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This paper discusses data-collection strategies that use digitized historical newspaper archives to study social conflicts and social movements from a global and historical perspective focusing on nationalist movements. I present an analysis of State-Seeking Nationalist Movements (SSNMs) dataset I, which includes news articles reporting on state-seeking activities throughout the world from 1804 to 2013 using the New York Times and the Guardian/Observer. In discussing this new source of data and its relative value, I explain the various benefits and challenges involved with using digitized historical newspaper archives for world-historical analysis of social movements. I also introduce strategies that can be used to detect and minimize some potential sources of bias. I demonstrate the utility of the strategies introduced in this paper by assessing the reliability of the SSNM dataset I and by comparing it to alternative datasets. The analysis presented in the paper also compares the labor-intensive manual data-coding strategies to automated approaches. In doing so, it explains why labor-intensive manual coding strategies will continue to be an invaluable tool for world-historical sociologists in a world of big data.

Purpose: This study is concerned with media representation of crime in the Israeli press. It examines the pattern of offenses reported in two daily newspapers of seemingly different characteristics, the “elitist” Haaretz and the “popular” Israel Hayom. Methodology/approach: Crime reports appeared in the news pages during November 2016 were content analyzed in both newspapers by using a coding scheme, which operationalized several variables relating to type of crime, characteristics of offenders and victims, and court proceedings. Findings: Violent and sex offenses featured disproportionately in the news reports in both newspapers, while conventional property offenses were under-reported relative to their prevalence in official crime statistics. In terms of the characteristics of offenders and victims, the vast majority of offenders portrayed in crime stories were adult Jewish males. Women were more likely to appear as victims of crime rather than perpetrators, and more likely to appear as victims of sex offenses rather than other offenses. Research limitations: This study was based on an analysis of crime stories which appeared in two newspapers during one-month period of time. Future research should extend the sample size and collect data from a longer period of time and from additional media outlets. Originality/value: Media coverage of crime stories has not yet been researched in Israel. Beyond the interest in the Israeli case or the potential contribution to comparative global knowledge, the value of the study may lie in expanding the lens of scholarship of media’s construction of crime.

Prior evidence suggests the existence of asymmetric timeliness in the reporting of good and bad news of firms that trade in the Athens Stock Exchange. The purpose of this paper is to explore whether these results are consistent with inferences related to persistence property of earnings for firms that trade in the Athens Stock Exchange.

The research design employs both level regression specification and change regression specification and it is based on pool cross‐sectional regressions. Empirical results after classifying observations are reported based on both the sign of prior period and current period firms' return, while a number of sensitivity tests are employed.

According to prior evidence, bad news is recorded more timely than good news but in an unbiased and non‐conservative way. This implies that earnings shocks of firms with bad news should present persistence. Results from an ex‐ante perspective verify these arguments while results from an ex‐post perspective do not.

In contrast to other studies that report results that, in bad news periods, firms' earnings tend to present lower persistence than firms' earnings in good news periods, because managers conservatively report bad news, this paper focuses on a sample of firms that seems to report bad news in a timely way.

This paper sets out to encompass a comparative analysis of news reports and official police records of TASER deployments from 2002 to 2005.

The methodology involves a content analysis of all LexisNexis and New York Times articles involving police use of the TASER during the study period (n = 353). Regional (New York Times) and national (LexisNexis) news reports describing police use of the TASER are compared with police reports of all TASER deployments by the New York City Police Department (NYPD) during the same timeframe (n = 375).

Descriptive statistics and logistic regression are used to compare the data sources with respect to: the circumstances in which the weapon is deployed; the characteristics of the suspects involved in the TASER incidents; and the significant predictors of continued suspect resistance and repeated use of the TASER by an officer.

The paper examines official police records on TASER deployments from one police agency. This limits the ability to generalize the research findings to other police agencies that have adopted different practices and policies regulating the deployment of CEDs. Additionally, the content analysis includes only articles in the mainstream print media.

The paper concludes with a discussion about some myths associated with news reports on police use of the TASER, and their potential impact on both public perception and police practices.

To date, research has not systematically compared media representations of the TASER with official reports on police deployments of the weapon. That is the focus of this paper.

Purpose: Mentioning a criminal’s country of origin in crime news is a divisive and much-discussed issue among both journalists and members of society. Scholars assume that mentioning a criminal’s foreign origin could develop and maintain prejudices against individuals with a migrant background among news recipients. However, until now, no attention has been paid to what increases the likelihood that a journalist does or does not mention a criminal’s country of origin when reporting on crimes. Methodology/approach: One possible explanation is that the frequency and intensity of specific news factors could lead to mentioning a criminal’s origin, since increased importance of a news story is usually assigned when many high-intensity news factors occur. Even though numerous studies have determined the frequency of specific news factors in (crime) news, the explanation hypothesized in this chapter has not yet been examined. To investigate this supposition empirically, a quantitative content analysis of four German prime newscasts (n = 290), including public and private broadcasts, was conducted in the current study. Findings: The findings indicate that mentioning criminals’ origins is still common practice in journalism; furthermore, criminals with foreign origins are explicitly represented as foreign almost ten times more often than German-origin criminals are explicitly mentioned as German. News factors such as personalization, location, and influence show some effects of positively predicting journalistic mentioning of a criminal’s country of origin.

