"This research study provides baseline indicators for the Solomon Islands Media Assistance Scheme (SOLMAS) Program Phase III. It presents findings around the current quality of media, experiences of training to date, and relationships with stakeholders such as development organisations, government c
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ommunications and the National Disaster Management Office. This executive summary presents main findings from the study, under several key areas: media quality and inhibitors of quality; training and capacity building; audience needs and new media; media and development issues; the Media Association of Solomon Islands (MASI); the public broadcaster Solomon Islands Broadcasting Corporation (SIBC); and perceptions of SOLMAS to date." (Exexutive summary)
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"This article investigates what the news says about inequity-driven civil wars and economic underdevelopment. Dewey argued that the lack of causal knowledge that distinguishes between symptoms and root causes would limit potential effective and transformative public action. Political scientists have
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demonstrated that increases in just the number of news stories about a foreign country in both US print and TV news in one year produced a clearly significant relationship to increases in commitments of US foreign aid the following year. This study of reporting on a 2003-2005 African crisis by ten news organizations over 26 months found few articles predominantly focused on causes against conditions on the ground or remedies. It raises questions about the conditions under which news organizations might be expected to provide causal knowledge and when such information can lead to more enlightened long term aid for national transformation." (Abstract)
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"This study presents the results of research into the media's capacity to carry religious messages. It is based on a qualitative content analysis of original texts inspired by religious motives in Slovak Catholic and secular press. The main focus is the messages as such, related topoi (bases for arg
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uments) and their epiphenomena. The study focuses on the topoi and seeks an answer to the following key question: What ‘common ideas’ (in Greek topoi) do mass-media messages and religious messages refer to? Based on the comparison of the topoi of original religious messages and messages covered by media, the study concludes that the key topoi of religious messages and of media messages resulting from it differ significantly. The difference in topoi arises mainly from a different pre-understanding –that is, attitude of faith / absence of faith in a journalist, and the related trust / distrust of the church. Apart from basic personal predispositions, the study points to a number of important factors such as comprehensibility, attitude on the capacity of mass media to evangelize, compliance with journalistic form, understanding of the role of news values (conflict in particular),and level of religiousness of the language used in massmedia communication. Finally, the study offers several recommendations and outlines the challenges faced by church and secular media communicators." (Abstract)
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"The Media Council of Kenya (MCK), the statutory body established under the Media Act 2007 that regulates media and advances professionalism of the media in Kenya, monitored a set of ten vernacular radio stations in September/October 2011 in order to assess their current performance. The study looke
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d at the adherence of the stations to the “Code of Conduct for the Practice of Journalism in Kenya” and the quality and diversity of their coverage. The monitoring was carried out during the confirmation of charges hearings at the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague. A specific objective of the study was to analyze the ICC coverage in terms of accuracy, balance, fairness and conflict sensitivity. Key Findings: The radio stations scored highly on balance and fairness: 97% of the news reports showed no evidence of slanted reporting and 96% covered at least two viewpoints; only a few cases of hate speech were encountered. 99,5% of all radio items contained no hate speech; women were clearly underrepresented in the radio programmes. Women were central news subjects in less than 10% of the news items. Only a quarter of the presenters were female; the radio stations covered the ICC confirmation of charges hearings mainly in their news bulletins. Only a few talk-shows took up the topic. Several editors and managers described this editorial line as an attempt to avoid ethnic tension and incitement; the ICC coverage was predominantly perpetrator-centred. Only a few stories included the side of the victims of post-election violence. Most of the coverage focused on the immediate court procedures, only a few items provided in-depth background information about the cases." (Executive summary)
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"Results show that, overall, REDD+ has received limited attention in the Nepali media. Within the overall climate change discourse in Nepal, the melting of the Himalayan ice-caps and glaciers has dominated all other discourses, including that on REDD+. Nepali journalists have found the science behin
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d REDD+ to be very complex, making it difficult to understand and report. Moreover, technical topics such as REDD+ tend to attract less media attention than political issues. Our analysis also revealed that reporting on REDD+ has concentrated on major national and international events, such as the Conference of the Parties (COP) of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the Cabinet meeting of the Government of Nepal in Kalapatthar (Mt Everest base camp). Similarly, the analysis of media framing shows that ‘symptomatic’, ‘prognostic’ and ‘motivational’ approaches prevail in reporting about REDD+ in Nepal. This tells us that the focus of media articles has been on the identification of specific issues and problems concerning REDD+, articulation of proposed solutions, and justification of why stakeholders should be concerned about the issue. We did not find a single article in which the views of adversaries of the dominant opinion were expressed." (Executive summary)
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"The study found that the media often framed REDD+ in political and economic terms, at the expense of, for example, ecological concerns or discussions of the drivers of deforestation and forest degradation. Issues associated with carbon trading were a frequent topic of media articles, with many stor
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ies focusing on the activities and antics of so- called ‘carbon cowboys’. Governance issues, including allegations of corruption and impropriety levelled against the Office of Climate Change also featured prominently. International policy debates were also common topics covered by the media, including the annual conference of the parties (COP) to the UNFCCC, international funding for REDD+, and Papua New Guinea’s leadership role in promoting REDD+ internationally The 160 newspaper articles (and 213 frames) that covered REDD+ in depth (as opposed to only mentioning REDD+ in passing) featured a total of 183 advocates and 21 adversaries. The analysis reveals that national government actors were the dominant voices in the REDD+ debate in Papua New Guinea." (Executive summary)
