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This article attempts to highlight the defining role that community media engagements play during times of the pandemic. It is argued that the outbreak of COVID-19 pandemic forced community news media houses to reinvent their news reporting practices to cover issues pertaining to the marginalized and underprivileged sections of the society. It explores the role of community media in engaging and empowering the citizens during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Central to our study is the analysis of the news model of “Video Volunteers” (henceforth VV), an independent community-based online news platform based in India. To understand the level of citizen participation and engagement in the making and dissemination of news during the pandemic, the authors conducted 13 interviews with different stakeholders of VV, including founders and news audiences.

It seeks to reveal that when the mainstream media have failed to represent the issues of a local community, it is the independent media platforms like VV which function as a veritable source of information and sharing of knowledge. Most importantly, this paper emphasizes that the communicative model of independent community-based online platforms has been most successful in the coverage of the pandemic and the level of engagement with the citizenry.

The study contributes to the aspects of reciprocity and collaborative journalism in community news media and its potential impacts on news creation and dissemination.

To elaborate the nature of fact-checking in the domain of political information by examining how fact-checkers assess the validity of claims concerning the Russo-Ukrainian conflict and how they support their assessments by drawing on evidence acquired from diverse sources of information.

Descriptive quantitative and qualitative content analysis of 128 reports written by the fact-checkers of Snopes – an established fact-checking organisation – during the period of 24 February 2022 – 28 June, 2023. For the analysis, nine evaluation grounds were identified, most of them inductively from the empirical material. It was examined how the fact-checkers employed such grounds while assessing the validity of claims and how the assessments were bolstered by evidence acquired from information sources such as newspapers.

Of the 128 reports, the share of assessments indicative of the invalidity of the claims was 54.7%, while the share of positive ratings was 26.7%. The share of mixed assessments was 15.6%. In the fact-checking, two evaluation grounds, that is, the correctness of information and verifiability of an event presented in a claim formed the basis for the assessment. Depending on the topic of the claim, grounds such as temporal and spatial compatibility, as well as comparison by similarity and difference occupied a central role. Most popular sources of information offering evidence for the assessments include statements of government representatives, videos and photographs shared in social media, newspapers and television programmes.

As the study concentrated on fact-checking dealing with political information about a specific issue, the findings cannot be extended to concern the fact-checking practices in other contexts.

The study is among the first to characterise how fact-checkers employ evaluation grounds of diverse kind while assessing the validity of political information.

This paper aims to investigate how the Japanese media conveyed the country’s foreign aid policy and analyse how framing biases in the news differ depending on which language (either Japanese or English) was used in the broadcasts.

This study uses a qualitative single case-study design and conducts a content analysis. The study uses news videos about the fifth Tokyo International Conference on African Development aired on YouTube by the Japanese media using Japanese and English.

The findings reveal subtle but notable differences in the patterns of the framing biases in the Japanese media’s news aired in Japanese intended for the domestic audience, and in the news on the same topic broadcast in English to the international audience.

The limitation of the study is the rather small data set used for the single case study of one event.

Framing biases could lead the general public in a monolingual society to a more skewed view of their government’s policy and its activities abroad. This could be an obstacle to developing a common ground for global issues and cross-border policy agendas.

The study explores an under-researched function of language in international affairs. It highlights how the mass media in a non-English-speaking country uses a dual approach to framing news while addressing different audiences. To the best of the author’s knowledge, the context that this paper deals with is novel because there are limited studies on the nexus between the influence of language choices and media logic in the field of international business.

A clickbait is a deceptive headline designed to boost ad revenue without presenting closely relevant content. There are numerous negative repercussions of clickbait, such as causing viewers to feel tricked and unhappy, causing long-term confusion, and even attracting cyber criminals. Automatic detection algorithms for clickbait have been developed to address this issue. The fact that there is only one semantic representation for the same term and a limited dataset in Chinese is a need for the existing technologies for detecting clickbait. This study aims to solve the limitations of automated clickbait detection in the Chinese dataset.

This study combines both to train the model to capture the probable relationship between clickbait news headlines and news content. In addition, part-of-speech elements are used to generate the most appropriate semantic representation for clickbait detection, improving clickbait detection performance.

