"International contributors assess a variety of key contexts that impact access to digital technologies, including contextual variations related to geography and infrastructure, as well as individual differences related to age, income, health and disability status. Chapters explore how variations em...erge across the life course, illustrating the effects of digital disparities on personal wellbeing. Intervening in critical debates relating to the digital divide, this Handbook offers key insights into privacy and trust issues that affect technological usage." (Publisher)
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"This book reveals the value and significance of pirate radio, with a special focus on local radio stations that broadcast illegally in Poland in the early 90s. It shows that many of them, like in other countries from the region, began as non-commercial, community-oriented initiatives. Several sourc...es of information were used to maximize the potential of the study, especially documents gathered from public institutions, press articles, interviews with radio representatives, and decision-makers who influenced the shape of the broadcasting system. The analysis of these sources supports the conclusion that, although the pirates left a lasting legacy, they lost out in the licensed regime driven by market logic." (Publisher)
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"Online violence against women journalists is one of the most serious contemporary threats to press freedom internationally. It aids and abets impunity for crimes against journalists, including physical assault and murder. It is designed to silence, humiliate, and discredit. It inflicts very real ps...ychological injury, chills public interest journalism, kills women’s careers and deprives society of important voices and perspectives. This ground-breaking three-year global study on gender-based online violence against women journalists represents collaborative research covering 15 countries. It is the most geographically, linguistically, and ethnically diverse scoping of the crisis conducted up until late 2022. The research draws on: the inputs of nearly 1,100 survey participants and interviewees; 2 big data case studies examining 2.5 million social media posts directed at Nobel Laureate Maria Ressa (The Philippines) and multi award-winning investigative journalist Carole Cadwalladr (UK); 15 detailed individual country case studies. The Chilling illuminates the evolving challenges faced by women journalists dealing with prolific and/or sustained online violence around the world. It calls out the victim-blaming and slut-shaming that perpetuates sexist and misogynistic responses to offline violence against women in the online environment, where patriarchal norms are being aggressively reinforced. It also clearly demonstrates that the incidence and impacts of gender-based online violence are worse at the intersection of misogyny and other forms of discrimination, such as racism, religious bigotry, antisemitism, homophobia and transphobia. Further, it identifies political actors who leverage misogyny and anti-news media narratives in their attacks as top perpetrators of online violence against women journalists, while the main vectors are social media platforms - most notably Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and YouTube." (Exexutive summary)
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"Over the past decade, Vladimir Putin’s Russia has employed unorthodox foreign policy tools with increasing frequency, intensity, and success. Perhaps the most effective of these tactics has been the use of information warfare designed to affect decision-making in countries Russia considers to be ...its adversaries. In the target countries, these measures aim to destabilize civil society, erode trust in democratic institutions, and foster uncertainty among allies. If the United States and Europe hope to defend their economies, institutions, and identities, an immediate and effective policy response is required. To date, however, the United States and many of its European partners have struggled to develop policies that combat and counter Russian information warfare. The articles gathered here examine the tools that Russia has used against Ukraine, Poland, the United States, and the European Union, as well as the strategies that these countries have employed to combat Russian information warfare. The joint article by the four authors concisely summarizes the findings and proposes policy options by means of which the democratic countries of the West can address the challenges information warfare poses. The final article looks at Russia, examining controversies around the political role of the aggregator Yandex.news in prioritizing media news." (Introduction, p.2)
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"The Global Handbook of Media Accountability brings together leading scholars to 'de-Westernize' the academic debate on media accountability and discuss different models of media self-regulation and newsroom transparency around the globe. With examination of the status quo of media accountability in... forty-four countries worldwide, it offers a theoretically informed, comparative analysis of accountability regimes of different varieties. As such, it constitutes the first interdisciplinary academic framework comparing structures of media accountability across all continents and represents an invaluable basis for further research and policy-making. It will therefore appeal to scholars and students of media studies and journalism, mass communication, sociology and political science, as well as policy-makers and practitioners." (Publisher)
