims-making, several primary causal frames are prevalent: mental health; financial debt; fall from grace; and ‘out of the blue’, whilst a domestic violence frame is notable in its absence. Coverage is found to be episodic in character, linked to dramatisation and more simplistic explanatory frames, rather than evidence-based analysis of potential causal factors for these incidents. Findings raise important questions for journalistic practice, regarding processes of selection and salience of sources contributing to overall coverage that is partial and biased, rather than an ‘objective’ representation of the social world.
Obesity is a persistently newsworthy topic for the UK press and in recent years levels of coverage have increased. In this study, we examine the ways in which obesity has been framed by the press ...over a ten-year period (2008–2017), focussing both on areas of stability and change. The analysis is based on a ~36 million-word database of all UK newspaper articles mentioning the words ‘obese’ or ‘obesity’ published within this time frame and draws upon techniques from corpus linguistics – a collection of computational methods for examining recurrent linguistic patterns in large bodies of language data. Our analysis shows that, over time, obesity is represented increasingly as a biomedical problem that is both caused and should be prevented by individual action. Meanwhile, focus on wider environmental determinants of health, including the role of Government and the food industry, decreases over time. In the paper, we situate these trends within the wider context of UK society and argue that they both represent the increasing dominance of neoliberal models of health but also have the potential to contribute to weight stigma and the blaming of individuals. Accordingly, it is argued that the press should seek greater balance in its reporting of the potential causes of and solutions to obesity, as well as closer alignment with scientific evidence. By doing so, the press could begin to report on obesity in a way that raises useful public awareness around the topic and which challenges some of the stigma that currently attends to this social justice issue.
•British newspapers doubled the amount of reporting on obesity between 2008 and 2017.•These newspapers increasingly emphasise individual factors like biology and personal choice when writing about obesity.•Emphasis on political and social factors has decreased in news reporting on obesity over time.•The newspaper depictions run counter to the Government's Foresight Report in 2007.•These depictions are likely to result in increased stigma and discrimination of people with obesity in the UK.
This study systematically delves into the intricacies of crime reporting by mass media in postcovid Nigeria, shedding light on its profound impact and intensity. Through meticulous archival methods, ...historical editions of The Guardian and Punch newspapers were analyzed over three years. The findings highlight a notable emphasis on crimes against individuals, such as murder and assault, compared to other categories like financial and drug-related crimes. Over 4,093 crime incidents were reported, with crimes against persons dominating in 2021 and 2022. The study underscores the need for nuanced crime reporting and advocates for substantive engagement through editorials and analyses. By fostering awareness and discourse, print media can play a pivotal role in shaping public understanding of crime dynamics and promoting societal well-being.
Information retrieval is the backbone of an information-serving institution. There is predominant use of printed media in Indian judiciary, as public outreach of the electronic media is still ...negligible. This work tries to explore the usage of different media of information among users in the library at the National Green Tribunal, Eastern Zone Bench at Kolkata, identify the shortcoming, trace the user's feedback on the Judgment Information System (JUDIS) and improve it. Based on users' responses, a system improvement for information retrieval is suggested, framing an alternative indexing mechanism to improve the proper and accurate search, locally.
This article investigates how the press stigmatized Toxteth during, and immediately following, the disturbances in 1981. It builds upon a body of literature on territorial stigmatization where there ...is a gap in understanding surrounding the production and formation of stigma. Drawing on the acceptance in literature that the media is a key contributor to territorial stigma, I delve further to understand some of the techniques that the media uses to stigmatize place. I engage in a combined quantitative and qualitative analysis of 496 newspaper articles from five British newspapers to examine how the press reports on Toxteth, and who constructs Toxteth’s identity. I show that the name of ‘Toxteth’ was largely defined by the media and that the residents of Toxteth were denied a voice in the press coverage in 1981 with fewer than 10 per cent of all articles quoting a resident. I refer to this process as ‘stranger-making’, and it underscores the way that the media denied residents an ability to construct their own identity and the identity of their area. While stranger-making involves obfuscating the unique contours of Toxteth and silencing voices, the press simultaneously impose aspects of identity from a position of power through the techniques of naming, negativity, and oppositionality.
