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Racism in the United States is complex given the cultural logics that uphold notions of “post-race” or “colorblindness” as a means for understanding racialized events. The various forces at play within media institutions create paradoxes in the power that the media wields in society. Utilizing the concept of “media spectacle” and putting it into dialogue with colorblind racism, the author looks at local coverage of the 2009 arrest of Henry Louis Gates. The author’s primary concern is to identify not only the narratives that uphold or challenge colorblind racism during racialized events, but also the dynamic in which racialized events are mediated in contemporary society. Through a critical discourse analysis of two Boston newspapers, the author demonstrates the way colorblind racism adapts during a racialized event. This study demonstrates the contested nature of the media and nuance to the ways we understand colorblind racism in an increasingly mediated society.

This paper aims to explore the extent to which global reporting initiative (GRI) standards reflect the material concerns of stakeholders in developing countries, with particular reference to Latin America.

The main dataset was a sample of 120 media articles that discussed corporate conduct related to COVID-19 from both developing (Chile, Mexico and Peru) and developed (Australia, UK and the USA) countries. Concerns evident from those articles were compared and then mapped to applicable GRI standards to identify relevant disclosures and gaps. Findings were triangulated by drawing on two additional datasets: Latin American GRI-related academic literature (in Spanish) and submissions to GRI standards.

Media analysis reveals significant differences between developing and developed country concerns, as well as gaps in GRI disclosure requirements in relation to customers, labour standards and corporate interactions with non-government organisations and governments. Analysis of Latin American literature corroborates the concerns raised in media articles regarding employment. Additionally, it points out country-specific issues and calls for increased reporting of corruption. Analysis of the GRI standards development process reveals marked underrepresentation of developing countries, which may contribute to the observed deficiencies in the GRI standards.

This paper contributes to the (surprisingly rare) research concerning the quality of GRI standards and responds to calls for greater attention to developing countries in the SEA literature by showing that GRI standards may not fully meet the needs of users in the developing country context of Latin America. The paper also contributes to practice via specific recommendations for improvement to GRI standards and the standard-setting process and provides a summary of the key findings from Spanish-language Latin American literature.

The purpose of this study explores the effects that media coverage of corporate social responsibility (CSR) news related to primary stakeholders (e.g. customers, employees and investors) and secondary stakeholders (e.g. community) have on the market value of companies, measured as the impact generated in the positive and negative abnormal returns for those companies.

Using a sample of 195 online papers published in the most important Spanish business newspaper during 2015, the authors implement an event study and a regression analysis that confirm the importance of CSR news for corporate financial goals.

The findings show that negative CSR news related to primary stakeholders such as investors and customers generate significant abnormal returns for companies that are notably larger than the abnormal returns generated by secondary stakeholders (e.g. community). Similarly, positive news related to primary stakeholders such as employees are the only positive news that affect market reactions significantly.

The study provides an empirical analysis that clarifies how media coverage of different types of CSR news affect the market value of companies. In doing so, the paper contributes to previous literature significantly because scant research exists that has compared the differential effects of CSR news focused on primary and secondary stakeholders. The findings are discussed under the premises of the managerial perspective of stakeholder theory.

Taking an intersectional approach, this chapter makes a theoretical and empirical contribution to the study of mothers’ movements in the context of social welfare cutbacks in Israel. I argue that the political use of the maternal identity provides an important cultural resource to women’s social movements, yet all women cannot access this advantage equally. By adding an intersectional perspective to the literature on women’s movements and media debates, this empirical study shows that the ability of different groups of women to politically mobilize their maternal identity in the news is impacted by their class and racial backgrounds. I focus on Israel as an ambiguous case that reflects both the political relevance of maternal identity as mobilized by different political actors, as well as the intersectional dynamics of marginalization of women’s movements within contentious media debates about austerity policies. Using critical discourse analysis, I analyzed 268 newspaper articles that discuss the Israeli Single Mothers’ Movement, a welfare rights movement of low-income women of color (Mizrahi). I find two competing frames converging across the newspapers analyzed: the first draws on a nationalist discourse of the “mother of the nation” to present a positive image of a heroic “mothers’ movement”; the second draws on racist and sexist images to negatively frame activists as a “Mizrahi movement” of undeserving poor mothers. I show how the contested construction of the Single Mothers’ Movement in the news media is directly connected to hegemonic Israeli discourse on motherhood and ethnicity, and demonstrate how this shapes the movement’s public image and its political and feminist value.

This study aims to investigate whether United Kingdom (UK)-based companies have changed their voluntary disclosures on curbing the bribery of foreign officials in response to the UK Bribery Act 2010, and if so whether and how such disclosure changes substantively reflected allegations of bribery of foreign officials by news media.

By using the notions of institutional pressure and decoupling and applying content and thematic analysis, the authors examined, in particular, disclosures on curbing bribery by the largest 100 companies listed on the London Stock Exchange in periods before and after the Bribery Act (2007–2012). News media reports covering incidents of bribery of foreign officials and related corporate disclosures before and after the Act were thoroughly examined to problematise corporate anti-bribery disclosure practices.

The study finds a significant change in disclosure on curbing bribery before and after the enactment of the UK Bribery Act, consistent with the notion of institutional coercive pressure. However, decoupling is also found: organisations' disclosures did not substantively reflect incidents of bribing foreign public officials, mostly from underprivileged developing nations.