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"Trust in the news has fallen in almost half the countries in our survey, and risen in just seven, partly reversing the gains made at the height of the Coronavirus pandemic. On average, around four in ten of our total sample (42%) say they trust most news most of the time. Finland remains the countr...y with the highest levels of overall trust (69%), while news trust in the USA has fallen by a further three percentage points and remains the lowest (26%) in our survey.• Consumption of traditional media, such as TV and print, declined further in the last year in almost all markets (pre-Ukraine invasion), with online and social consumption not making up the gap. While the majority remain very engaged, others are turning away from the news media and in some cases disconnecting from news altogether. Interest in news has fallen sharply across markets, from 63% in 2017 to 51% in 2022.• Meanwhile, the proportion of news consumers who say they avoid news, often or sometimes, has increased sharply across countries. This type of selective avoidance has doubled in both Brazil (54%) and the UK (46%) over the last five years, with many respondents saying news has a negative effect on their mood. A significant proportion of younger and less educated people say they avoid news because it can be hard to follow or understand – suggesting that the news media could do much more to simplify language and better explain or contextualise complex stories.• In the five countries we surveyed after the war in Ukraine had begun, we find that television news is relied on most heavily – with countries closest to the fighting, such as Germany and Poland, seeing the biggest increases in consumption. Selective news avoidance has, if anything, increased further – likely due to the difficult and depressing nature of the coverage.• Global concerns about false and misleading information remain stable this year, ranging from 72% in Kenya and Nigeria to just 32% in Germany and 31% in Austria. People say they have seen more false information about Coronavirus than about politics in most countries, but the situation is reversed in Turkey, Kenya, and the Philippines, amongst others." (Summary, p.10)
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"The CANnual Report 2022 follows a slightly different editorial concept than before. Since 2016, the publication featured one central topic which all creative agencies wrote about. This year however, weCAN experts write about twelve of the hottest topics in communication across the region. Five of t...he most influential consumer trends are also featured in the country chapters along with the articles about TikTok, e-commerce, Gen Z – and the war-torn Ukrainian market." (wecan.net)
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"The book brings together scholars from Western and Eastern Europe, North America, Latin America, and Asia, reporting findings based on data collected from democratic, transitional, and non-democratic contexts to produce thematic chapters that address how journalistic cultures vary around the globe,... specifically in relation to challenges that journalists face in performing their journalistic roles. The study measures, compares, and analyzes the materialization of the interventionist, the watchdog, the loyal-facilitator, the service, the infotainment, and the civic roles in more than 30,000 print news stories from 18 countries. It also draws from hundreds of surveys with journalists to explain the link between ideals and practices, and the conditions that shape this divide." (Publisher)
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"This 3rd edition maps the new world of Investigative Journalism, where technology and globalisation have connected and energized journalists, whistle-blowers and the latest players, with far-reaching consequences in politics and business worldwide. In this new edition, expert contributors demonstra...te how crowdsourcing, big data, globalization of information and changes in media ownership and funding have escalated the impact of investigative journalists. The book includes case studies of investigative journalism from around the world including the exposure of EU corruption, destruction of the Malaysian environment, and investigations in China, Poland and Turkey. From Ibero-America to Nigeria, India to the Arab world, investigative journalists intensify their countries' evolution by inquisition and revelation. This new edition reveals how investigative journalism has gone digital and global." (Publisher)
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"Online spaces are being systematically weaponised to exclude women leaders and to undermine the role of women in public life. Attacks on women which use hateful language, rumour and gendered stereotypes combine personal attacks with political motivations, making online spaces dangerous places for w...omen to speak out. And left unchecked, this phenomenon of gendered disinformation, spread by state and non-state actors, poses a serious threat to women’s equal political participation. In this research, we investigated state-aligned gendered disinformation in two countries, Poland and the Philippines, through an analysis of Twitter data. We analysed tweets in Polish and, from the Philippines, in English." (Executive summary)
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"This edited volume gives voice to pluralised avenues from visual communication and cultural studies regarding the Global South and beyond, including examples from China, India, Cambodia, Brazil, Mexico and numerous other countries. Defining visual communication and culture as an umbrella term that ...encompasses imagery studies, the moving image and non-verbal visual communication, the first three chapters of the book describe de-Westernisation discourse as a way to strengthen emic research and the Global South as both a geographical concept and, even more so, a category of diversity and pluralism. The subsequent regional case study-based chapters draw on various emic theories and methodologies and find a complex arrangement of visuality between sociocultural and sociopolitical practices and institutions." (Publisher)