This study adopted a content analysis to describe the prominence given to agricultural information in print media using four selected Newspapers. Specifically, the study determined the space ...allotted; the number; and prominence given to agricultural information in Nigerian newspapers. Stratified and purposive sampling procedures were used to select a sample of 384 editions of newspapers for analysis. Data were collected from hard copies of the selected Newspapers and were analysed using percentages, Kruskal Wallis (H) test and Pearson Product Moment correlation. Findings revealed that a total of 102,317.57cm2 space was allotted to agricultural information out of which 41% was used by the Guardian Newspaper. Only 398 pieces of agricultural information were reported out of a total of 29,666 pieces of information reported. There were significant differences across the newspapers in the number and space allotted to agricultural information and there was a positive and significant correlation (r=0.794) between the space allotted to agricultural information and the number of agricultural information reported. The majority (86.6%) of the agricultural information were reported on other pages of Newspapers. The study recommended that agricultural information should be reported at prominent pages and Ministries and Agencies should advertise their products and services in the newspapers.
The notion of francophonie still raises many questions in various fields, such as the didactic, economic, political, and media fields, among others, making it difficult to understand the concept. In ...this article, we analyze the ways in which the discursive contours of the francophone issue and its representation in the discourse of the Colombian print media are defined, based on a corpus of 35 journalistic articles. To this end, we combined textometric analyses obtained with the Iramuteq® software with linguistic discourse analysis tools, in order to propose an interpretative hypothesis. On this basis, we were able to demonstrate that, in the Colombian print media, the issue of francophonie is mainly elaborated on the basis of its relationship to the French language and, more concretely, on the basis of its pragmatic aim, which configures a discursive register of education and work. In addition, there is a quest linked to the desire for social mobility, where language takes on the role of auxiliary, even in the absence of cultural, social, political or historical dimensions. From this point of view, its learning and its use are reduced to a rather technical and individual subject without considering its complex character also constituting the social.
This article examines the role of the print media in a campaign against political denunciations in the Grand Duchy of Finland from 1899 to 1917. It explores how the public condemnation of ...denunciations and denouncers evolved into a means for Finnish nationalist activists to raise national awareness and mobilise citizens against the integration policies of the Russian government. The source material includes Finnish newspapers and magazines, analysed through qualitative and computational methods, and a corpus of letters between citizens and the Governor-General. The article shows that the increase in the media coverage of denunciations was linked to the imperial integration policies, and that newspapers across party lines framed the denunciations as a national threat. The anti-denunciation campaign culminated during the revolutions of 1905 and 1917, when the nationalist news media published extensive name lists of denouncers based on findings from the confiscated papers of the imperial authorities. Overall, the article suggests that the media campaign against denunciations effectively suppressed the practice of denunciation in Finland, even if it also fostered an atmosphere of ubiquitous surveillance and may have inspired some individuals to become denouncers.
We assess the rate of replication for empirical papers in the 2010 American Economic Review. Across 70 empirical papers, we find that 29 percent have 1 or more citation that partially replicates the ...original result. While only a minority of papers has a published replication, a majority (60 percent) have either a replication, robustness test, or an extension. Surveying authors within the literature, we find substantial uncertainty over the number of extant replications.
This article examines the role of the media in the EU freedom of movement debate through the lens of high-circulation German and UK newspapers during the first half of 2014. It explores how the media ...problematised migration from Eastern European member states and its influence on national host country labour markets and welfare systems. It also analyses how different media outlets positioned themselves in relation to relevant policies or policy proposals. The findings show that most articles in our sample present low-skill, low-wage working European Union (EU) migrant class referred to as "poverty migrants" as a problem to be addressed at the policy level in contrast with the economically self-sufficient migrant with marketable skills. The article contributes to discussions on work, welfare, and mobility in the EU by cross-fertilising the literature on migration policy, freedom of movement, social rights, and the media.
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