This research successfully compiled a dataset containing up to 20,896 Chinese clickbait news articles. This collection contains news headlines, articles, categories and supplementary metadata. The suggested context-aware clickbait detection (CA-CD) model outperforms existing clickbait detection approaches on many criteria, demonstrating the proposed strategy's efficacy.

The originality of this study resides in the newly compiled Chinese clickbait dataset and contextual semantic representation-based clickbait detection approach employing transfer learning. This method can modify the semantic representation of each word based on context and assist the model in more precisely interpreting the original meaning of news articles.

This article aims to elaborate the context-sensitive nature of credibility assessment by examining how such judgments are made in online discussion in times of uncertainty caused by Finland's intent to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in spring 2022.

The empirical findings draw on the qualitative content analysis of 3,324 posts submitted to a Finnish online discussion in February–March 2022. It was examined how the participants of online discussion assess the credibility of information sources referred to in debates on the NATO membership. It is assumed that the believability of the author of information is indicative of his or her expert power, for example based on the credentials of a scholar, while the credibility of information content, for example the provision of factual evidence is indicative of the source's informational power.

Political decision-makers, particularly the President of Finland were assessed as most credible information sources, due to their access to confidential knowledge and long-time experience in politics. The credibility assessments differed more strongly while judging the believability of researchers. On the one hand, their expertise was praised; on the other hand, doubts were presented about their partiality. Fellow participants of online discussion were assessed most negatively because information sources of these types are associated with low expert and informational power.

As the study concentrated on credibility assessments made in a Finnish online discussion group, the findings cannot be extended to concern the credibility judgments occurring information in other contexts.

The study is among the first to characterize the role of expert and informational power in credibility assessment in times of uncertainty.

Background: Fear has been a common response to the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic throughout the world. In Mauritius, the outbreak of COVID-19 has been an exceptional occurrence requiring stringent confinement of the population. In this study, we have explored people’s reactions to COVID-19 during confinement, with emphasis on fear and the impact of news on the level of fear.

Methods: An anonymized online survey was carried out during confinement. Participation was voluntary. Participants reported fear level on a scale from 1-10, where no fear scored 1 and maximum fear scored 10. Participants reported the impact of news on their fear level on a scale of 1-10, where 1 represented no impact and 10 represented maximum impact. Participants reported the status of information received about COVID-19 on a scale of 1-10 where 1 represented no information on COVID-19 and 10 represented maximum information on COVID-19.

Results: The self-rated level of fear during confinement had a mean of 5.09 with 95%CI [4.70, 5.47]. This increased to a mean of 6.39 with 95%CI [6.00-6.78] at the prospect of confinement being lifted. The difference was statistically significant (paired-sample T-test, p<0.001). With regard to the impact of news on fear of COVID-19, the mean for local news was 5.97 with 95%CI [5.59, 6.34] whereas that of worldwide news was 6.86 with 95%CI [6.50, 7.23]. Worldwide news had a more significant impact (paired-sample T-test, p<0.001). The information score about COVID-19 had a mean of 5.12 with 95%CI [4.71, 5.53].

Conclusions: Participants experienced a moderate level of fear of COVID-19 during confinement which increased at the prospect of confinement being lifted, implying that people felt safer during confinement. Their fear was influenced more by international news than by local news. Overall participants reported that they were moderately well informed about the COVID-19 pandemic.

Corruption perception is essential to study because it can shape people’s attitudes toward the government. Thus, the purpose of this paper is to address this key question: what factors are associated with a non-expert’s judgment of whether Canada is corrupt?

This study uses the World Value Survey conducted in Canada in October 2020. This survey is based on a nationally representative sample of a cross-section of adult Canadian residents, including Canadian citizens and permanent residents and those who are neither Canadian citizens nor permanent residents.

Based on this study, some conclusions can be made. First, people accessing corruption news from the traditional news media are less likely than those receiving information from the new media to perceive the state (in this case, Canada) as corrupt. Second, people who have less confidence in public institutions are more likely to perceive a country as corrupt. Third, people who participate in electoral and non-electoral forms of political participation are more likely to perceive the state and its public officials as corrupt. Fourth, regardless of which political party is in power, individuals who lean right politically are more likely than those on the left to perceive the state as corrupt. Finally, immigrants are less likely than those born in Canada to perceive the state as corrupt. This work enriches the literature on the substantive understanding of the factors associated with corruption perception.