This study acknowledges a limitation stemming from using media reports that focus on bribery incidents in identifying actual cases or incidents of bribery. As some of the incidents identified from news media reports appeared to be allegations, not convictions for bribery, companies could have defensible reasons for not disclosing some aspects of them.

Regulators should think why new or more regulations without substantive requirement are not helpful to curb corporate decoupling and injustice. The regulators should address the crisis that multinational companies (MNCs) being suppliers of bribery are much more harmful for the underprivileged communities in developing nations. Accordingly, this paper provides practical insights into how stakeholders ought to critically interpret MNCs' accounts of their involvement in bribery.

This study contributes to the accounting literature by problematising MNCs' operations in underprivileged countries. The findings suggest that not only public officials in developing countries as creators of bribery but also Western-based MNCs as the suppliers of bribery contribute to perpetuating unethical practices and injustices to the underprivileged communities in developing countries. This research is imperative as this is one of the first known studies that provides evidence of the actions including disclosure-related actions companies have taken in response to the UK Bribery Act.

This paper aims to examine the trends in research studies in the past decade which address the use and analysis of propaganda in social media using natural language processing. The purpose of this study is to conduct a comprehensive bibliometric review of studies focusing on the use, identification and analysis of propaganda in social media.

This work investigates and examines the research papers acquired from the Scopus database which has huge number of peer reviewed literature and also provides interfaces to access required for bibliometric study. This paper has covered subject papers from 2010 to early 2020 and using tools such as VOSviewer and Biblioshiny.

This bibliometric survey shows that propaganda in social media is more studied in the area of social sciences, and the field of computer science is catching up. The evolution of research for propaganda in social media shows positive trends. This subject is primarily rooted in the social sciences. Also this subject has shown a recent shift in the area of computer science. The keyword analysis shows that the propaganda in social media is being studied in conjunction with issues such as fake news, political astroturfing, terrorism and radicalization.

The lack of highly cited papers and co-citation analysis implies intermittent contributions by the researchers. Propaganda in social media is becoming a global phenomenon, and ill effects of this are evident in developing countries as well. This denotes a great deal of scope of work for researchers in other countries focusing on their territorial issues. This study was conducted in the confines of data captured from the Scopus database. Hence, it should be noted that some vital publications in recent times could not be included in this study.

The uniqueness of this work is that a thorough bibliometric analysis of the topic is demonstrated using several forms such as mind map, co-occurrence, co-citations, Sankey plot and topic dendrograms by using bibliometric tools such as VOSviewer and Biblioshiny.

The purpose of this paper is to examine coverage of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement in seven US-based newspapers to determine whether the protest paradigm, “a pattern of news coverage that expresses disapproval toward protests and dissent,” and other marginalizing techniques are present, and racialized.

Relevant articles published during a six-month period of 2014 near the death of Michael Brown were retrieved from the selected outlets, including the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and the St Louis Post-Dispatch. Textual and content analyses were performed.

The articles heavily followed the paradigm. An additional characteristic, blame attribution, was also identified. Language of crime, lawlessness, violence, blame for nearby acts of violence, and inflammatory quotes from bystanders and official sources were often present. There was little discussion of key issues associated with the formation of BLM.

Mainstream outlets rather than social media or alternative outlets were examined. Future research should study coverage of BLM in other outlets.

Measures to avoid marginalizing protests and racialization of coverage, including increased diversity in the newsroom and monitoring for racialized language are suggested.

Racialization of news and coverage of BLM has widespread negative consequences, such as association of Blacks with criminality that may affect their quality of life. The protest paradigm has the ability to squelch participation in social movements, which have the possibility to bring about needed social change.

This interdisciplinary paper highlights the important role of mainstream media and news routines in affecting the BLM movement. It uses diversity research to make recommendations for media practitioners to avoid racialization of news.

In the past few years, research focusing on misinformation, referred to broadly as fake news, has experienced revived attention. Past studies have focused on explaining the ways in which people correct it online and on social media. However, fewer studies have dealt with the ways in which people are able to identify fake news (i.e. fake news literacy). This study contributes to the latter by theoretically connect people’s general social media use, political knowledge and political epistemic efficacy with individuals’ fake news literacy levels.

A diverse and representative two-wave panel survey in the United States was conducted (June 2019 for Wave 1, October 2019 for Wave 2). We performed cross-sectional, lagged and autoregressive regression analyses to examined how social media us, people’s political knowledge and political epistemic efficacy are related to their fake news literacy.

Results suggest that the more people used social media, were politically knowledgeable and considered they were able to find the truth in politics (i.e. epistemic political efficacy), the more likely they were to discern whether the news is fake. Implications of helping media outlets and policy makers be better positioned to provide the public with corrective action mechanisms in the struggle against fake news are discussed.

The measurement instrument employed in the study relies on subjects’ self-assessment, as opposed to unobtrusive trace (big) digital data, which may not completely capture the nuances of people’s social media news behaviors.

This study sheds light on how the way people understand politics and gain confidence in finding political truth may be key elements when confronting and discerning fake news. With the help of these results, journalists, media outlets and policymakers may be better positioned to provide citizens with efficient, preemptive and corrective action mechanisms in the struggle against misinformation.

Recent literature highlights the importance of literacy education to contest fake news, but little is known about what specific mechanisms would contribute to foster and reinvigorate people’s fake news literacy. This study helps address this gap.

The peer review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/OIR-03-2024-0140