The Portuguese language service of Euronews is facing closure following the decision of the Portuguese government to end its contract with the international news channel.

Due to the economic crisis, the Portuguese government has been forced to make cuts in every sector. “As far as I know, the government’s decision is not against Euronews; it was aimed at saving resources and Euronews was a collateral victim,” explained the Portuguese politician José Ribeiro e Castro, who is also the president of a governmental commission for education and culture. The news was announced by Euronews’ CEO Michael Peters to the Portuguese Parliament on January 18th.

In protest against the decision, Ribeiro e Castro launched an online petition “Let’s save Euronews Portuguese,” which has collected over 1,700 signatures so far. The politician, who is also a Member of the European Parliament for the European People’s Party, sees Euronews Portuguese as a valuable medium to deliver European news to a worldwide audience. The service recognises the “value of Portuguese as an international language, not only within Europe but globally,” he says, noting that “there are more Portuguese speakers outside than inside of Europe.”

Portuguese migrant communities count over five million people spread around the world and Portuguese is the official language in eight members countries of the Community of Portuguese Language Countries (CPLP). Euronews added the Portuguese language service in 1999, and has since then offered round-the-clock news and programmes written and spoken in Portuguese. Besides delivering international news, the service produces content related to Portugal’s cultural, political, economic and social scene that is broadcasted in 11 languages, reaching a significant audience of 344 million households in 155 countries.

The international team of 17 permanent journalists and 20 freelancers of the Portuguese service’s bureau based at Euronews’ headquarters in the French city of Lyon, reacted to the news with “deep sadness and frustration,” said Maria Barradas, the team’s spokesperson.

Since the beginning of the partnership, the Portuguese government – through the state-owned channel RTP – has been paying Euronews an annual amount of EUR 1.8 million to produce, broadcast and publish news content in Portuguese.

This sum is much below the EUR 6m any country interested in opening a similar service needs to pay. “Portugal is receiving this high value service at a competitive cost,” argues Ribeiro e Castro.

The EU to the rescue?

Michael Peters presented a set of possible solutions to help Euronews continue its Portuguese service, among which the most likely to be implemented would rely on a participation of the European Commission (EC) in financing the channel’s operations.

After taking up the matter on January 30th with EU Commissioner for Justice, Citizenship and Fundamental Rights, Viviane Reding, Ribeiro e Castro said he felt hopeful for a positive outcome but clarified that the European Commission’s help would be limited in time, in view of the fact in normal circumstances that the responsibility of maintaining the Euronews project belongs to each member state.

Another way in which the Portuguese service of Euronews could appeal to the European Commission would be to apply to a multi-lingual funding scheme, designed to support actions promoting European languages outside of the continent.

Michael Peters also proposed a solution involving cable operators, which have the obligation to broadcast the channel under a must carry policy. Each cable operator has the duty to include a channel of public service to its offer.

In an interview with the Portuguese newspaper Diário de Notícias Ribeiro e Castro explained however that this solution would require a change in the legislation. Each viewer would have to pay an additional EUR 0.50 per year.

More popular than the BBC and CNN

Euronews is the most viewed international news channel in Portugal. It is broadcasted in the country through RTP, reaching 3,487 households. Every day it attracts over 800,000 citizens.

Quoting the 2011 EMS study, Michael Peters said that “Portugal is the only country where Euronews is more recognised than BBC and CNN.”

“It enjoys a reputation score of 97 percent,” he added.

Euronews’ contract with the Portuguese public broadcaster RTP will come to an end on January 31st, 2013. What’s more, the state-owned channel intends to sell its 1.39 percent share in the Euronews capital.

The decision regarding the future funding of Euronews Portuguese must be made by May 2012. In the meantime, the ongoing talks between the European Commission and the Portugal’s representative, Ribeiro e Castro, seem to indicate that European support is the most likely solution to save the Portuguese language service the time being.

This article, written by Filipa Moreno, was originally published by the European Journalism Centre, on February 24, 2012.

New research raises the question of whether an integrated culture of journalism exists in Poland.

Election season is a challenging time for reporters, a time when the duality between objective reporting patterns conflicts with the desire for politicians to supplant favorable content about their own election campaigns into mainstream media.

This type of confrontation, seen mainly by the masses in the form of public debates, has become the domain of television journalists, collectively described by Walery Pisarek as “the summit of journalism’s professional hierarchy.”

In a recent study, University of Wroclaw researcher Piotr Piskozub conducted a content analysis (quantitative and qualitative) of two television programs, focusing on content broadcast during the 2010 Polish presidential campaign. The two programs, Tomasz Lis na zywo hosted by Tomasz Lis, and Warto rozmawiac hosted by Jan Pospieszalski were chosen due to their larger-than-average viewership, which places them among the most popular programs of their kind in Poland. 