Studies investigating factors associated with public perception of corruption tend to focus on developing countries. The current study contributes to filling this gap in knowledge by examining correlates of corruption perception in Canada. As a result, this study contributes to the literature on factors associated with corruption perception, especially in the developed country context.

Narratives about racism and equity in schools have been documented in varying degrees of detail and accuracy in the news media (Farhi, 2012). Thus, race is front and center in the news reports, demonstrating how education policies are detrimental to the Island while also contending that policy drivers of Ley de Reforma Educativa de Puerto Rico (LREPR) are ignoring the racialized consequences of these neoliberal policies.

To examine the implementation of LREPR in education discourse in the media, a content analysis on texts in the Puerto Rican media was conducted. To conduct the analysis, an original dataset of texts from the four major newspapers in Puerto Rico: El Nuevo Dia, El Vocero, Primera Hora and The San Juan Daily Star (n = 119) was created.

The study shows how the collective resistance of Puerto Ricans towards LREPR suggests racialized consequences for this “post”-colonial Island as they engage in dialogues about property rights and dispute policy discourse. Data suggests the alarming effects of neoliberalism as perceived by Puerto Rican citizens, while highlighting shared concerns aligned with elements of critical race theory such as colorblindness and property rights.

This study breaks ground by identifying a new intellectual pursuit of charter schools purchasing land or buildings in marginalized communities. It argues that the news coverage demonstrates how Puerto Rican citizens have illuminated the purchase of land for charter schools, viewing it as an act of colonialism veiled as market competition and economic improvement for the Island. Implications for policy and practice are discussed.

The findings from this research contribute to how critical race theory is used and conceptualized in the educational leadership field. Additionally, the study contributes to the field of research by conducting a content analysis of newspaper articles in Puerto Rico, looking through the CRT lens to illuminate systemic racism that is present in media accounts of education.

This exploratory research examined how emphasizing a brand’s unethical behaviour through high moral intensity news framing influences consumer boycott intention.

The hypotheses were tested and validated using two experimental studies that expose customers of real retail and personal care product brands to news articles that have high and low moral intensity news frames.

The results showed high moral intensity news framing’s positive effect on consumer boycott intention. The frame’s influence is moderated by moral awareness and partially mediated by perceived moral intensity and moral judgement. The findings suggest that consumers’ perception of the frame and their attitude towards the brand will have a substantial role in boycott intention.

These research outcomes aid in the understanding of news framing effects on boycott intention, providing both insights for consumer activists and managerial implications for stewards of brands.

While previous research have examined the impact of news frames on the typical audience, there has been relatively little focus on news framing’s impact on consumers and their decision to boycott brands. This study addresses this gap by applying the work on emphasis framing to a consumer decision-making context. It also introduces moral intensity framing to the news frame classification. In addition, this study expands current conceptualizations of individual ethical decision-making to help explain consumer boycott intent.

For corporate communications, it is crucial to know how news media outlets report and frame the sociopolitical activities of multinational corporations (MNCs), including their corporate diplomacy, that affect perceptions of their legitimacy. Therefore, this study aims to identify how local news media frame corporate diplomacy in a host country and, in turn, benefit the media legitimacy of MNCs.

To identify media frames in the host country, a quantitative content analysis involving factor and cluster analyses of 385 articles published in newspapers in the United Arab Emirates from 2014 to 2019 addressing the corporate diplomacy of large European MNCs operating in the country was conducted.

This study identified three media frames, two of which establish moral and pragmatic media legitimacy. Results suggest that media legitimacy grows when news media emphasise institutional relationships between MNCs and local, established organisations and corporate diplomacy's benefits for society.

Findings provide insights into how corporate communications can contribute to legitimacy building by emphasising corporations' relationships with institutional actors in host countries and the benefits of corporate activities for local communities.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study was the first in corporate communications to empirically investigate news media's role in corporate diplomacy and how media frames contribute to the media legitimacy of MNCs at the moral, pragmatic, regulative and cognitive levels.