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"Computational propaganda is an emergent form of political manipulation that occurs over the Internet. The term describes the assemblage of social media platforms, autonomous agents, algorithms, and big data tasked with the manipulation of public opinion. Our research shows that this new mode of int...errupting and influencing communication is on the rise around the globe. Advances in computing technology, especially around social automation, machine learning, and artificial intelligence mean that computational propaganda is becoming more sophisticated and harder to track at an alarming rate. This introduction explores the foundations of computational propaganda. It describes the key role that automated manipulation of algorithms plays in recent efforts to control political communication worldwide. We discuss the social data science of political communication and build upon the argument that algorithms and other computational tools now play an important political role in areas like news consumption, issue awareness, and cultural understanding. We unpack the key findings of the nine country case studies that follow—exploring the role of computational propaganda during events from local and national elections in Brazil to the ongoing security crisis between Ukraine and Russia. Our methodology in this work has been purposefully mixed, we make use of quantitative analysis of data from several social media platforms and qualitative work that includes interviews with the people who design and deploy political bots and disinformation campaigns. Finally, we highlight original evidence about how this manipulation and amplification of disinformation is produced, managed, and circulated by political operatives and governments and describe paths for both democratic intervention and future research in this space." (Abstract)
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"This publication presents the comparative overview of the legal framework and practices related to ‘hate speech’ in six Member States of the European Union (EU): Austria, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Poland and the United Kingdom. The publication is based on six individual country reports commissio...ned by ARTICLE 19 in 2017. The six country reports identified widespread deficiencies in the respective national frameworks on ‘hate speech’ in terms of their compatibility with applicable international freedom of expression standards, as well as inconsistencies in the application of existing legislation. In ARTICLE 19’s view, these deficiencies render the legal framework open to political abuse, including against precisely those minority groups that the law should protect. Moreover, the respective national frameworks generally fail to provide effective remedies to victims of ‘hate speech’, and are insufficient to enable instances of intercommunal tensions to be effectively resolved, or to enable poor social cohesion to be addressed." (Executive summary)
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"The Handbook of International Crisis Communication Research articulates a broader understanding of crisis communication, discussing the theoretical, methodological, and practical implications of domestic and transnational crises, featuring the work of global scholars from a range of sub-disciplines... and related fields. It provides the first integrative international perspective on crisis communication; articulates a broader understanding of crisis communication, which includes work from scholars in journalism, public relations, audience research, psychology, political science, sociology, economics, anthropology, and international communication; explores the topic from cross-national and cross-cultural crisis communication approaches; includes research and scholars from countries around the world and representing all regions; discusses a broad range of crisis types, such as war, terrorism, natural disasters, pandemia, and organizational crises." (Publisher)
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"How is professionalization influenced by the constant growth of a network society and social media? How are commercialization and political influences in the media relating to each other? These are some of the issues discussed in this study. It is based on the research project Journalism in Change ...– professional journalistic cultures in Poland, Russia and Sweden. From 2011 to 2014 researchers from Sweden, Poland and Russia at Södertörn University in Stockholm have been cooperating closely in order to survey a sample of 1500 journalists and 60 in depth interviews with journalists. The results are presented in a comparative design covering different areas." (Publisher)
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"This article presents a comparative study of investigative journalism in nine countries in the Central and Eastern European region (Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, and Slovakia). The purpose is descriptive and analytical. Descriptively, the articl...e charts the presence and provision of investigative journalism across the region and inventories and assesses the various funding forms that exist against the background of the recent (2008–2009) financial crisis. Analytically, the article focuses on assessing the relative autonomy (defined as autonomy from external actors) and effects (defined as the removal from office and sentencing of political actors revealed to be engaged in legal and moral transgressions, commonly various forms of corruption). The article finds investigative journalism across the region in general to be weak in terms of autonomy and effects, but stronger in countries that have had more stable and richer media markets (notably Estonia, Poland, and the Czech Republic). The article further finds that in some countries (notably Romania and Bulgaria), alternative news online sources play an increasingly important role as providers of investigative journalism." (Abstract)
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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... 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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