"Reporting bias – the media's tendency to systematically underreport or overreport certain types of events – is a persistent problem for participants and observers of armed conflict. We argue
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that the nature of reporting bias depends on how news organizations navigate the political context in which they are based. Where government pressure on the media is limited – in democratic regimes – the scope of reporting should reflect conventional media preferences toward novel, large-scale, dramatic developments that challenge the conventional wisdom and highlight the unsustainability of the status quo. Where political constraints on reporting are more onerous – in non-democratic regimes – the more conservative preferences of the state will drive the scope of coverage, emphasizing the legitimacy and inevitability of the prevailing order. We test these propositions using new data on protest and political violence during the 2011 Libyan uprising and daily newspaper coverage of the Arab Spring from 113 countries. We uncover evidence of a status-quo media bias in non-democratic states, and a revisionist bias in democratic states. Media coverage in non-democracies underreported protests and nonviolent collective action by regime opponents, largely ignored government atrocities, and overreported those caused by rebels. We find the opposite patterns in democratic states." (Abstract)
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"Is journalism under threat? The image of journalists, as helmeted war correspondents protected by bullet-proof vests and armed only with cameras and microphones, springs to mind. Physical threats are only the most visible dangers, however. Journal
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ists and journalism itself are facing other threats such as censorship, political and economic pressure, intimidation, job insecurity and attacks on the protection of journalists’ sources. Social media and digital photography mean that anyone can now publish information, which is also upsetting the ethics of journalism. How can these threats be tackled? What is the role of the Council of Europe, the European Court of Human Rights and national governments in protecting journalists and freedom of expression? In this book, 10 experts from different backgrounds analyse the situation from various angles. At a time when high-quality, independent journalism is more necessary than ever – and yet when the profession is facing many different challenges – they explore the issues surrounding the role of journalism in democratic societies." (Publisher description)
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"In today's Africa racism and ethnicity have been implicated in serious conflicts - from Egypt to Mali to South Africa - that have cost lives and undermined efforts to achieve national cohesion and meaningful development. Racism, Ethnicity and the
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Media in Africa sets about rethinking the role of media and communication in perpetuating, reinforcing and reining in racism, absolute ethnicity and other discriminations across Africa. It goes beyond the customary discussion of media racism and ethnic stereotyping to critically address broader issues of identity, belonging and exclusion. Topics covered include racism in South African newspapers, pluralist media debates in Kenya, media discourses on same-sex relations in Uganda and ethnicised news coverage in Nigerian newspapers." (Publisher description)
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"Tied by history, politics, and faith to all corners of the globe, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict fascinates and infuriates people across the world. Based on new archive research and original interviews, Headlines from the Holy Land explains why this fiercely contested region exerts such a pull ov
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er leading correspondents and diplomats." (Publisher description)
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"This study shows how women and women’s organisations in Central America and southern Africa use media for social development. One of the milestones of the women’s movement was the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995. Section J of the Platform for Action, which was a result of th
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e conference, defined concrete goals for the area of women and media. These goals have still not been met, as the Global Media Monitoring Report, which is published every 5 years, shows. The first part of this study examines the situation. The second part of the study focuses on the debate on the right to communicate in the 20th and 21st century, which reached a peak in 1980 with the publication of the MacBride report, and provides an overview of important organisations in the field of media. The third part looks at different definitions of community and alternative media and highlights the differences between them and state-owned, public, and commercial media. It also provides a closer look at the media landscape of the regions under review, Central America and southern Africa. The fourth and final part shows examples of strategies individual women and women’s organisations use to spread their messages through the media and achieve social change." (Introduction)
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"The civil war in Syria is the most important propaganda topic for Islamists in Germany at the moment. Even German youngsters have already followed the calls, left their homes to join the fight and have been killed. When recruiting new followers, the jihadists use videos as a central element for spr
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eading their Islamistic ideas and inciting to the armed struggle against 'non-believers'.
Platforms like Facebook and YouTube, very popular among young people, make these videos widely accessible even outside of the spectrum of Islamist movements. This in-creases the risk for children and youngsters of stumbling across Islamist's ideas, hatred and depictions of extreme violence. [...] Many videos rely on an emotionalizing effect with images of children suffering or dying. The use of close-ups of faces contorted by pain, serious injuries or even severed limbs is very common. The producers of these clips emotionally ap-peal to the empathy, sense of justice and protective instinct of the recipients. Very often, Islamists directly approach young men with slogans like 'Where are the lions? Where are the men? Where are you?' and try to make more young Muslims shoulder responsibility for 'their brothers and sis-ters' and support them in their fight.