Both hosts are journalists recognizable by most citizens (Wieslaw Godzic defines Lis as a “forced celebrity,” noting the interest of tabloids who write about his personal life). Lis and Pospieszalski participate in mainstream press and radio projects, however with the caveat that they will only engage in media projects which contain a distinct program policy. Considering this perspective, Lis and Pospieszalski can be defined as representative figures for specific sections of domestic journalism. The purpose for conducting the content analysis was to confirm or falsify the hypothesis that a relatively integrated journalism culture exists in Poland. The additional hypothesis was based on the variances between several journalism subcultures, which differ not only in their views on social and political issues, but also in their description of the appropriate standards of labor and ethics in journalism.

Sixteen total broadcasts were included in the content analysis, seven episodes of Tomasz Lis na zywo and nine episodes of Warto rozmawiac. Data was gathered by coding the dominant features of each journalist’s statements (suggestions, emotionality, value judgments, mixing features of colloquial style and political vocabulary, etc.), while also coding statements made by the host (unilateral, bilateral, neither), and retention of  principles of impartiality and objectivity. Even if the discourse in the studio assumed a sequential dialogue between the host and his guests, the most important elements of content were statements that had been prewritten by a journalist and implanted into the discussion.

In Pospieszalski’s program, statements were marked for value judgments (23.3 percent) and emotionality (16.7 percent). Both hosts also conducted their broadcasts by mixing features of their own colloquial styles and political vocabulary (Pospieszalski 6.7 percent, Lis 3.8 percent), which allowed journalists to reduce the tension between politicians in the studio. While the statements made by Pospieszalski were found to be more theoretically diverse, the host of Warto rozmawiac made calculated judgments concerning his broadcast method in order to create an emotional, if not ethically abnormal atmosphere in the studio.

In analyzing the principle of sustainability, which refers to the arguments used by the hosts, it was noted that 43.3 percent of Pospieszalski’s statements were based on unilateral rhetoric, with only 6.7 percent on bilateral rhetoric. Lis referred to both sides of the political confrontation in 52.6 percent of cases. Regarding the principle of impartiality, a distinct factual advantage of the statements made by Lis existed with 80.8 percent including objective content.  In contrast, only 33.3 percent of Pospieszalski’s statements were deemed objective. Overall, Lis is more effective in presenting himself as a high-level journalist compared to Pospieszalski.

The last criterion considered in the context of professionalism in journalism was the use of emotional statements (based on the pathos, tragedy, or on open support to one option), and relating to conspiracy theories. When comparing the use of these types of messages, the content analysis revealed that 30 percent of the dialogue spoken by the host of Warto rozmawiac was formulated in an emotional way, with 20 percent of the content relating to conspiracy theories.  In comparison, the host of Tomasz Lis na zywo avoided these statements entirely, failing to make emotional or conspiracy-related comments throughout the program. When the journalists spoke in an emotional way or cited conspiracy theories, they failed to live up to a high standard of quality and professional journalism.

It is worth mentioning that both hosts have generated support within two different circles of journalism.  Lis is affiliated with “progressive” journalists who maintain liberal worldviews while Pospieszalski aligns himself with colleagues attached to traditional forms of journalism. Journalistic integrity is certainly vital, but both circles of journalism are valid and can be implemented simultaneously. This phenomenon is positive because it creates diversity in media.

However, as the results presented in the content analysis have shown, varying styles of journalism can create radically different perceptions of reality due to the use of different methods for description and explanation of events. Journalists cannot be responsible for a specific group of citizens; their role is to adhere to the expectations of society as a whole. This dissonance should increase the level of ethics in journalism rather than lead to the stratification and confrontation of standards by different groups of journalists. Therefore, the existence of several journalistic subcultures in Poland is a phenomenon with a variety of advantages and disadvantages. The crystallization of a more complete future within the journalism culture in Poland will depend both on external factors (such as the digitalization of media), and redefining the roles and tasks of journalism in a dynamic media reality.

Inga Springe, Director of the Baltic Investigative Reporting Center & Ints Silins of the U.S. Baltic Foundation

Inga Springe sits down with Liga Ozolina of the EJO’s Latvian team to discuss the Baltic Investigative Reporting Center.

On August 9, 2011, a group of journalists from Lithuania, Estonia, and the United States announced the creation of the first-ever Baltic Investigative Reporting Center, a non-profit organization based in Riga, Latvia, designed to preserve the integrity of investigative journalism.  The announcement came as a breath of fresh air for those resigned to the fact that investigative journalism is an endangered discipline in the Baltics.

Inga Springe, who is director of the center in addition to working as a journalist and lecturer at the University of Latvia, discusses the institute’s development and ambitions with the EJO’s Latvian Editor, Liga Ozolina.

Q: Where did you get the idea for the creation of the Baltic Investigative Reporting Center?

