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1 – 10 of 36The study aims to explore WikiLeaks' worldwide impact amongst readers of three online newspapers, as expressed through reader comments. There are three primary research questions…
Abstract
Purpose
The study aims to explore WikiLeaks' worldwide impact amongst readers of three online newspapers, as expressed through reader comments. There are three primary research questions: are there differences between the three online newspapers concerning the factual information in the comments, the linguistic characteristics of the comments, and the rhetorical and style elements of the comments?
Design/methodology/approach
The study focused on three online newspapers: The New York Times in the USA, The Guardian in the UK and Ynet in Israel, all popular channels of communication in their countries. The researcher examined the comments relating to WikiLeaks and conducted a content analysis on a sample of the comments.
Findings
The main findings suggest that most of the comments were written in an emotional style and with pathos. However there are major differences between comments written to The New York Times and to Ynet.
Research limitations/implications
This research is limited by the extent to which it can be generalised, as it focuses only on WikiLeaks comments written before 1 December 2010.
Originality/value
This paper is the first known exhaustive study that concentrates on WikiLeaks comments. The research findings may encourage further exploration into the nature of the relationship between media texts and reactions to them.
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Benny Nuriely, Moti Gigi and Yuval Gozansky
This paper aims to analyze the ways socio-economic issues are represented in mainstream news media and how it is consumed, understood and interpreted by Israeli young adults…
Abstract
Purpose
This paper aims to analyze the ways socio-economic issues are represented in mainstream news media and how it is consumed, understood and interpreted by Israeli young adults (YAs). It examines how mainstream media uses neo-liberal discourse, and the ways YAs internalize this ethic, while simultaneously finding ways to overcome its limitations.
Design/methodology/approach
This was a mixed methods study. First, it undertook content analysis of the most popular Israeli mainstream news media among YAs: the online news site Ynet and the TV Channel 2 news. Second, the authors undertook semi-structured in-depth interviews with 29 Israeli YAs. The analysis is based on an online survey of 600 young Israelis, aged 18–35 years.
Findings
Most YAs did not perceive mainstream media as enabling a reliable understanding of the issues important to them. The content analysis revealed that self-representation of YAs is rare, and that their issues were explained, and even resolved, by older adults. Furthermore, most of YAs' problems in mainstream news media were presented using a neo-liberal perspective. Finally, from the interviews, the authors learned that YAs did not find information that could help them deal with their most pressing economic and social issue, in the content offered by mainstream media. For most of them, social media overcomes these shortcomings.
Originality/value
Contrary to research that has explored YAs’ consumerism of new media outlets, this article explores how YAs in Israel are constructed in the media, as well as the way in which YAs understand mainstream and new social media coverage of the issues most important to them. Using media content analysis and interviews, the authors found that Young Adults tend to be ambivalent toward media coverage. They understand the lack of media information: most of them know that they do not learn enough from the media. This acknowledgment accompanies their tendency to internalize the neo-liberal logic and conservative Israeli national culture, in which class and economic redistribution are largely overlooked. Mainstream news media uses neo-liberal discourse, and young adults internalize this logic, while simultaneously finding ways to overcome the limitations this discourse offers. They do so by turning to social media, mainly Facebook. Consequently, their behavior maintains the logic of the market, while also developing new social relations, enabled by social media.
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This chapter attempts to uncover the decision code of Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, based on 12 decisions he made concerning the Middle East during his third term as president…
Abstract
This chapter attempts to uncover the decision code of Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, based on 12 decisions he made concerning the Middle East during his third term as president, from 2012 until October 2015.
The study was carried out to understand Putin’s line of thought and decision-making, in light of Putin’s increasing importance throughout the last decade, globally and in the Middle East, in particular. After understanding the decision calculus of Putin, it might also be possible to predict his future decisions concerning the region.
Decision rules can be inferred by analyzing a set of decisions. Analysis of such decisions is made in this chapter using the Applied Decision Analysis (ADA) method that uncovers historic decisions, and aims to peer into the mind of the decision-maker.
The results show the main decision rule for each of Putin’s decisions. The work proves that when it comes to foreign issues, the decision code which leads Putin in his decisions is rational. The results also reveal Putin’s strong desire to promote Russia and himself, while using holistic, maximizing, and compensatory processing, as long as his political survival is not compromised.