The drastic images make the Muslim audience feel guilty: If they do not actively help in this crisis situation how should they stand trial before Allah? As the minimum form of sup-port, Islamists demand from them to become aware of their Muslim identity and to comply with the rules of the funda-mentalist groups." (Page 1)
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"This discussion paper studies several main sources to assess the health of ethical journalism in Pakistan today. It takes three main areas of conflict and examines the ethics of reporting in relation to them. They are faith based issues (the blasphemy charge against 14-year-old Rimsha Masih, a Yout
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ube video film which disrespected Islam and the persecution of the Hazara community in Balochistan); the coverage of conflict in the 2013 general election and the Pakistan media's coverage of Afghanistan." (Methodology, page 7)
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"War Reporters Under Threat describes the threat of violence facing war reporters from the United States government and some of its closest allies. Chris Paterson argues that what should have been the lesson for the press following the invasion of Iraq - that they will be treated instrumentally by t
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he US government - has been mostly ignored. As a result, even nominally democratic states cannot be counted upon to protect journalists in conflict, and urgent reform of legal protections for journalists is required. War Reporters Under Threat combines critical scholarship with original investigation to assess the impact of the US government's obsession with information control and protection of its own troops. While the press-military relationship has been well researched, this book is the first to elaborate the US government threat to journalists." (Abstract)
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"Tracking the ways in which journalism and memory mutually support, undermine, repair and challenge each other, this fascinating collection brings together leading scholars in journalism and memory studies to investigate the complicated role that journalism plays in relation to the past." (Publisher
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description)
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"For two years, Clemencia Rodríguez did fieldwork in regions of Colombia where leftist guerillas, right-wing paramilitary groups, the army, and drug traffickers made their presence felt in the lives of unarmed civilians. Here, Rodríguez tells the story of the ways in which people living in the sha
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dow of these armed intruders use community radio, television, video, digital photography, and the Internet to shield their communities from armed violence's negative impacts. Citizens' media are most effective, Rodríguez posits, when they understand communication as performance rather than simply as persuasion or the transmission of information. Grassroots media that are deeply embedded in the communities they serve and responsive to local needs strengthen the ability of community members to productively react to violent incursions. Rodríguez demonstrates how citizens' media privilege aspects of community life not hijacked by violence, providing people with the tools and the platform to forge lives for themselves and their families that are not entirely colonized by armed conflict and its effects. Ultimately, Rodríguez shows that unarmed civilian communities that have been cornered by armed conflict can use community media to repair torn social fabrics, reconstruct eroded bonds, reclaim public spaces, resolve conflict, and sow the seeds of peace and stability." (Back cover)
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"The role of journalists in covering trauma and tragedy isn’t new. Witnessing acts of violence, destruction and terror has long been the professional responsibility of countless print and broadcast reporters and photographers. But what is new is a growing awareness of the emotional consequences of
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such coverage on the victims, their families and loved ones, their communities, and on the journalists whose job it is to tell these stories. Trauma Journalism personalizes this movement with in-depth profiles of reporters, researchers and trauma experts engaged in an international effort to transform how the media work under the most difficult of conditions. Through biographical sketches concerning several significant traumatic events (Oklahoma City bombing, Columbine school tragedy, 9/11, Iraq War, the South Asian tsunami, Hurricane Katrina), students and working reporters will gain insights into the critical components of contemporary journalism practices affecting news judgment, news gathering techniques, as well as legal and ethical issues. Trauma Journalism calls for the creation – through ongoing education – of a culture of caring among journalists worldwide." (Publisher description)
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"[...] Explores the role played by local-nationals in covering the crisis for global audiences and how these journalists differed from the traditional, Western-born foreign correspondents who worked alongside them. The research draws on two methods: in-depth, semi-structured interviews with foreign
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correspondents in Khartoum, Sudan; and a content analysis of the news articles they produced. The results show that Sudanese journalists differed from Western foreign correspondents in a number of important ways. They worked in greater fear of the government of Sudan, and they had a different understanding of their role as journalists which, importantly, did not include a strong sense of their work as 'watchdog journalism'. The content analysis confirms that these differences matter; local stringers produced news that was significantly less critical in tone, presented fewer competing viewpoints, and privileged the government of Sudan's position." (Executive summary)
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"Contiene, además de un apartado dedicado a revisar los seis años de recorrido del ONADEM, cuatro grandes secciones que cubren las áreas de trabajo del Observatorio en los últimos tres años: el Derecho a la Información y a la Comunicación, el análisis de la calidad de la información period
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stica, el desempeño de los periodistas y la evolución del campo mediático en el contexto de la dinámica política del país. Son trabajos realizados por los investigadores del ONADEM desplegados sobre objetos de estudio nacionales y regionales. El libro busca dar continuidad a uno anterior, Medios a la vista, publicado en 2009, el cual daba cuenta de las principales investigaciones realizadas por el ONADEM de UNIR entre los años 2005 y 2008. En sus seis años de vida, el Observatorio ha realizado más de 60 investigaciones." (Página web UNIR)
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"Aus einer Forschungsperspektive wird die Rolle der Medien bei der Kriegs- und Krisenberichterstattung für Kinder beleuchtet. Es werden sowohl Aspekte der Rezeption und Produktion von Medientexten durch Kinder als auch die Sicht und Vorgehensweisen von ProduzentInnen von Kindernachrichten zusammeng
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etragen." (Zusammenfassung)
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"Silence lies between forgetting and remembering. This book explores the ways in which different societies have constructed silences to enable men and women to survive and make sense of the catastrophic consequences of armed conflict. Using a range
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of disciplinary approaches, it examines the silences that have followed violence in twentieth-century Europe, the Middle East and Africa. These essays show that silence is a powerful language of remembrance and commemoration and a cultural practice with its own rules. This broad-ranging book discloses the universality of silence in the ways we think about war through examples ranging from the Spanish Civil War and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to the Armenian Genocide and South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Bringing together scholarship on varied practices in different cultures, this book breaks new ground in the vast literature on memory, and opens up new avenues of reflection and research on the lingering aftermath of war." (Publisher description)
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"Since Galtung (1998) and Kempf (1996) outlined their first ideas of an alternative to conventional war reporting, their model(s) of “Peace Journalism” stimulated a broad debate among peace researchers and journalists, practical thought about h
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ow to achieve this type of journalism, and a large body of basic theoretical and empirical research. How the concept of peace journalism developed in the course of these studies is documented in the present book which contains a collection of papers from the years 1997-2009 that previously were only available in German, in hard to find sources and/or in electronic form." (Publisher description)
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