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Using the under-explored relationship between the press and Major General George G. Meade as a case study, this article argues for a new method of analyzing war reporting. Past investigations of Civil War reporting tend to focus on censorship, the societal impact of media, or the adventure stories of war correspondents. Instead of seeing war correspondents as passive recorders of events, the new history of war reporting views journalists as powerful actors with the ability to influence military decisions. This included retaliating against military excesses and shaping how commanders were remembered in history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"Freedom of the press is a precious privilege that no country can forego. But if there is, as there should be, no legislative check save that of the mildest character, an internal, check such as I have suggested should not be impossible and ought not to be resented."-M. K. Gandhi. In a vibrant democracy like India, the media is considered as fourth pillar of democracy. The primary objective of media is to make the people aware about the society and the issue prevalent in it. Therefore, it becomes extremely important that media should conduct their activities in a more responsible manner and they should avoid presenting biased opinions. It is also the responsibility of media to avoid the practice of yellow journalism. In order to make media as an independent body, the concept of self-regulation is being adopted in India. However, present scenario clearly shows that the self-regulation has failed to make any significant mark and to avoid the misuse of media. With the emergence of technology, the face of media has changed significantly with the time. Today is an era of technology and media being not untouched from the impact of technological advancement that led to the new vertical of media i.e. Digital Media Platforms. Digital Media Platforms has enormous power to influence the mind of millions of people as these platforms can share the content instantly. Instances of fake news inciting communal violence are very common. Hence, there is a demand for controlling the media. However, the advocates of free media feel that an independent media is a sine qua non for a sustainable democracy whereas others feels that any institution with unbridled freedom will lead to the creation of a Frankenstein monster. Thus, a combination of statutory and self-regulating bodies is the best way to protect the freedom of the content across all media, where India has made a start and still has a long way to go. This paper attempts to examine the existing legal framework that applies to various broadcast technologies that are currently in use in India and presents a critique of existing legal framework. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study analyzes the beginnings and development of the Chilean crime or police story, later known as the crónica roja, a Latin American branch of contemporary literary journalism. While the held belief is that this new Chilean genre was influenced by the fait divers and the chronique judiciaire that appeared in nineteenth-century French print journalism, in fact, a more complex cultural mediation took place. After considering the particular historical and cultural features of both French and Chilean societies at the time, taking special note of their respective journalistic traditions and the manner in which the French press entered Chilean print culture, the study compares the narrative treatment of criminal actions reported in three Chilean newspapers, El Chileno, El Mercurio de Valparaíso, and La República, against Le Petit Journal, a popular French daily well known in Chile. The historical and comparative analysis shows that French faits divers criminels and chroniques judiciaires share more similarities with the Chilean folletín crime books than with the country's more famous crónica roja. The reasons are twofold. First, the French texts' sensationalist tone and penchant for narrative detail did not have a place in the logic of the informative journalism that began imposing itself in Chile at the fin-de-siècle. It was a logic the Chilean folletín could largely ignore given its different editors, format, and target audience. And second, the Chilean press began adopting a moralizing and didactic tone in its crónica roja more in line with the rationale of its elite readership, which equated criminal activity with the lower classes, than with its growing populist audience, which favored these more sensationalist narratives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The media has an incentive to publish sensational news.We study how this incentive affects the accuracy of media coverage in the context of merger rumors. Using a novel dataset, we find that accuracy is predicted by a journalist's experience, specialized education, and industry expertise. Conversely, less accurate stories use ambiguous language and feature well-known firms with broad readership appeal. Investors do not fully account for the predictive power of these characteristics, leading to an initial target price overreaction and a subsequent reversal, consistent with limited attention. Overall, we provide novel evidence on the determinants of media accuracy and its effect on asset prices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article raises difficult questions about the media representation of rape. It mentions that reporters need to help audiences understand what a piece of information means. It also informs that bad choices journalists often make are usually attributed to sensationalism focusing on philosophy of journalism.