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Irit Shmuel and Nir Cohen
This study aims to examine changes in the discourse concerning Israeli tourism to Turkey between 2000 and 2014.
Abstract
Purpose
This study aims to examine changes in the discourse concerning Israeli tourism to Turkey between 2000 and 2014.
Design/methodology/approach
Drawing on the concept of geographic imagination and using a critical cultural discourse analysis of travel stories published in the Israeli media, the authors analyze the extent to which changes have both reflected and resulted from changing relations between the two countries.
Findings
The analysis reveals that before 2010, Turkey was depicted in largely positive geo-cultural terms, imagined as a desired cosmopolitan, culturally “authentic” destination, which elicits feelings of joy and peacefulness. More recent narratives, however, highlighted its negative geopolitical qualities, underscoring its anti-Israel stance and invoking a fearful discourse of political and ethno-religious radicalization.
Originality/value
The study makes three contributions. First, by attending to the significance of perceptions in the social construction of tourist destinations it brings the fields of tourism and cognitive geography into a closer dialogue. Second, by using a critical discourse analysis it highlights the changing cultural contexts within which places are imagined and constructed by tourists. Finally, by uncovering the geographic complexities that undergird the discursive construction of places as tourist destinations, it illustrates how everyday narratives change over time, reflecting the dynamic nature of inter-state relations.
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Yuval Karniel and Amit Lavie‐Dinur
The purpose of the paper is to draw a new map confronting the issue of privacy in the new media age in general, and in the State of Israel in particular.
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of the paper is to draw a new map confronting the issue of privacy in the new media age in general, and in the State of Israel in particular.
Design/methodology/approach
The paper presents an in‐depth review based on professional literature covering the topics of privacy, new media, social networks, and Israel. The paper considers all citizens of Israel (both Jewish and non‐Jewish), the vast majority (over 80 percent), however, of which are Jewish.
Findings
The study has found that even though Israeli social network users may be aware of online privacy issues, their adoption of online sharing and exposure, while partly due to third person effect, is to a great extent a reflection of the Israeli collective ethos which emphasises the importance of community and emotional and material sharing.
Originality/value
The study proposes a new classification of privacy exposures and violations by analyzing the nature of privacy violations inherent in the new media. The paper then discusses the unique cultural and normative manifestations of this issue in Israeli society.
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Maayan Zhitomirsky-Geffet, Esther David, Moshe Koppel and Hodaya Uzan
Reliability and political bias of mass media has been a controversial topic in the literature. The purpose of this paper is to propose and implement a methodology for fully…
Abstract
Purpose
Reliability and political bias of mass media has been a controversial topic in the literature. The purpose of this paper is to propose and implement a methodology for fully automatic evaluation of the political tendency of the written media on the web, which does not rely on subjective human judgments.
Design/methodology/approach
The underlying idea is to base the evaluation on fully automatic comparison of the texts of articles on different news websites to the overtly political texts with known political orientation. The authors also apply an alternative approach for evaluation of political tendency based on wisdom of the crowds.
Findings
The authors found that the learnt classifier can accurately distinguish between self-declared left and right news sites. Furthermore, news sites’ political tendencies can be identified by automatic classifier learnt from manifestly political texts without recourse to any manually tagged data. The authors also show a high correlation between readers’ perception (as a “wisdom of crowds” evaluation) of the bias and the classifier results for different news sites.
Social implications
The results are quite promising and can put an end to the never ending dispute on the reliability and bias of the press.
Originality/value
This paper proposes and implements a new approach for fully automatic (independent of human opinion/assessment) identification of political bias of news sites by their texts.
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This chapter uses the poliheuristic theory of decision-making to analyze the decisions of Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The study examines a series of Netanyahu’s…
Abstract
This chapter uses the poliheuristic theory of decision-making to analyze the decisions of Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The study examines a series of Netanyahu’s decisions regarding the peace process during 1996–2014. Using Applied Decision Analysis (ADA), this study demonstrates that Netanyahu ruled out alternatives that failed to satisfy alternatives on the non-compensatory decision dimension – his political survivability. The prime minister’s final choices were made from the remaining options according to their ability to maximize net benefits with respect to Netanyahu’s ideological concerns.
