"The Russian war against Ukraine illustrates how the disinformation ecosystem works in Hungary, and it also reveals its devastating impact on democratic public discourse. Public service media play a prominent role in spreading disinformation. We were able to identify several false narratives in the
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period of the first year since the start of the war. In the first few months of the war, a key element of disinformation that was being spread in Hungary suggested that Ukraine had provoked the armed conflict. Later, the prevailing message was that only Hungary wanted peace, while the Western powers were interested in a continuation of the war. During autumn, the focus of the disinformation campaign increasingly shifted to the EU, disseminating an anti-EU message that was more concerned with the sanctions than the war. The pro-government media constantly told news consumers that the economic difficulties and the rise in energy prices had not been caused by the war launched by Russia but by the sanctions that the EU had imposed in response to the aggression. Public opinion research clearly shows the impact of these narratives on the perceptions of the Hungarian public. The polls readily capture how the Hungarian public's opinion has changed over time. This study is primarily based on a content analysis of the relevant shows of the M1 public television channel, but we have also relied on some insights from public opinion polls to inform our analysis." (Abstract)
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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
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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 description)
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"This collection engages with alternatives to mainstream radio systems, histories and concepts. It addresses the impacts and challenges that alternative, community and pirate radio represent." (Publisher description)
"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
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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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"This series of articles produced by local journalists follows the Hungarian money invested in media abroad, and also offers an insight into the influence exercised by the Hungarian government." (Introduction)
"Recently several European countries shifted to illiberalism and made attempts to dominate the media and political narratives. The question we raise is how media populism in Hungary contributes to the buttressing of the regime by discrediting protests. We offer a four-level media analysis. First, we
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ask whether the pro-government media is characterized by so-called selection bias. Second, we focus on framing bias relying on ideas presented by the protest paradigm. Third, we highlight the tone of disdain that characterizes numerous pro-governmental utterances. Finally, we point out the significance of iconic frames. Contrary to our expectations, we found no selection bias, but there was a clear framing bias in progovernmental media, which was made harsher by the derogatory tone of pro-governmental media and the dog-whistling produced by iconic frames. By identifying how media populism operates, our aim is to offer a way to grasp democratic backsliding by concentrating on the media." (Abstract)
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"On April 3, 2022, Hungary’s ruling Fidesz party won a fourth term in national elections, cementing its dominance with a two-thirds majority that will allow it to continue traveling what critics of the party and many others would describe as the path of centralizing power and rolling back democrat
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ic safeguards. International observers characterized the elections as free but raised serious concerns about their fairness. These included blurring the lines between the government and the ruling party in campaigning, which amplified the advantage of the ruling coalition, the absence of a level playing field, and lack of balance in campaign coverage in the press, on television, and on billboards. Fidesz’s effective control over large sections of the media, undermining the independence of the judiciary and public institutions, and curbing of civil society has received considerable attention from international media and international observers. However, its misuse of people’s personal data, which helped the party reach voters in new, opaque ways, has received relatively little scrutiny. This report examines how data-driven campaigning in Hungary’s 2022 elections exacerbated an already uneven playing field and undermined the right to privacy. It also documents new forms of misuse of personal data collected by the government and used for political campaigning by Fidesz in the 2022 elections." (Summary)
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"Existing research on factors informing public perceptions of expert trustworthiness was largely conducted during stable periods and in longestablished Western liberal democracies. This article asks whether the same factors apply during a major health crisis and in relatively new democracies. Drawin
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g on 120 interviews and diaries conducted during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic in the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, and Serbia, we identify two additional factors not acknowledged in existing research, namely personal contact with experts and experts’ independence from political elites. We also examine how different factors interact and show how distrust of experts can lead to exposure to online misinformation." (Abstract)
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"The research – based on programmatic text-mining supported analyses of several millions of war-related comments scraped by Sentione and further examined with CrowdTangle - found traces of inauthentic, repetitive pro-Kremlin activity on Facebook in all countries under review, which can be consider
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ed attempts to influence public opinion in the affected states and, in some cases, beyond them. Our main conclusions are: Crises help the Kremlin. Even if public opinion in the EU is currently unfavorable to the Kremlin, the onset of high, permanent inflation, soaring energy prices and the looming danger of an EU-wide recession could create a more favorable environment for the Kremlin’s propaganda efforts. Most (covertly) Kremlin-friendly forces will adopt a rhetoric blasting sanctions for harming Europe more than Russia. Importing disinformation narratives. Three out of the four narratives found in Hungary were imported into the country from abroad. One doubting Ukraine’s existence as a country started from an organization connected to Ukrainian pro-Putin oligarch Viktor Medvechuk, taken over by the so-called “news agency” of separatists. Another narrative detailing a new, dictatorial world order based on, among others, COVID-19 restrictions, and led by NATO was aimed at developing countries where Russia can hope to hold more sway. The third essentially took over a trend in the Russian media space: users tried to discredit anti-war voices by asking them “where they were in the past eight years” when Ukraine committed atrocities against minorities. Strategies in Germany: Divide and Rule. The six relevant narratives we found in Germany employed three different strategies. The first was anti-Westernism, where the US and NATO are to blame for Russia’s attack. The second aimed clearly at generating debates by spreading a Kremlin-critical narrative. Some profiles involved in this were caught disseminating both pro-Kremlin and anti-Kremlin narratives, which indicates it is not intended to counter the Kremlin’s information operation but to be a part of it. The third strategy was about exploiting contemporary events - such as heightened discussions on sanctions and rising inflation." (Executive summary)