The idea came from the United States, where investigative journalism is mainly held within similar nonprofit organizations. One year ago, through the Fulbright/Humphrey Fellowship Program, I was given the opportunity to improve my professional skills in the United States. By that time I had resigned from my job at one of the largest daily newspapers in Latvia, Diena. While I didn’t know what my future held, I knew I didn’t want to work at a weekly magazine or for a daily newspaper anymore.  At the same time I knew I couldn’t leave journalism completely.  I was in the U.S. when some former colleagues came up with the idea to establish a nonprofit media center in Latvia.  I decided to research the idea by attending conferences and reviewing the practices of The Washington Post and one of the oldest and largest non-profit investigative news organizations, The Center for Public Integrity, in order to gain a better understanding of developing trends in investigative journalism.

I also visited some of the most important non-profit media organizations in the U.S., among them ProPublica, which has twice been awarded the Pulitzer Prize. I was fortunate enough to meet Kristine Rizga, a Latvian journalist who lived in the United States for 10 years and worked for several non-profit media projects. She provided me with a great deal of support by helping to edit my writing while also offering emotional encouragement.  As I continued to meet more journalists considered to be experts in non-profit investigative journalism, I became immersed in the idea of creating a center.  I began to realize that in times like these, when journalistic news is decreasing in scope and frequency, such centers are integral in order to support the discipline.  So I said, “Let’s try it in Latvia!”

Q: What will this center do?

We have set two main goals for our center: (1) to hold cross-border investigations of socially important issues, with a focus on topics involving corruption, crime, finances, entrepreneurship, health and human rights, and (2) to think about new and interesting ways to present our results for an expansive audience. One of the ways the center would meet these goals is by introducing the practice of “reading experience” which would consist of interactive maps, charts, time lines, photos, videos, and special programs with the aim of providing readers with a deeper level of understanding regarding journalistic topics.

The center would also use the Internet and other social networks to expose crime and corruption, similar to an India-based website titled ipaidabribe.com, which features self-reports from citizens who post messages detailing where and to whom they’ve been bribed or offered to bribe others. One idea for our center would be to expose the prevailing problem of bicycle theft in Riga, the capital city of Latvia, by creating an online interactive map of the city that includes self-reports from various victims of bicycle theft in order to publicize the most dangerous areas of the city for cyclists.

Q: Why does the center include the entire Baltic region as opposed to just Latvia?

When I was writing the project proposal, I acknowledged that we wouldn’t receive funding if we were only going to work within the borders of Latvia. Latvia is too small. Funding is typically granted to projects that are innovative due to their cross-national nature.  Also working within three Baltic States gave us the opportunity to conduct in-depth comparative research projects, which are more valuable for our audience.

Q: Do you agree with the statement that investigative journalism is dying?

I think that investigative journalism is dying simply because media outlets do not have the time and resources needed to promote and encourage investigative stories.  While investigative journalism still exists in Latvia, most journalists tend to perform analytical journalism, rather than investigative.

In the United States, reporters have the freedom to choose story topics, whereas in Lithuania powerful political and business interests hamper journalists, which has resulted in the deterioration of investigative and analytical traditions.  Unfortunately journalism in Lithuania now consists mostly of entertainment news and thinly veiled advertisements.

Q: Do you think people are interested enough in investigative journalism to appreciate the activities of your center?

I think it is like this: People won’t know what they’ll need until they get it. If we find interesting ways to share our research results with the public, people will appreciate it. We need to keep in mind that people want to receive information in a clear and friendly manner.

Q: How will you reach your audience?

Typically, non-profit media organizations reach their audience through other media outlets. We are going to perform research, create a story and provide our research to media organizations free of charge.  We will not staff any full-time journalists; rather we will hire journalists working for existing media organizations when conducting an investigative project. Media organizations will then be rewarded for sharing their workforce by providing first rights to publish the research before other publications are given access.

In addition we will have an official Web page, which is scheduled to launch at the end of November (currently the center has a Facebook page). The Web site will function using four language versions – Latvian, Lithuanian, Estonian and English, and will be used as an instrument for crowd sourcing.

Q: You recently conducted an interview with Charles Lewis, the founder of The Center for Public Integrity, who explained that non-profit centers typically survive due in large part to private donations. Will your center function in a similar fashion?

Because we do not have the same type of donation traditions that exist in the United States, I am quite certain that we won’t survive exclusively on private donations. But I am not worrying about that so much. My experience in the field of NGOs has helped to enlighten me to different funding options for financial support.

Q: How will you ensure the sustainability of your center?

Last spring we received $29,000 in support from the U.S. State Department as well as $10,000 from the United States Baltic Foundation.  The Latvian-based Soros Foundation also announced a 30,000 Euro donation to our center. With the help of this money we will be able to survive for the duration of our inaugural year. Over time, we plan to raise funds through a diverse mix of sources: 50 percent from foundations, 40 percent from individual donors, and 10 percent from selling content and conducting exclusive research projects.

But if I want to be sincere with you, I have to say that in the very beginning I was thinking a lot about the sustainability of this center, but now I am seeing it as an experiment. We will try our best and in the end, time will tell if our center is sustainable or not.

