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Private politics refers to situations in which activists or NGOs try to push firms to conform to social standards (regarding, for instance, human rights and environmental protection) without public policy intervention. The existing literature on private politics has focused on large campaigns such as consumer boycotts, and looked at the impact of those boycotts on firms’ financial performance and on the likelihood that firms comply with activist demands. Even though these large campaigns are important, focusing on them leads to neglecting the fact that a large portion of the time and resources that activists consecrate to private politics is used to monitor firms and criticize them through Internet posting and media statements, rather than to launch high profile campaigns. Little is known, however, about what drives these activists when they criticize companies, why they target certain companies and not others, and whether this criticism should be considered as a primary step in the production of full-fledged campaigns. In this paper, we fill this gap by exploring a unique international database of CSR-based criticisms against Fortune 500 companies for the 2006–2009 period. This database allows us to look at the impact of a broad range of factors including industry differences, country/institutional differences and firm-specific dimensions, on the likelihood that a certain firm will be targeted by activist critique. Results indicate that criticism is driven by strategic intents. Similar to previous literature, large and visible firms in certain industries are more targeted than others. In addition, these firms also tend to come from countries with strong institutions and high standards of living.

This paper seeks to provide a systematic understanding of the controversy surrounding commerce in US schools.

The paper surveys the history, research and policies related to commerce in schooling (1890‐2005) within the USA. The literature is organized according to four emergent US perspectives – protectionist, celebrant, cultural critic, and educated consumer.

The review finds that dominant US assumptions of commercial media subscribe to a stimulus‐response model of learning, rather than an active model of young people as constructing their own experiences with commercial media. Much of the research and many of the policies about commercial media in schools reflect adult assumptions about how young people learn, rather than provide empirical research about how young people actually interact with commercial texts while in school. The paper questions an excessive emphasis on the texts and technologies of instruction and calls for more empirical research that is grounded in theories of social constructivism, symbolic interactionism, and media education.

The four dominant media perspectives generated through this review of literature are limited to the USA.

A useful review of literature and schema to inform the understanding of educators, policy makers, and researchers as to the dominant US perspectives about commercial media and the education of young people. The schema can be used as a springboard for research and inquiry into the perspectives and policies of commercial practices and education in other countries.

This paper contextualizes nearly a century of research on commercial media and the education of youth in the USA, and provides a historical and theoretical context for researching education, technology and commerce in the USA and other countries.

A three‐person field team devoted four days to gathering data in Andover, Kansas, USA, after a tornado devastated the Golden Spur Mobile Home Park on 26 April 1991. They sought to assess the extent to which the media′s reporting of the local emergency management team′s response to the disaster influenced the team′s subsequent decisions. The researchers functioned as participant observers in the emergency operating centre (EOC), informally interviewed principal EOC members and media personnel, and obtained copies of media news stories (television and newspaper) which reported on the organizational response to the disaster. Assesses the observation and interview data as well as the content analysis of the news stories and suggests that the EOC team devoted a considerable portion of their time to responding to the negative press they received centring around two issues: pre‐impact warning and post‐impact debris clearance. Some of the media′s news stories sought to engage in blame assignation. The EOC members devoted time to developing strategies to control the media damage and changed some decisions they had made in response to the media′s criticism. The relevant disaster research literature is utilized to explain the response of the EOC personnel and the media. Reliance on normal time roles explains the EOC response to blame assignation.

The purpose of this paper is to show how a major public benefit entity in New Zealand uses formal accountability mechanisms and informal reporting to justify its existence. The paper is premised on the view that the accountability relationship for public benefit entities is broader and more complex than the traditional shareholder‐manager relationship in the private sector.

This longitudinal single case study of the Department of Conservation (DOC) spans the period from its establishment in 1987 to June 2006. It involves the detailed examination of the narrative disclosures contained in the annual reports, including the Statement of Service Performance, over the period of the study. A number of controversial items that appeared in the printed media between 1 April 1987 and 30 June 2006 were traced through the annual reports to establish whether DOC used impression management techniques in its annual reports to gain, maintain and repair its organisational legitimacy.