This article examines how space mediates the relationship between publishers and public attention. Drawing on a heterodox reading of attention economics, it relates the rise of the yellow newspaper the New York Journal and the viral news publisher BuzzFeed to the spatial structure of two marketplaces of attention: the streets of New York City in the late 1890s and the Facebook News Feed today. It finds that the sensationalist media forms developed by these two publishers were institutional adaptations to spaces in which information and sensation were heavily concentrated; time–space was radically compressed; and multiple different social contexts were collapsed. By juxtaposing Facebook’s News Feed with the streets of New York City, this article ultimately endeavors toward a more rigorous understanding of the space of social media. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study explores how characteristics of a homicide affect prominence of the story in a newspaper (including front-page placement, photographs, article length, and a composite measure of these items). Using a sample of 3,998 newspaper articles from the Vancouver Sun (2004–2015), we examine how homicides that (a) may be deemed "sensational crimes" or (b) may incite fear of personal victimization are related to greater prominence. Findings suggest the presence of sensational characteristics have a greater impact on article prominence than the presence of fear-inciting characteristics. Implications for public perception of homicide events and policy are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we study the impact of noise traders' limited attention on financial markets. Specifically, we exploit episodes of sensational news (exogenous to the market) that distract noise traders. We find that on "distraction days," trading activity, liquidity, and volatility decrease, and prices reverse less among stocks owned predominantly by noise traders. These outcomes contrast sharply with those due to the inattention of informed speculators and market makers, and are consistent with noise traders mitigating adverse selection risk. We discuss the evolution of these outcomes over time and the role of technological changes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By adopting the uses and gratifications approach to understand two evolutionary needs—the environmental surveillance need and social involvement need—this study investigated the use of alarm and prosocial words in news headlines and the associated generic digital footprints. We analyzed over 170,000 online news headlines and the number of associated clicks and "likes" for each news story on an online news platform. Our results support the idea of a human alarm system for sensational news as a psychological survival mechanism designed to detect and pay attention to threatening news such as catastrophes and diseases. News headlines with alarm words indirectly attracted more "likes," indicating a concern with survival, through an increased number of clicks to select that news item. Furthermore, the results of a conditional indirect effect model showed that while online readers selectively clicked on news headlines with alarm words, the presence of a prosocial word in the headline increased the likelihood that readers would "like" it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After the 2016 US presidential election, the concept of fake news captured popular attention, but conversations lacked a clear conceptualization and used the label in elastic ways to describe various distinct phenomena. In this paper, we analyze fake news as genre blending, combining elements of traditional news with features that are exogenous to normative professional journalism: misinformation, sensationalism, clickbait, and bias. Through a content analysis of stories published by 50 sites that have been labeled fake news and the engagement they generated on social media, we found that stories employed moderate levels of sensationalism, misinformation and partisanship to provide anti-establishment narratives. Complete fabrications were uncommon and did not resonate well with audiences, although there was some truth-stretching that came with genre blending. Results suggest that technocentric solutions aimed at detecting falsehoods are likely insufficient, as fake news is defined more by partisanship and identity politics than misinformation and deception. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Historia y Comunicación Social is the property of Universidad Complutense de Madrid and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Purpose News algorithms not only help the authors to efficiently navigate the sea of available information, but also frame information in ways that influence public discourse and citizenship. Indeed, the likelihood that readers will be exposed to and read given news articles is structured into news algorithms. Thus, ensuring that news algorithms uphold journalistic values is crucial. In this regard, the purpose of this paper is to quantify journalistic values to make them readable by algorithms through taking an exploratory approach to a question that has not been previously investigated.Design/methodology/approach The author matched the textual indices (extracted from natural language processing/automated content analysis) with human conceptions of journalistic values (derived from survey analysis) by implementing partial least squares path modeling.Findings The results suggest that the numbers of words or quotes news articles contain have a