*See EJO’s Latvian site for the original interview.

Over the past seven weeks, the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) story has been nothing shy of enigmatic, due largely to a lack of clear policy demands and a surplus of creepy plastic masks no one really understands.

Despite its many nebulous elements, one point remains clear: Most everyone in the media has an opinion on how or how much the OWS protests should be covered, and no one likes how anyone else is doing it.

With a peculiar divergence from business-as-usual, in which news-making decisions and processes are rarely discussed, the U.S. media is covering itself. Or rather, the media is covering the media covering Occupy Wall Street. An atypical amount of attention has been devoted to the various frames and narratives employed by particular news outlets, a form of professional criticism normally reserved for after-hours conversation.

Grievances about the quantity and quality of protest coverage are vast. Critics in the U.S. media emphatically griped about both a “media blackout” and  “saturation.” The New York Times was accused of being shamefully slow to pick up the story, the New York Observer was accused of using ridicule to mock the protestors, and the predictably abominable Fox News behaved as it always does, feeding the standard set of concerns about journalistic dung flinging.

As satellite protests continue to appear across the globe, foreign media reports intensified as well (especially in Iran). Even Al Jazeera Arabic chimed in on the discontent, criticizing American news organizations for inadequate coverage of the protestors.

According to the Poynter Institute’s Adam Hochberg, “Such complaints come as little surprise, and not just because we saw the same kind of criticism surrounding coverage of the Tea Party movement, the Wisconsin collective bargaining protests, and even comedian Jon Stewart’s Rally to Restore Sanity. The complaints also are predictable because there’s no consensus among news organizations about what makes a particular protest newsworthy.”

In his blog, Reuters columnist Jack Shafer describes his policy of banishing protest coverage while working as an editor for the Washington City Paper. He explains, “It’s not that I opposed the right of the people to peaceably assemble and petition the government for a redress of grievances. It’s just that my newspaper was published in Washington, D.C., where the list of scheduled demonstrations, picket lines, and budding riots would scroll off your page if you loaded it in your browser.”

Overdosed or not, as an audience we’ve amassed the various nuggets of intrigue which make OWS stories compelling: the twinkles, the teargas, the drum circles, the problem of where to pee, the clashes with police, the human microphone, the makeshift tents, the arrests (+2,000), the Occu-Pie pizza special, the umbrella ban, the falafel, the disappointment, the anger, the fear. The great potential for storytelling and valuable inquiry clearly exists. It has thrived for seven weeks on vegan casseroles and quinoa. As a news item, its reach and longevity pose a fresh set of obstacles for news outlets maintaining long-term coverage.

Tackling concerns about continued OWS coverage, Arthur Brisbane, Public Editor of the New York Times, reached out to journalists and former editors who understand the challenge of mobilizing reporters and editors to cover complicated movements. Tom Fielder, former executive editor of the Miami Herald responds, writing, “As a journalist vying for the limited and valuable time of an audience, I bear the responsibility of intruding on the audience’s attention only when I have something of interest – something new and worthy (or newsworthy) – to report. Otherwise I’m just an annoyance. Now that I’ve reported exhaustively on the Occupiers’ presence and their general unhappiness with many things, I have no obligation to chronicle their on-going daily existence, which best I can tell has devolved into something of a mixture of Grateful Dead parking-lot scene, Woodstock without bands (although plenty of bongos), and unofficial skid row.”

Complex issues of this scale pose a particular danger in the U.S. media, as they often skew coverage of exigent developments elsewhere (the death of Muammar Gaddafi, for example). In the end, there are many ways to tell the story. While the notion of arriving at some form of “standard” for newsworthiness has its merits, the diversity of coverage is inevitable. Some will miss the point, some will agonize over beards and boho oddities, some will leap to conspiracy, some will dismiss the protests entirely, some will cover them hour-by-hour (bless the persevering hearts). Not to suggest 54 days of encampment coverage isn’t useful, but investigating beyond the Port-O-Potties is indeed essential.

The extent to which journalists and the media might share at least partial responsibility for the meltdown of banks and the financial markets has not been widely addressed thus far.

Can the dog’s dinner that is the economic crisis also be seen as a crisis of business and financial journalism? Are we insufficiently informed – despite, or even because of the overload of information that comes with the 24/7 news cycle?

Anya Schiffrin of Columbia University has devoted considerable attention to these questions. She is one of the rare experts to take an unbiased look at the work of business and financial journalists. In her recent book, Bad News: How America’s Business Press Missed the Story of the Century, she and a range of contributors consider what went wrong from a variety of different perspectives.

Schiffrin sees the failure of business and financial journalism as being intertwined with a general lowering of standards in professional journalism in recent years. As she explains, “There was a collapse in advertising revenues which preceded the crisis but was aggravated by the economic downturn. There were the ensuing layoffs and staff cuts that made journalists fear for their jobs and perhaps more afraid to stand out from the pack.” The financial crisis of 2008 and 2009 came “at a time when American journalism was already imploding” and when almost one-third of all newsroom jobs had disappeared.