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Maayan Zhitomirsky-Geffet and Judit Bar-Ilan
Ontologies are prone to wide semantic variability due to subjective points of view of their composers. The purpose of this paper is to propose a new approach for maximal…
Abstract
Purpose
Ontologies are prone to wide semantic variability due to subjective points of view of their composers. The purpose of this paper is to propose a new approach for maximal unification of diverse ontologies for controversial domains by their relations.
Design/methodology/approach
Effective matching or unification of multiple ontologies for a specific domain is crucial for the success of many semantic web applications, such as semantic information retrieval and organization, document tagging, summarization and search. To this end, numerous automatic and semi-automatic techniques were proposed in the past decade that attempt to identify similar entities, mostly classes, in diverse ontologies for similar domains. Apparently, matching individual entities cannot result in full integration of ontologies’ semantics without matching their inter-relations with all other-related classes (and instances). However, semantic matching of ontological relations still constitutes a major research challenge. Therefore, in this paper the authors propose a new paradigm for assessment of maximal possible matching and unification of ontological relations. To this end, several unification rules for ontological relations were devised based on ontological reference rules, and lexical and textual entailment. These rules were semi-automatically implemented to extend a given ontology with semantically matching relations from another ontology for a similar domain. Then, the ontologies were unified through these similar pairs of relations. The authors observe that these rules can be also facilitated to reveal the contradictory relations in different ontologies.
Findings
To assess the feasibility of the approach two experiments were conducted with different sets of multiple personal ontologies on controversial domains constructed by trained subjects. The results for about 50 distinct ontology pairs demonstrate a good potential of the methodology for increasing inter-ontology agreement. Furthermore, the authors show that the presented methodology can lead to a complete unification of multiple semantically heterogeneous ontologies.
Research limitations/implications
This is a conceptual study that presents a new approach for semantic unification of ontologies by a devised set of rules along with the initial experimental evidence of its feasibility and effectiveness. However, this methodology has to be fully automatically implemented and tested on a larger dataset in future research.
Practical implications
This result has implication for semantic search, since a richer ontology, comprised of multiple aspects and viewpoints of the domain of knowledge, enhances discoverability and improves search results.
Originality/value
To the best of the knowledge, this is the first study to examine and assess the maximal level of semantic relation-based ontology unification.
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Yaniv Poria and Harmen Oppewal
This paper explores the possible uses of online news discussions that emerge following the publication of news on the Internet. It is suggested that this medium provides those…
Abstract
This paper explores the possible uses of online news discussions that emerge following the publication of news on the Internet. It is suggested that this medium provides those investigating consumer behaviour with a new, previously unavailable, source of information (at almost no direct cost). The unique attributes of this medium are presented, and examples of discussions are provided that emphasise possible implications for hotel managers and marketers.
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Tariq Abdullatif Halimi, Clare D’Souza and Gillian Sullivan-Mort
As the Arab/Muslim-Israeli animosity case is attracting international attention, citizens of non-Arab and non-Muslim countries around the world, referred to as third-country…
Abstract
Purpose
As the Arab/Muslim-Israeli animosity case is attracting international attention, citizens of non-Arab and non-Muslim countries around the world, referred to as third-country nationals (TCNs), are increasingly joining the boycott against Israel. The purpose of this paper is to examine the role of empathy for the citizens of the countries offended by Israel, namely Palestine and Lebanon, as a potential factor affecting TCNs decision to boycott Israeli products.
Design/methodology/approach
In total, 20 in-depth interviews were conducted with non-Arab, non-Muslim, and non-Israeli informants from different national and religious backgrounds, supported by secondary data sources. The qualitative grounded theory approach was employed to analyse data in order to answer the research questions.
Findings
TCNs decision to boycott Israeli products is affected by their empathic concern for the citizens of Palestine and Lebanon rather than by animosity towards Israel. Such concern is evoked by their awareness of the animosity case and further strengthened by their self-transcendence/universalism values and interaction with the case which activate their altruism towards the citizens of the offended countries, and consequently motivates them to relieve or reduce the suffering of these citizens by avoiding Israeli products. Greater emphasis is given to the Arab/Muslim-Israeli animosity case as a result of the greater empathic emotional impact it generates compared to other cases.
Originality/value
This is an original attempt to distinguish empathy from animosity as a factor which can affect TCNs decision to buy from a country engaged in hostile actions against another country other than their own. As the boycott campaign against the country under examination is growing internationally, this study can help international marketers in setting strategies to either exploit or combat the boycott campaign.
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