Ringing the alarm: The media coverage of the fulfillment of electoral pledges
This article examines South
African tabloid newspapers’ coverage of the Covid-19 pandemic, focussing
specifically on a case study of the national newspaper the Daily
Sun. Through a quantitative content analysis
of 1050 online news stories in the Daily Sun, we found that
unlike mainstream front-page news reporting which was largely episodic, negative
and alarmist, the majority of Daily Sun coverage was thematic
and neutral. Daily Sun news coverage countered Covid-19 related
misinformation and provided contextual coverage, with a large focus on the
social impacts of Covid-19.
"Americans are a very moral and compassionate people who believe in extending a helping hand, especially when they get the full facts instead of one-minute clips." If the news fulfills its responsibility, as she sees it, the world can show its compassion and help promote freedom. While early media providers were those who could pay the high cost of printing or broadcasting, modern media require just a URL and ample server space. The ease of online publication has made it possible for more niche media outlets to form. The websites of the New York Times and other newspapers often focus on matters affecting the United States, while channels like BBC America present world news. FOX News presents political commentary and news in a conservative vein, while the Internet site Daily Kos offers a liberal perspective on the news article. Most affiliate stations will show local news before and after network programming to inform local viewers of events and issues.
- Because cable does not broadcast programming through the airwaves, cable networks can operate across the nation directly without local affiliates.
- Daily Sun news coverage countered Covid-19 related
misinformation and provided contextual coverage, with a large focus on the
social impacts of Covid-19. - These limitations notwithstanding, this study provides a valuable exploration of how irrational fear perceptions can be media inspired and how impactful a distorted worldview can be.
- Hence, the biased or ill-informed decision to refrain from commercial air travel—for example, in the wake of a fatal plane crash—is shaped by something else than statistical changes and real risk levels.
Provided we are connected digitally, we have a bewildering amount of choices for finding information about the world. In fact, some might say that compared to the tranquil days of the 1970s, when we might read the morning newspaper over breakfast and take in the network news at night, there are now too many choices in today’s increasingly complex world of information. This reality may make the news media all the more important to structuring and shaping narratives about U.S. politics. Or the proliferation of competing information sources like blogs and social media may actually weaken the power of the news media relative to the days when news media monopolized our attention. Our analysis of tabloid news coverage of Covid-19 rests on a case study approach,
focussing on the Daily Sun.
However,
despite this focus on everyday lived experience of the pandemic, the Daily
Sun’s narrative approach was not overly alarmist, as might have been
expected from a news genre with an inclination towards sensation and melodrama. The
overall tone of the stories were neutral, while much of its reporting remained
factual, to the extent that it even favoured the official viewpoints of government
over and above other sources. It is
thus not surprising that the largest emotional appeal used in the tabloid coverage
also relies on fear appeals. The monthly statistics regarding aviation accidents were obtained from National Transportation Safety Board’s database. This database provides an overview of the number of accidents and of commercial carriers and related number of fatalities both worldwide and in the United States.
Personality and susceptibility to political microtargeting: A comparison between a machine-learning and self-report approach
Deepfake videos, for example, are incredibly creepy since they can nail the impression and voice of a real person. Before adding explanatory variables to the ARIMA models, the series need to be tested for stationarity, AR and moving average (MA) terms need to be determined, and the absence of autocorrelation of residuals need to be assessed (Vliegenthart 2014). First, the Dickey–Fuller test was applied to test the assumptions regarding mean stationarity. The terms help to build a model that reflects the past of the series and that includes all the previous information of the series over-time variance in the model. AR orders refer to the influence of pervious values and MAs are about the influence of residuals from previous values. Finally, the Portmanteau (Q) test for white noise indicates whether the residuals and the squared residuals are autocorrelated or not.
- To explore the over-time effect of media attention for aviation accidents (H4 and H5), we draw on monthly level Autoregressive Integrated Moving Average (ARIMA) time-series techniques (Vliegenthart 2014).
- Around the world, tabloid newspapers are routinely surrounded by a moral and
cultural panic. - From a news values perspective, a negative tone in news reportage is an instrumental value for journalistic processes of deciding what news garners the highest ratings (Galtung and Ruge 1965; Harcup and O’Neill 2001).
This is the largest tabloid newspaper
in South Africa with a readership of 3.8 million (PAMS, 2017). Using the keywords
‘Coronavirus’, ‘Covid-19’ and ‘vaccine’, a sample of 1050 stories was selected from
the Daily Sun website during the period March 2020-August 2021. While the Daily Sun is primarily a print publication, like many
other news publications they seek to increase their reach via their website and
social media accounts. Online journalism usually supplements print media, and most
traditional print newspapers have online versions which replicate offline content
online with little user interactivity (Bosch, 2010). In the case of the
Daily Sun, print versions of stories are published on the
website, and there is no opportunity for reader comments as this function is
disabled.
Being focused on the negative and highlighting things that go wrong can therefore be essential for journalism to fulfill a critical and investigative role within society. For example, in the context of aviation accidents, grounding all Boeing 737 MAX airplanes in the wake of two crashes on October 29, 2018 and March 10, 2019, partly under pressure of the media, possibly prevented more accidents due to the faulty software of these 737 planes. Yet, when such alarms ring all the time and for the wrong reason (Bennett 2003), a distorted media reality is portrayed that can bias people’s understanding of the world around them.
The role of the media
For the analysis, this study relies both on the absolute and relative media attention for both types of incidents. The absolute measure reflects the total number of articles in the selected newspapers that discuss aviation or road accident. In addition, a relative measure was constructed where the number of news articles about these accidents was divided by the total news circulation of newspapers in the United States. This measure allows for controlling whether over-time trends in news attention are not caused by fluctuations in newspaper circulation but rather show changes in relative attention. Several scholars have, however, critiqued the claims related to cultivation theory and empirical studies found mixed results.