According to Schiffrin, there has been little academic research on how business journalism fares during economic crises. What has been done suggests that during crises reporters become more dependent on sources – their contacts at the firms in key public and private institutions. “The pace at which the stories unfold means that reporters do not have the time to do broader investigative reporting, or to turn to academics or even former ‘insiders’ for more analytic perspectives. At the same time, these sources dry up because they are afraid that publicizing bad news will make things worse. If the sources are available, their focus – even more than usual – is on ‘spin’, trying to shape the coverage of the story as it develops.”

Nobel Prize winner and information economist Joseph E. Stiglitz  states that “a critical press might serve as one of the checks and balances, restoring sanity to markets that have lost touch with reality.” But Stiglitz is also fully aware of why such high expectations are difficult to meet: “Reporters and their editors do not stand apart from the rest of society. They too can easily be swept up in the herd mentality,” not least because “there are strong incentives for the media not to lean against the wind.” Stiglitz identifies a significant problem in the symbiotic relationship between the press and those they cover. This cozy relationship “does not necessarily serve the rest of the society well.” Moreover, “hubris can lead to the view by journalists that as recipients of information they can sort out the distortions and inaccuracies – so long as they can get the information.”

The result is, according to Stiglitz, that too often “there is a he-said, she-said kind of coverage, a simple reporting of the different perspectives, with little balance, let alone analysis. It is as if in covering a story about the colour of the sky, a colorblind reporter gave equal weight to those who claim it is orange as to those who claim it is blue.”

Dean Starkman from the Columbia Journalism Review points to a handful of other firewalls which did not work well in sounding early warnings of the crisis. Among them he lists risk managers, directors within financial institutions, accounting firms, rating agencies, regulators and – yes – journalists. In his content analysis of the nine most influential business press outlets of the U.S. between January 2000 and June 2007, Starkman identifies 730 entries containing significant warnings. And while 730 may seem a lot of relevant stories, Starkman reminds us that this is not at all an impressive record. We should keep in mind that the Wall Street Journal alone “published 220,000 stories during that period, so in a sense these were corks bobbing on a news Niagara.”

While Chris Roush, a business journalism expert from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, defends the overall performance of business journalism, Robert H. Giles and Barry Sussman, both from the Nieman Foundation at Harvard University, remind us of journalism’s old virtues. The two media experts highlight the importance of “being skeptical, thinking counter-intuitively, and fighting the tendency to follow the pack.” This sounds charmingly old-fashioned, but such appeals can be seen as signs of helplessness. To understand why business and financial journalism failed in some respects, another insight of Giles and Sussman may be more important: for journalists, dealing with economic experts is particularly difficult because consensus amongst economists is rare, and their opinions can vary significantly.

According to Giles and Sussman, economists can be divided into three groups: “The first one, the one most often called on by the media, especially cable TV, includes fine and competent economists but ones employed by Wall Street and various commercial interests.” The second group includes those who became so immersed in the theory of efficient markets “that they simply couldn’t let go of it, even after the great catastrophe that exposed the flaws in the theory and left millions out of work, homes lost, savings gone.” The third group consists of  “those with credibility,” believing “that markets are fallible, vulnerable to irrational speculation and bubbles, and that government has a large role in regulating markets and in establishing monetary policy that help stabilize them.”

This may be seen as a somewhat crude summary, but it nonetheless seems to have a grain of truth, and it goes some way to explaining why even those business journalists who try to identify “truth” in their reporting cannot always do so. The power and influence of leading economic commentators, financial analysts and others who have an agenda to advance is significant and all too often, these are the voices who are allowed to frame the debate.

Originally published in Neue Zürcher Zeitung, October 18, 2011.

Anya Schiffrin (ed.): Bad News. How America’s Business Press Missed the Story of the Century, New York/London: The New Press, 2011

The European Journalism Observatory will soon expand, offering five new Eastern European languages.

This October marks the beginning of EJO’s integration of Albanian, Czech, Romanian, Serbian and Ukrainian languages, which will soon join the current operating roster of English, German, Italian, Latvian and Polish EJO versions. We expect to have the new platforms up and running by early 2012, at which point readers will have access to analyses and articles on the latest developments in mass media and journalism available in 10 languages.

This tremendous new development has been made possible thanks to the SCOPES (Scientific Cooperation between Eastern Europe and Switzerland) research program, funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) and the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC). The SCOPES initiative, designed to increase scientific cooperation between Switzerland and Eastern Europe, has generously agreed to support the EJO with 240,000 CHF for the next two years.

In the words of Professor Stephan Russ-Mohl, Director of the Observatory, “In a period during which journalism is the victim of strong economical pressures and radical changes due to new technologies, quality journalism is increasingly endangered. Initiatives like ours aim to safeguard it, providing new instruments to enable those in the media sector to avoid compromise in terms of quality and independence.”

