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Date: November 22, 2024 Fri
Time: 11:54 am
Time: 11:54 am
Results for journalism
3 results foundAuthor: Estevez, Dolia Title: Protecting Press Freedom in an Environment of Violence and Impunity Summary: This chapter reviews the situation of violence against the press in Mexico and what each of the different actors involved is doing, or not doing, to address a problem that in some Mexican states has reached alarming crisis levels. The essay examines the political willingness and steps taken by the federal and legislative branches of government to protect freedom of expression, through the exercise of journalism. It discusses measures taken by reporters, editors, media companies and civil society, to defend that right. Special attention is given to explain how the failure of federal and local authorities to effectively prosecute crimes against reporters has resulted in almost total impunity. Most crimes againts reporters remain unsolved, authorities rarely determine who perpetrated the crime and there are no prosecutions much less convictions. The report also examines the extent to which editors and journalists, working in states overwhelmed with violence, have engaged in widespread self-censorship out of fear for their lives. The report emphasizes freedom of expression and a free press as fundamental and universal rights protected by international law. These rights are also consider an effective way to measure the strength of a democracy. Details: Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Mexico Institute; San Diego: University of San Diego, Trans-Border Institute, 2010. 21p. Source: Internet Resource: Working Paper Series on U.S.-Mexico Security Cooperation: Accessed December 8, 2010 at: http://wilsoncenter.org/topics/pubs/Protecting%20Press%20Freedom.%20Estevez.pdf Year: 2010 Country: Mexico URL: http://wilsoncenter.org/topics/pubs/Protecting%20Press%20Freedom.%20Estevez.pdf Shelf Number: 120411 Keywords: Freedom of the PressJournalismMediaViolence |
Author: Wazir, Burhan Title: Fear and the Ballot Box: How Political and Media Responses to Terrorism Influence Elections Summary: Cities like New York, Madrid, London, Paris, and Mumbai have long been home to protests, riots, and wars. As recent terrorist attacks have shown, cities can also turn into theaters of violence and high-profile targets of terrorist actions. These events exert pressure on both the media - who must quickly report on the incidents while providing accuracy, context, and analysis - and politicians, who are bound to enact new laws and security measures. And now, as social media has become pervasive, citizens across the world are active participants in the media when these acts occur, not just a passively consuming audience. The purpose of this paper is to examine how actions taken by politicians and members of the media have shaped recent elections in the wake of acts of terrorism and how the growth of social media platforms and web-based news has become part of the picture. One disturbing aspect of the current fight against terrorism is the disintegration of previously defined margins separating times of war from times of peace and civilians from combatants. While civilians have previously been frequently killed in wars - the bombing of Dresden in 1945 is just one example - they are usually nominally protected. Terrorism, on the other hand, deliberately exhibits no prohibition against the intentional targeting of civilians. The evolving, real-time nature of a terrorist attack also has an undeniable effect on the media, which finds itself acting as both filter and participant in the face of such violence, especially in an era when social media platforms have become a dominant new source of information for audience and journalist alike - and indeed sometimes even the attackers themselves. In the following report, I will examine four key elections - those which took place in Israel in 1996, the United States and Spain in 2004, and India in 2009 -to explore the relationship between terrorism and how it is portrayed in the media. Three of these elections took place in the wake of unique terror incidents: the 2008 siege of Mumbai, carried out by terrorists from Lashkar-e-Taiba; the 2004 Madrid bombings, which bore the hallmarks of Al-Qaeda; and the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin in 1995, which was conducted by an Israeli extremist disillusioned with the recently signed Oslo Accords. The fourth case, the 2004 election in the United States, was fought around the theme of security - the first American presidential election held since the 9/11 terrorist attacks, in the midst of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The release of a videotaped statement directed at the American public by Al-Qaeda's Osama bin Laden - known as an "October surprise" in US political shorthand - left an indelible impression on the election. Details: New York: Tow Center for Digital Journalism, Columbia Journalism School, 2016. 48p. Source: Internet Resource: Accessed May 12, 2017 at: http://cjrarchive.org/img/posts/Political%20and%20Media%20Responses%20to%20Terrorism%20%28Wazir%29.pdf Year: 2016 Country: International URL: http://cjrarchive.org/img/posts/Political%20and%20Media%20Responses%20to%20Terrorism%20%28Wazir%29.pdf Shelf Number: 145456 Keywords: JournalismMediaPoliticsSocial MediaTerrorismVoting |
Author: Phillips, Douglas Title: An Investigation of Police Brutality in News Media: Media Narratives and Narrative Icons as Argumentation and Communal Identity Summary: This dissertation explores the ways in which narratives about decisive events coalesce in news media discourse, and how they function rhetorically. Specifically, this study examines how journalists frame stories about police brutality, how those frames construct versions of public narratives, and how those narrative versions can be used in discourse about issues of civic concern such as support for new community policing policies or opposition to Florida's "Stand Your Ground" law. I show how journalists' choice of semantic frames (e.g., racism, police-community relations, or criminal justice) helps to shape readers' understanding of the events and contributes to the formation of a narrative icon, a word, name, or short phrase that, absent narrative detail, indexes particular versions of a broader cultural narrative. This research is motivated by questions about the reciprocity between prior knowledge, audience expectations, and public discourse, and how those combine to shape or reinforce cultural values and communal identities. To explore these questions, I draw on scholarship in narrative theory, frame semantics, inter-textual analysis, and argument. I analyze over 1,700 newspaper articles published in the Los Angeles Times, Los Angeles Sentinel, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, and New Pittsburgh Courier between 1991 and 2013 concerning incidents of police brutality, including Rodney King and Jonny Gammage, a Black man who died following a traffic stop in Pittsburgh, PA. My findings suggest three primary functions of narratives in news media discourse: as background information, as examples used to establish or illustrate a rule, or as points of comparison. For each of these functions, I consider how journalists' micro-linguistic choices frame the events in line with the values, concerns, and fears of readers. In that way, journalists suggest the most important story elements and thus perpetuate specific ways of thinking about incidents of police brutality. Moreover, as consistent references to specific story elements, these frames contribute to the formation of a narrative icon, which becomes rhetorically available for use in public arguments. In other words, journalists can interpolate the narrative versions indexed by the icon into unrelated stories using discursive constructions such as "the Rodney King incident." When this happens, readers are expected to fill in the missing narrative details by drawing on their background knowledge. The findings of this project have important implications for the study of media discourse, but their broader value lies in what they can tell us about how background knowledge takes shape and is used as a resource in public argument. In particular, critical appraisal of narrative icons suggests that readers are expected to access a trove of cultural knowledge to fully understand news stories and the sociocultural implications of the events described. In doing so, journalists and readers jointly construct and reinforce communal identities and establish credibility. Details: Pittsburgh: Carnegie Mellon University, 2016. 273p. Source: Internet Resource: Dissertation: Accessed June 17, 2017 at: http://repository.cmu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1761&context=dissertations Year: 2018 Country: United States URL: http://repository.cmu.edu/dissertations/722/ Shelf Number: 146222 Keywords: JournalismMediaPolice BrutalityPolice Use of ForcePolice-Community Relations |