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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
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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, page 10)
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"Cold War media cultures are typically remembered in terms of an East-West binary, emphasizing conflict and propaganda. Remapping Cold War Media, however, offers a different perspective on the period, illuminating the extensive connections between media industries and cultures in Europe's Cold War E
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ast and their counterparts in the West and Global South. These connections were forged by pragmatic, technological, economic, political, and aesthetic forces; they had multiple, at times conflicting, functions and meanings. And they helped shape the ways in which media circulates today—from film festivals, to satellite networks, to coproductions. Considering film, literature, radio, photography, computer games, and television, Remapping Cold War Media offers a transnational history of postwar media that spans Eastern and Western Europe, the Nordic countries, Cuba, the United States, and beyond. Contributors draw on extensive archival research to reveal how media traveled across geopolitical boundaries; the processes of translation, interpretation, and reception on which these travels depended; and the significance of media form, content, industries, and infrastructures then and now." (Publisher description)
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"What are root causes of trust and distrust in media in different political contexts? How is media use shifted from one source to another with the change of political culture? What factors shape media perception across cultures and across political regimes? Are there commonalities or are they differ
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ent? Given the common instrumentalization of media in conflict environments and the growing ubiquity of political media capture, we may also ask, whether unfettered trust in media is normatively desirable under any circumstances. Put differently: Isn’t distrust a healthy response to propaganda and media manipulation? How is the concept of media literacy connected to trust or media scepticism? Do we need to be more sceptical rather than gullible? Against the backdrop of these (and other) questions, the Forum Media and Development (fome) dedicated its 2021 annual symposium to the question of trust in media, namely the question how media perception is shaped differently by different political contexts and media structures across the globe. Fome is the German platform for international media development initiatives (fome.info), a network that includes 24 organizations working towards strengthening free and independent media in developing and transitioning countries. The 2021 fome-symposium ran under the heading “Believe it or Not! Enquiries about TRUST in media (assistance)” and was organized by MiCT. The proceedings of the conference can be found online at https://fome.info/symposium-2021-documentation. Finally, this themed issue of the Global Media Journal – German Edition is curated as an extension of the conference and an effort to follow up upon some of the most pressing questions deriving from it." (Editorial)
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"There is a heated debate about the social-sustainability implications of infrastructure. We engage this debate by delving into China’s Digital Silk Road (DSR), an important component of China’s infrastructure-centric Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Optimists and pessimists have offered strong v
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iews about the DSR’s social-sustainability implications. Unfortunately, there is a dearth of analytical tools and in-depth studies which can be used to judge their competing arguments. In this article, we address these problems in two ways. First, we advance an original scheme for operationalizing social sustainability. Second, we use our framework to systematically analyze the DSR’s social-sustainability effects in Ethiopia, Malaysia, the United Arab Emirates, and Hungary. Our research indicates that much of the positive and negative commentary about the DSR’s social-sustainability implications is problematic. None of our cases show significant year-to-year changes in political or quality-of-life social-sustainability benchmarks. Indeed, our analysis indicates that analysts must pay close attention to the political and economic context to understand the social-sustainability patterns associated with DSR infrastructure. Finally, it suggests that the social-sustainability implications of DSR infrastructure are dependent on its scale and nature. These findings have ramifications for broader debates about the socioeconomic impact of infrastructure." (Abstract)
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"This report is meant to share the experiences and lessons of local media practitioners globally, and to build a community for networking and support. It’s about telling their story in their own voice – and helping all involved learn from one another. By talking to both new digital start-ups and
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traditional media in transition, this report identifies how media builders in different circumstances understand and meet the challenges they face. Comparing and contrasting experiences from different parts of the world provides both lessons that can be copied as well as warnings about the need to understand how different regional and national conditions impact success. From there, the report draws practical recommendations for news media leaders, for media support organizations, and for the IPI global network." (Introduction, page 4)
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"In this study, we explore the challenges and strategies of independent media outlets in contexts of shrinking civic space. To this end, we present five case studies on a specific media outlets. These describe the overall political context for the media, the specific challenges that the respective m
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edia outlet has faced, as well as the different strategies that they have used to meet these challenges. The overall problem is situated within a set of concepts introduced in the first chapter, while the conclusions chapter brings together the lessons which can be learned from the case studies in one framework. The five case studies each have a distinct focus, namely: the efforts of Átlátszo in Hungary to reach groups in society who are currently not exposed to independent media content; the lessons KRIK in Serbia learned on how to anticipate and counter attempts by powerholders to repress their story, including through cross-border collaboration; the thin line between activism and journalism that Liber in Teleorman in Romania threaded, while investigating power abuse by national politicians at the local level; the focus on professional standards and community engagement by Oštro, in their attempt to build credibility towards an audience used to partisan media; the position of Átlátszo Erdély, a Hungarian-language media outlet in Romania stuck between pressures from multiple sides, who as a city-based media outlet managed to embed themselves in a rural audience." (Executive summary)
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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,
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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 description)
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