Well, there. It’s been said.

Perhaps not exactly in such precise terms, per se, but it’s been generally implied that there’s catastrophic U.S. federal debt out there, and that it’s massive, and that it will – ultimately – destroy us. Or help China destroy us. Or it will, at the very least, make a lot of moms and dads fight more and worry about new things they didn’t have to worry about before. Let’s suppose there are two prominent news narratives with regard to the current state of the U.S. economy: (a) blood-drooling, fire-breathing Godzilla Debt or (b) Moms and dads sleeping less and clipping coupons more. American news can be kind of polarized.

What’s become clear is that economic news in the U.S. bums people out. Big time. According to the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, negative views of economic news have risen sharply since last month, now resting at their highest level in more than two years. Perhaps no news is, in fact, less-depressing news.

Just for fun, let’s take a quick gander at a few recent headlines dealing with the U.S. economy:

“Analysts Increasingly Pessimistic About Economic Recovery” (Huffington Post)

“Lessons from the U.S. Economy’s Malaise” (New York Times)

“Will Bank of America Doom the Economy?” (Salon)

“The Next Horrible Budget Showdown” (Salon)

“America’s Economic Prospects Look Grim” (the Economist)

“When Dollar Stores Are Too Expensive” (Slate)

“Be Afraid: Why the Markets Are Tanking” (Slate)

“Police: Man Blames His Meth Making on Bad Economy” (Evansville Courier & Press)

Granted, there are a number of more optimistic sources for keeping up with current events (try TV Guide, Sports Illustrated for Kids…). But according to findings based on the most recent installment of the weekly News Interest Index, an ongoing Pew project, 67% of those surveyed say they are hearing “mostly bad” news about the economy, up 18 points in the last month alone and more than 40 points since the start of 2011.

The index, based on longstanding research into public attentiveness to major news stories, examines news interest as it relates to the news media’s coverage. Results for this survey were based on telephone interviews conducted among a national sample of 1,001 adults 18 years of age or older living in the continental United States.

Views on news about individual economic sectors – from the financial markets to jobs to real estate – are “increasingly downbeat”.

The Pew breakdown goes like this:

“Nearly three-quarters say that they are hearing mostly bad news about the job situation, while more than six-in-ten say they are hearing mostly bad news about financial markets (69%), gas prices (66%), real estate values (63%) and the prices of food and consumer goods (62%).” In summary (although the good people over at Pew somehow left this out) it’s a big old suckfest out there.

When it comes to employment, responses pertaining to the job situation in the U.S. are the lowest they’ve been since Pew first started tracking them in June of 2009.

And among those expressing negative sentiments about economic news you’ll find majorities in nearly every demographic group: More than six-in-ten Republicans (71%), Democrats (62%) and independents (69%) say that the news they are hearing about the economy is mostly bad.

The vast weight of the federal debt can be (lightly) understood as follows: The recession forced revenue to plunge, and tax rates have been very low for a long time. Then there are the (more than two) wars. Expensive ones.

And yet the world still turns, and things still continue to happen (even outside America!). Other such issues garnering attention include the Federal Aviation Administration’s partial shutdown, violence following political uprisings in Syria, the candidates for the 2012 presidential elections, and the food shortage in Somalia, although these accounted for significantly smaller portions of the newshole.

Unremitting economic storylines may be topping public interest, however given the recent market plunge, this is not terribly unusual. Revoking pessimism is certainly an unrealistic order, but it’s worth noting that despite the national anxiety, preoccupation with uncertainty, deepened feelings of bewilderment, resentment – equally magnificent events continue to occur each week, unsettling entire populations. They are simply happening in other places.

The attacks in Oslo last month once again brought up the issue of framing in the media. As it turns out, not only do media outlets set the agenda for discussion in society, they also dictate how people should feel about the subjects in question.

Ironically, anti-Islam extremist Anders Behring Breivik’s case emphasized the tendency of Western media to use prejudiced language when it comes to covering politically motivated violence committed by Muslims. Breivik’s attack was widely dubbed an “act of terror” in the mainstream media… that is, until Breivik himself was identified. As authors of the blog Foreign Policy Watch Matt Eckel and Jeb Koogler describe, the Western press responded by “largely avoiding the term ‘terrorist’ when speaking of the blond, blue-eyed, Christian attacker…” It seems that even those members of the media who did not clearly state that the attacker had connection to the Islamic extremists had secretly assumed this is exactly what the investigation would reveal.

Hours before the Norwegian authorities released any official information about the executor of the horrendous act, many media outlets, including Fox News, MSNBC, the Wall Street Journal and other sizable news sources published assumption-based stories about the terrorists’ alleged connection to Al-Qaeda. American political satirist Stephan Colbert found the news behavior hilarious enough to feature on one of his shows, saying that the American media uncovered the terrorist long before the Norwegian government, describing Breivik’s action as “Muslish” and “Islam-esque”. He even offers a general headline for the news: “Bad thing happens someplace. Muslims involved.” Funny or not, the situation emphasized a legitimate frustration among Muslim communities with regard to the media’s coverage of the tragedy.