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"There is a vast scholarly literature tracing western stereotypes of Arab women from medieval times to the present. From 1800, the dominant western stereotype of Arab women depicts them as passive and oppressed. Thirty years of social science media research in the west has shown that media images of
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Arab women reinforce this two hundred year old stereotype. Much of this research has studied silent "image bites" of Arab women, where women are pictured in veils and their own voices are replaced by western captions or voice-overs. This book sets out to answer this question. To answer it, we contracted with a global news translation service from the Middle East to collect and translate a sample of 22 months of new summaries from 103 Arab media sources belonging to 22 Arab countries. Filtering the summaries that contained one or more female keywords (e.g., woman, mother, aunt, sister, she) yielded 2, 061 summaries between September 2005 and June of 2007. Using the 2,061 summaries as input data, a coding scheme was developed for "active" and "passive" female behaviors based on verb-phrase analysis and conventions of English-language news-reporting." (www.bloomsbury.com, January 19, 2015)
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"Im subsaharischen Afrika orientieren sich die Medien am Entwicklungsjournalismus und am westlichen Journalismusverständnis. Daniel Kuehnhenrich untersucht mit verschiedenen Methoden die Ausprägung dieser Konzepte in den ghanaischen Zeitungen. Seine umfassende Analyse beruht auf der ersten Journal
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istenbefragung in Westafrika, teilnehmenden Beobachtungen in zwei großen Zeitungsredaktionen, qualitativen Interviews mit deren Chefredakteuren und einer quantitativen Inhaltsanalyse von über 1100 Zeitungsartikeln. Die detaillierte und umfangreiche Literaturanalyse ordnet die empirischen Ergebnisse in die subsaharische Presselandschaft ein." (Verlagsbeschreibung)
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"A presente pesquisa tem por objetivo analisar a rede simbólica de enunciados construídos ao longo da história acerca das categorias pobre/pobreza e, mais precisamente, discutir os recentes discursos produzidos sobre esses grupos no âmbito da televisão brasileira, encontrando as continuidades e
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rupturas que se apresentam nessas formas de representação social que encontram na televisão um suporte dotado de técnicas e linguagem próprias. Por meio de revisão bibliográfica que se aproxima das questões conceituais determinantes da análise sobre pobreza, seus sujeitos e espaços de convivência, o trabalho também discute a natureza das representações sociais, a dinâmica das relações simbólicas que aportam padrões de sociabilidade; os sentidos atribuídos à classe social e os contornos que tal conceito adquire perante a organização da sociedade, bem como da construção e reconhecimento das identidades coletivas que se formam nesse contexto. O olhar pós-colonialista e os Estudos Culturais Latino-Americanos guiam essa análise e, a fim de compreender quais interpretações e percepções os sujeitos de baixa renda desenvolvem a partir da recepção de dicotômicas representações televisivas da pobreza. À análise do discurso do programa Esquenta!, soma-se o conteúdo analítico obtido a partir de entrevistas realizadas com jovens moradores de um bairro periférico de Goiânia." (Resumo)
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"The project investigated foreign TV news in 17 countries from five regions in the world: Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Chile, China, Egypt, Germany, Hong Kong, Israel, Italy, Japan, Poland, Portugal, Singapore, Switzerland, Taiwan and the United States of America. The data of the content analysis in all
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these countries in 2008 contain over 17,500 news items. The analysis concentrates on ‘news geography’, a term that is used to describe the extent to which the countries of the planet are represented in TV news. The results show a complex, multifaceted picture of foreign news reporting in the world. This multifaceted picture demands multi-causal interpretation. Several factors are discussed, i.e. the types of countries, their political order and integration into the international system, trade, different degrees in political power, but also historical connections, cultural ties, etc. Principally, the foreign news outlet depends on the selection criteria of journalists. On the whole the findings seem to question the world’s globalization, which is often taken for granted." (Abstract)
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"This study brings journalists back to the centre of inquiry about the media’s role in covering ethnicity and religion. It asks: What professional norms guide editors and journalists when reporting on ethnicity and religion? What news gathering tools are most commonly used? What are the institutio
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nal constraints in producing reports? What could have been done better? What makes excellent coverage? What type of journalistic work fuels intolerance instead of providing information that supports intercultural understanding? Based on extensive interviews with 117 journalists and editors in nine EU countries and analysis of 299 news stories, it offers a review of reporting practices as related to the coverage of ethnic and religious issues. The study finds that the main obstacles to good reporting are the poor financial state of the media, overloading of reporters, lack of time, lack of knowledge, and lack of in-house training." (Executive summary, page 2)
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"The tabloid news genre has been chastized for depoliticizing its public by causing cynicism about the democratic process and lowering the standards of rational public discourse. Counter-arguments point to the alternative public sphere offered by popular media such as ‘tabloid TV’ which is the f
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ocus of this study. The ‘tabloid TV’ genre is relatively new in Zambia and in the African context in general. This article sets out to examine the rapid rise in popularity of the Zambian private television station, Muvi TV. It examines Muvi TV’s main evening news as an example of the ‘tabloid TV’ news genre vis-à-vis the criticisms levelled against tabloidization. The article presents results from a reception study of viewers in the capital city, Lusaka. A three-stage qualitative study was carried out, consisting of a thematic/content analysis of news bulletins, focus groups and individual, semi-structured interviews. The findings suggest that audiences attach greater credibility to Muvi TV’s news broadcasts than those of the public broadcaster, the Zambia National Broadcasting Corporation (ZNBC). As such, Muvi TV can be seen to fulfil a political function despite its sensationalized approach." (Abstract)
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