strong association with the survey respondent assessments of their balance, diversity, importance and factuality. Linguistic polarization was an inverse indicator of respondents' perception of balance, diversity and importance. While linguistic intensity was useful for gauging respondents' perception of sensationalism, it was an ineffective indicator of importance and factuality. The numbers of adverbs and adjectives were useful for estimating respondents' perceptions of factuality and sensationalism. In addition, the greater numbers of quotes, pair quotes and exclamation/question marks in news headlines were associated with respondents' perception of lower journalistic values. The author also found that the assessment of journalistic values influences the perception of news credibility.Research limitations/implications This study has implications for computational journalism, credibility research and news algorithm development.Originality/value It represents the first attempt to quantify human conceptions of journalistic values with textual indices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Instead of a single muckraking movement, four shades of muckraking existed during the Progressive Era. While all muckrakers were involved in exposure of wrongdoing, they differed, sometimes drastically, in how they exposed. Realist muckrakers, such as Ray Stannard Baker and Ida Tarbell, presented multiple sides of an issue, avoided inflammatory language, and tended to abstain from editorializing. Yellow muckrakers, including Thomas Lawson and David Graham Phillips, used sensational language, ridiculed and demonized their opponents, and treated their own opinions as if they were certainties. Prosecutorial muckrakers, such as Mark Sullivan and Norman Hapgood, wrote like prosecutors--telling restrained but one-sided stories that were based on a strategic and partial selection of facts. Radical muckrakers, including Upton Sinclair and Charles Edward Russell, infused their journalism with their ideology, giving voice to investigative journalism that preached revolutionary socialism. Drawing on the ideas of John Dewey and Walter Lippmann, I argue that those journalistic distinctions are important because journalists not only share information with the public, but they also share their epistemology and model public discourse. This monograph clarifies an influential moment in journalism history and helps us recognize how different types of journalism can advance or hinder a democratic culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract In this paper, we study the problem of discovering and learning sensational episodes of news events. A sensational episode of news events is in the form of lhs → rhs , where lhs is an antecedent event, rhs is a consequent event, and rhs often happens shortly after lhs. Such pairs of co-occurring news events within short period, while not necessarily bearing causal relationship between each other, are possible essential to media since they deliberately seek and broadcast examples of uncommon events to fascinate crowd attentions. First, to find all frequent episodes, we propose an efficient algorithm, MEELO, which significantly outperforms conventional algorithms. There can be a large number of frequent episodes. We rank them by their sensational effect from the perspectives of news audience, through learning from manually labeled examples. Instead of limiting ourselves to any individual subjective measure of sensational effect, we utilize a learning-to-rank approach that exploits multiple features to capture the sensational effect of a news episode from various aspects. NLP tools combined with knowledge bases are used in extracting and aggregating news events from news text. Experiments on real data verify our approach’s efficiency and effectiveness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study analyzed violent crime reports in three large circulation newspapers and tested by survey the relationship between newspaper reporting of crime and fear of crime. As was expected, there was a nexus between more sensationalist newspaper reporting and the public's fear of crime. Unexpected findings were an inverse relationship between newspaper format and awareness of violent crime, and also between awareness of crime and fear of crime. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is commonly stated that the press in China can be divided into two main categories, the party-oriented official press and the market-oriented commercial press. This article examines an official paper, China Youth Daily, which is a central organ of the Communist Youth League of China. The findings of a content analysis demonstrate that this title differs significantly from other central official titles, like People’s Daily, but also from commercial papers, like Southern Metropolis Daily. While China Youth Daily’s journalism is close to the official pole in the amount of propaganda-related material it covers, it also has a greater emphasis on watchdog journalism than does People’s Daily. It places a much greater emphasis on infotainment than do either of the official and commercial poles. It is more likely to use journalistic techniques like sensationalism and the revelation of personal details than are the other titles analysed. These findings lead to the conclusion that the bi-polar characterization of the Chinese press requires modification. At least one prominent national title is best described as ‘popular official’ media. One of the main features of this kind of journalism is that it presents the party and business elite in a human light and thus constitutes a renewal of the repertoire of hegemonic devices at the party’s disposal. What is certainly the case is that the frequent claim that there is a contradiction between popular journalism responding to audience tastes and official journalism constrained by the propaganda needs of the party is mistaken. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Historians’ frequent use of a nineteenth-century murder case as a pivotal moment in histories of American journalism and sexuality reveals historiographical complications arising from the co-constitution of journalism and history. The journalistic constitution of the “facts” of this story—and any news story—can be viewed as both shaping and reflecting contemporary understandings of the case. Analyzing the ways in which historians use and contextualize the journalism surrounding the murder complicates many received notions of journalism history, regarding such issues as objectivity and sensationalism. By reading journalism texts as evidence of professional, political, and socioeconomic practices, critical historians can better elaborate the social and cultural construction of many historical subjects, focusing less on what happened and more on how sense was made of what happened. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objectivity is a key aspect of hard news reporting. Ideally, the reporter should only provide the reader with the facts and not allow his/her personal feelings about a specific event or crime to be identifiable in a report. However, journalists sometimes use both obvious and subtle ways to increase the entertainment value of a specific event or crime in order to grab and keep the attention of the readers. The use of sensationalism influences the reader to form certain opinions about a crime or the individuals involved in the crime. In this study, I attempt to identify the techniques used to incorporate both subtle and obvious sensationalism in online reports of four murders that took place in South Africa between 2009 and 2016. While subtle sensationalism is incorporated in different ways in media reports, appraisal theory is used to identify obvious sensationalism in this study. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Copyright of Man & the Word / Zmogus ir zodis is the property of Vytautas Magnus University and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Varia História is the property of Varia Historia and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Despite the scholarly popularity of important developments of political communication, concepts like soft news or infotainment lack conceptual clarity. This article tackles that problem and introduces a multilevel framework model of softening of journalistic political communication, which shows that the 4 most prominent concepts-(a) sensationalism, (b) hard and soft news ( HSN), (c) infotainment, and (d) tabloidization, and, additionally, (e) eroding of boundaries of journalism-can be distinguished in a hierarchical model. By softening, we understand a metaconcept representing developments in political journalism that are observed on different levels of investigation, from journalism as a system (macrolevel) down to single media items (microlevel). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is generally agreed that in photojournalism pictures come first. However, also the short verbal texts that accompany them play a crucial role, as they lead readers among the different signifieds of the image. A multimodal discourse analysis of captions will aptly consider both the linguistic elements that appear within the verbal discourse and the image-text relation. The interconnectedness of captions and pictures has lately been defined as a "loop," a view which blurs the traditional distinction between anchoring and relaying processes theorized by Barthes. The association of the relaying function with comics, however, seems to establish an interesting point of contact between photojournalism and pop art. Captions actually show the tension between "high" and "low" culture, the former being traditionally identified with the word and the latter with the image. While in the heyday of photojournalism captions were made necessary by the poor quality of the photographs, they soon began to provide an abstractive summary of the story told by the picture. This selective process involves interpretation. For this reason, captions can be ethically misleading and even legally controversial forms of discourse, for instance when they are used instrumentally to convey a specific point of view. In photojournalism dealing with crime cases, in particular, captions may display a sensationalist and populist view of justice, thus articulating the thoughts of public opinion supported by the newspaper's stand. My case study focuses on the caption that accompanied the photo portraying Perry Smith and Richard Hickock while leaving the courtroom on March 29, 1960. The two murderers - who have become famous after the publication of the documentary novel In Cold Blood - had just been sentenced to death by hanging. As reported by Capote, the caption that appeared in the Kansas newspaper read "The Last Laugh?" Starting from this case, the present work will try to investigate the complexity of captions as multimodal forms of discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Gumushane Universty Electronic Journal of the Faculty of Communication / Gümüshane Üniversitesi Iletisim Fakültesi Elektronik Dergisi is the property of Gumushane Universitesi Iletisim Fakultesi Elektronik Dergisi (e-GIFDER) and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)