Identification of the actual criminal, however, seems to have brought little comfort to Muslims. From then on, as Eckle and Koogler observe, Breivik is called a “fundamentalist” or an “extremist”, but not a terrorist – a label reserved for Islamic assailants. Glenn Greenwald, an American columnist, writes that even when Breivik was identified to be an anti-Muslim Christian fundamentalist, the media used the word “terrorism” only to describe that he was “mimicking Al-Qaeda’s brutality and multiple attacks.”

One could argue, of course, that the wording doesn’t matter as long as the truth is released. Missouri School of Journalism researchers Kim and Cameron (2011)  prove the opposite in a recent study. As part of an experiment, news stories about a fictitious company were prepared. The stories were framed in two manners – anger-inducing (e.g. focusing on company’s intentional wrongdoing, which results in a battery explosion) and sadness-inducing (e.g. focusing on the victims of battery explosion). The content of the two articles is identical except for the headline and the second paragraph. Both versions of the news were distributed randomly among participants, who were then asked to evaluate their feelings towards the company after having read the news.

The chief finding indicated that individual responses to a crisis are largely affected by the framing of the news. Those, who were exposed to anger-inducing news had more negative attitudes toward the subject than those who read the same news in a sadness-inducing frame. Though the research was focused on audience responses to the framing of corporate crises, the findings may also be applied to terror coverage.

The results of Kimberly Powell’s (2011) research on media coverage of terrorist attacks in the United States since 9/11 suggest that the act of terror is mostly used to describe  “Muslims/Arabs/Islam working together in organized terrorist cells against a ‘Christian America,’ while domestic terrorism is cast as a minor threat that occurs in isolated incidents by troubled individuals.”

Such framing is most likely to induce anger not only among the non-Muslim Westerners, who naturally fear a loss of  peace and well-being, but also among Muslims, who are forced to take a defensive position against the generalizing blame placed upon them by the Western media. Smoother coverage of domestic terror, on the other hand, puts two otherwise equal crimes on different levels of the brutality scale. It’s no wonder that misunderstanding and confrontation between Islam and the West continue to grow.

While wording in the media might explain Muslims’ frustration with the media and Christians’ fear of Islam to a degree, it remains unclear what is behind such skewed coverage in the first place. Apparently, it is time for media editors and journalism educators to think about introducing a new aspect of fair coverage – namely fair framing.

Hyo J. Kim, Glen T. Cameron (2011): Emotions Matter in Crisis: The Role of Anger and Sadness in the Publics‘ Response to Crisis News Framing and Corporate Crisis Response. Communication Research, XX(X), 1-30.

Kimberly A. Powell (2011): Framing Islam: An Analysis of U.S. Media Coverage of Terrorism since 9/11. Communication Studies, Issue 1, Vol. 62.

Thomas Krüger

In advertising, a single catchword may move mountains.

In research however, such buzzwords often create trends unable to withstand a diverse reality. For decades, many social science researchers have used the phrase “Americanization” with regard to our living conditions – a formula that on closer inspection does not hold, as researchers have recently illustrated on two very different communication fields. At an annual conference of Swiss communication and media scientists dealing with visual communication, media researchers Roger Blum and Marlis Prinzing questioned the Americanization hypothesis in the field of party competition and campaigning. According to Blum and Prinzing, campaign planners no longer look  to the U.S. when conceptualizing election campaigns.  Researchers now prefer to discuss the “modernization, professionalization, mediatization and de-ideologization” of the election campaigns.

Their most radical example is that it would be unthinkable in the U.S. to display individuals in the nude on campaign billboards or posters, whereas in Germany several candidates have undressed – and as their creative and extreme “transparency” was appreciated by many voters, this approach found imitators in Switzerland, Belgium and Poland. On further inquiry Ms. Prinzing emphasizes that the Americanization hypothesis is “also a distraction, especially if the media are referring to it.” It tends to be misunderstood “as a synonym for Hollywood-like election campaigns,” and therefore leads us to “ignore how important issues are in the U.S., and that these are also discussed and transported via the media.”

The example of nude politicians indicates that campaign planners are observing one another internationally and vice versa – a behavior that could be advisable to journalists and media managers searching for new models as the Americanization hypothesis seems dubious with regard to the media business. At least researchers at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford are not all sure whether the American journalism crisis will surface similarly Europe.  According to David A.L. Levy and Rasmus Kleis Nielsen it was premature to forecast the death of newspapers, TV or commercial news media. In their new book dealing with changing journalistic business models they foresee entirely different trajectories in different European countries, in the U.S, and in the BRIC-states Brazil and India. “If the big news media in America have to cope with a more serious crisis than anywhere else, then this does not necessarily mean that they pave the way for the rest of the world. The U.S. could rather be an exception – instead of the forerunner as which they are depicted in the discussions about the international media development.”

