Search

The gatekeeping function of political journalism has never been as important. What has become known as the ‘infodemic’, the spread of spurious and false claims, has shown itself a threat to public health and well-being. Journalism is uniquely placed to reassert its role as arbiter within the information environment. We argue that professional standards must be central to the work of journalism, empowering them to ensure they determine what is news, who are the credible sources and rebalance their attention away from the loudest and most controversial voices to create a more pluralist news environment to inform and educate citizens. The Covid-19 pandemic has emphasised the problematic nature of disinformation, we argue journalists must protect citizens from being misinformed, from making unwise choices, so protecting the overall health of democracies.

This paper discusses the synthesised findings from two interdisciplinary, feminist studies conducted under the auspices of the non-corporate nexus, the Women’s Academic Network at Bournemouth University, UK, of which the main author is a co-convenor and co-founder. These qualitative studies focus on academic women’s experiences of managing careers in the work culture of corporate Institutions of Higher Education (HEI) in a modern UK university. The background to this work draws from a body of international research into the slower career progression rates of women academics in comparison to male counterparts and gendered barriers the former encounter. While there has encouragement within Higher Education bodies across the EU to balance out the current gendered inequities within academia, our findings indicate that these are woven into the institutional fabric of enacted daily academic practices serving to disadvantage women scholars.

Advertising, Marketing, Public Relations and contemporary News: in these potentially powerful forms of cultural communication whose voices do we hear and which of these voices command most attention? This special edition of the Journal of Promotional Communication offers some tentative answers to these important societal questions.\ud \ud Thus in this issue the subject of voice and both its re-presentation and representation are addressed and rightly afforded critical importance within the realms of media communication and culture. As Couldry (2010) argues, voice is fundamental as a process by which individuals can give their accounts, but vitally, he also refers to the idea of voice as a value too. That is to say we can understand much about broader societal values through nuanced appreciations of types of voices heard and the levels of being heard. In this special issue we are most interested and concerned with the voices we do not hear and those we hear framed in a manner that reduces their authority.

Young people do not vote in the same numbers as older generations, which causes considerable concern within British democratic life. They are seen as detached and disengaged, however, the focus on voting and other traditional forms of political participation is arguably a narrow way of assessing this generation’s political engagement. This paper discusses a critical discourse analysis of recent media texts on youth political participation and argues that media coverage of young people’s political participation furthers the misconception that the youth of Britain today are not interested in politics and political issues. It is argued that notions of youth political participation must extend beyond traditional political engagement, namely voting.

The 2012 Paralympics was the biggest ever, the most accessible and best attended in its 64-year history. The Paralympics and ideas of disability associated with the Games provide significant opportunity for reflection on how far societal opinions, attitudes and behaviour have changed regarding disability. In 2012 – the first ever “legacy games” – an explicit aim of the Paralympics was to “transform the perception of disabled people in society”, (Channel 4), and use sport to contribute to “a better world for all people with a disability” (IPC 2011). The 2012 Games therefore came with a social agenda: to challenge the current perceptions many people have about disability and disability sport. Within this report – commissioned by the UK’s Paralympic broadcaster, Channel 4 – we consider everyday experiences of disability and disability sport within the context of the London 2012 Paralympics and televised coverage of the Games. The analysis is based 140 in-depth interviews that took place in the UK over a period of eighteen months, during the lead up to, and immediately after, the Games: between January 2011 and September 2012. Embedded in the lifeworld of our participants, we ask whether the 2012 Paralympics was successful in changing perceptions of disability.