The analysis found that the annual report of a public benefit entity could play an important legitimising role. Using legitimacy theory, it is argued that assertive and defensive impression management techniques were used by DOC to gain, maintain and repair its organisational legitimacy in the light of extensive negative media publicity.

This is one of the first studies to examine the relationship between narrative disclosures in annual reports and legitimacy in the public sector. The paper provides a valuable contribution to researchers and practitioners as it extends the understanding of how public benefit entities can make use of the narrative portions of the annual report when pursuing organisational legitimacy.

This study aims to unravel characteristics of performance audit (PA) reports and official responses to them, associated critiques and alleged unintended consequences.

This archival research study has centered on PA reports and associated newspaper articles, books and reports, identified through database searches and the snowball approach. Mixed analysis approaches included content analysis, discourse analysis and informal analysis.

Auditees tend to oppose perceived unfair or inappropriate methods and process dimensions of the PAs more than the amount of criticism they face. The blame avoidance concept is therefore more accurate than the blame gaming one. The total amount of critical wording could still matter, as the media may disproportionally enlarge the significance of PA reports. Disclosure and interpretation of PA reports, and the associated media debates, could yield diametrical repercussions.

The research results may lack generalizability. Future studies could extend this work by covering a longer time period or being comparative in nature.

To achieve (more) effective and legitimate PAs, it is necessary to adequately understand, balance and display accountability perceptions of those held accountable. The choice of auditing methods and incorporation of auditees’ views seem paramount to the way auditees respond to PAs and ought therefore to be carefully selected, alongside specific wording.

Juxtaposition of critical wording with other characteristics of PA reports and how ministries respond to them gives insight into key sources of criticism and debate circumstancing accountability.

The purpose of this paper is to explore how Twitter is used as a political backchannel and potential agenda setter during two televised political debates during the Norwegian election in 2011. The paper engages with current debates about the role of social media in audience participation and traditional media's changing role as gatekeepers and agenda setter.

A combination of quantitative and qualitative methods. By introducing and using the IMSC multiple step analysis model on the Twitter datasets, the authors are able to analyse the flow of thousands of tweets and compare them with topics discussed in the televised debates.

The paper finds that the same topics are discussed on Twitter as on TV, but “the debate about the debate” or Meta talk tweets reveal critical scrutiny of the agenda. The paper identifies a clear pattern of political fandom and media criticism in the “debate about the debate”, indicating that Meta talk in social media can function as a critical public sphere, also in real time, which has not been identified in existing studies of Twitter and political TV shows.

The analysis is unique in the sense that the paper analyses a smaller, national Twitter population in deeper detail than what is common in larger Twitter studies related to political televised debates. The IMSC model can be used in future Twitter studies to uncover layers in the data material and structure the findings.

The idea that user comments on journalistic articles would help to increase the quality of the media has long been greeted with enthusiasm. By now, however, these high hopes have mostly evaporated. Practical experience has shown that user participation does not automatically lead to better journalism but may also result in hate speech and systematic trolling – thus having a dysfunctional impact on journalistic actors. Although empirical journalism research has made it possible to describe various kinds of disruptive follow-up communication on journalistic platforms, it has not yet succeeded in explaining what exactly drives certain users to indulge in flaming and trolling. This paper intends to fill this gap.

It does so on the basis of problem-centered interviews with media users who regularly publish negative comments on news websites.

The evaluation allows for a nuanced view on current phenomena of dysfunctional follow-up communication on journalistic news sites. It shows that the typical “troll” does not exist. Instead, it seems to be more appropriate to differentiate disruptive commenters according to their varying backgrounds and motives. Quite often, the interviewed users display a distinct political (or other) devotion to a certain cause that rather makes them appear as “warriors of faith.” However, they are united in their dissatisfaction with the quality of the (mass) media, which they attack critically and often with a harsh tone.

The study reflects these differences by developing a typology of dysfunctional online commenters. By helping to understand their aims and intentions, it contributes to the development of sustainable strategies for stimulating constructive user participation in a post-truth age.