That the Americanization hypothesis is dubious is further illustrated by the fact that years ago American researchers such as Everette Dennis conversely observed a “Europeanization” of journalism in the U.S.  This view surfaced as many news outlets were accused of no longer separating news and opinion, or because TV networks like Fox build success on politically one-sided (right-wing) populism.

A similar term has haunted the Eastern European research journals for years now: “Berlusconization.” A renowned researcher introduced the term, kick-starting its frequent usage by many others more or less thoughtlessly. “Boulevardization” picked up as well – this would have hit the bull’s eye, and also “Italianization” would perhaps have made sense, as the emphasis would have laid on the growing political control and “entertainization” – or even  “infantilization” of the media, as Umberto Eco once stated regarding the conditions in his home country. But Berlusconization? Young Eastern and South Eastern democracies should actually be grateful that they’ve been spared the overwhelming power of a media magnate like Berlusconi and his long lasting abuse of authority cushioned by the media. Also sustained in part because of the (certainly not altruistic) engagement of Western investors who usually keep out of political issues, such as Ringier and Springer, the Passauer Publishing Group and the WAZ-group as well as Scandinavian media companies like Schibsted.

Apparently researchers are not beyond using buzzwords, especially as they too hope to have a large impact – even though by engaging in buzzwords, they neglect the type of clarification research should actually ascribe to.

Published in Werbewoche by Stephan Russ-Mohl, April 29, 2011.

Translated by Irina Lock

Sources:

Roger Blum/Marlis Prinzing (2011): Böse Bilder – brave Bilder. Zwei Tendenzen in der Bildkommunikation europäischer Parteien, Presentation at the Annual Convention of the Swiss Association of Communication and Media Research (SACM) , March 25./26. 2011 in Basel

Levy, David A.L. /Nielsen, Rasmus Kleis (eds.) (2010): The Changing Business of Journalism and its Implication for Democracy, Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, University of Oxford

We all grew excited viewing images from Cairo and Tunis.

And as we listened to the reports from correspondents in Egypt and Tunisia, the world became convinced that the revolutions were unstoppable and, above all, spontaneous.  A “frame” of  truth was established that everyone embraced, without ever asking if it was reliable.  But if you analyze the situation from a different perspective, taking into consideration both the sophisticated communication techniques and the international political context, another truth emerges  –  one that is more credible.

The Premise:

At the end of the 1990s the American government decided to adopt, and above all, to apply the theories of Gene Sharp, a Harvard professor who theorized for years about the use of nonviolent struggle as an instrument to overthrow dictatorships. At this time the American government decided to test the effectiveness of his theories,  incorporating an element that Sharp himself had not contemplated: organization and support for nonviolent struggle from the outside. Thus, a new strategy was born and implemented on the world stage.

The first test was conducted in Belgrade, in October 2000, when the brave protest of Serbian students forced Milosevic to resign.  That movement was inspired by Sharp himself, but was organized and financed by non-governmental organizations, private corporations and philanthropic bodies, which - though they were independent - acted in agreement with Washington.  It was a success that was followed by the pink revolution of Tbilisi and the orange revolution of Kiev. On all three occasions the media desribed extraordinary, spontaneous insurgency.  No one was aware of what had taken place behind the scenes, which is that they were encouraged and guided from the outside, a fact now well-known to experts in communication.

After 2005 the “Sharp” formula was put aside, and resuscitated only now in this impetuous 2011, as is apparent from many coinciding implications.  The Daily Telegraph, for example, discovered – and it has not been denied – that the Egyptian opposition figures of the April 6th movement, extolled today as the brave anti-Mubarak leaders that emerged from blogs and social networks, participated in the fall of 2008 in a meeting at the State Department in Washington during which they discussed a democratic revolution that should erupt precisely in 2011.  The New York Times published a document that shows how Obama, more than 6 months ago, asked his experts to come up with proposals for ways to induce change in authoritarian political regimes in the Islamic world by taking advantage of mass discontent. Sharp himself admitted in an interview that he inspired the events in Egypt and Tunisia.  Add to that the role of the American NGOs in Tunisia and Egypt, the decisive support of the armies of these two countries, the allocation by Hillary Clinton of sizeable new funds for the spread of democracy via the Internet in authoritarian countries, and you have a more inclusive picture.

Washington, for obvious opportunistic reasons, cannot admit to more than it has so far.  It should be up to the mainstream press to explain what really happened from Tunis to Cairo, by piecing seemingly disconnected bits of information and statements together.  But once again the press appears to be overly dependent on official sources, too superficial to understand the subtlety of the spin, too frenetic in its chase for the latest news.  The media may pick up a detail here or there, but fail to paint the whole picture.  It does not reflect or probe deeper.  And again,  it fails.

For further analysis, see “It’s Libya’s Turn…”

Published in the Corriere del Ticino, February 22, 2011, by Marcello Foa. For the original Italian version, see here.