With 43.2 million coronavirus cases and 525,000 deaths in 2022, India ranked second worldwide, after the United States (84.6 million cases and 1 million deaths), according to the latest available June 2022 COVID-19 impact data.

Amid people’s growing mistrust in the government, India’s news media enhanced the nation’s distinguished designation as the world’s largest and most populous democracy. India’s news media inform, educate, empower, and entertain a surging population of 1.4 billion people, which is roughly one-sixth of the world’s people.

Drawing upon the media agendamelding theoretical framework, we conducted a case study research into interplay between two prominent democratic institutions, the media and the government, to analyze the role of the COVID-19 pandemic in redefining India’s networked society.

India’s COVID-19 pandemic aggravated internecine tensions between media and government relating to four key freedom issues: (1) world’s largest COVID-19 lockdown affecting 1.3 billion Indians from March 25, 2020 to August 2020 with extensions and five-phased re-openings, to restrict the spread of COVID-19; (2) Internet shutdowns; (3) media censorship during the 1975–1977 “Emergency”; and (4) unabated murders of journalists in India.

Although the COVID-19 pandemic caused deleterious problems debilitating the tensions between the media and the government, India’s journalists thrived by speaking truth to power. This study delineates key aspects of India’s media agendamelding that explicates how the people of India form their media agendas. India’s news audiences meld media messages from newspapers, television, and social media to form a picture of the issues, insights, and ideas that define their lives and times in the 21st century digital age.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the Chinese media’s performance on reporting the issue of waste incineration power plants. The authors analyze the role of media in supervising relevant agencies and meeting the public need for related information.

This paper provides a content analysis of media reports toward waste incineration projects that follow the anti-incinerator event that occurred in Panyu district of Guangzhou city in 2009. The sample of this paper is based on 469 news reports that were released on the state-level search engine “ChinaSo.com” from January 2010 to June 2016.

Chinese media did not continue to focus on waste incineration issues after the anti-incinerator event in the Panyu district and there were only a few news reports about this topic. News reports of the information disclosure category accounts for the largest proportion but lack a depth of explanation. The proportion of news reports of media supervision and popular science information categories is relatively small.

This paper is a pilot study of the media’s reporting characteristics on waste incineration issues. There are some shortcomings in terms of sample selection and analysis, more in-depth assessment will be implemented and improved upon the future research. This study highlights the importance of media reports before or after relevant events in examining the media’s social function. Besides, this study provides a new analytical idea for assessing the functions of the media on social public issues through media reports and the conclusions of this study have certain practical significance for the media to improve report behaviors.

This paper selects media reports on waste incineration power plant after the anti-incinerator event in Panyu district as media industry could pay much attention to relevant topics before the beginning of conflict events and continue tracking reports even after the events subside. This paper points out that Chinese media might increase sustained attention to waste incineration issues, strengthen the depth of interpretation, increase the supervision of relevant agencies, and enhance the relevance of the news reports to the public.

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.

The media is an important actor in public procurement, but research on its role is limited. This paper aims to investigate how the media has engaged with public procurement, using UK newspapers as a case example.

The method consisted of searching Nexis database for news articles on public procurement; automatic extraction of article attributes such as length, section, authorship; and manually coding each article for its theme and industry context. This produced quantitative indicators about the extent and focus of press coverage on public procurement.

Press coverage of public procurement increased between 1985 and 2018. The focus of coverage has been on governance failure and socio-economic policy. Governance failure, which includes corruption, cronyism and supplier malpractice, is associated with construction, outsourcing and professional services sectors. Socio-economic policy, which includes supporting small suppliers and favouring domestic industry, is associated with manufacturing, defence and agriculture.

The analysis included UK media only. While the trends observed on the extent and focus of public procurement news coverage likely reflect the situation in other countries, international comparative research is still required.

Government officials should be more proactive in countering the “negativity bias” in news coverage of public procurement by showcasing projects where value-for-money has been achieved, services have been successfully delivered and social value has been realised.

The media accentuates the negatives of public procurement and omits positive developments. The end-result is a selective and, at times, self-serving media narrative that is likely to engender cynicism towards public procurement.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study on media coverage of public procurement. It highlights that while there are similarities between media and academic treatment of public procurement, particularly in relation to its socio-economic side, the media emphasises governance failings and negative developments to a greater extent.

Arguing that the print media act as a claims-making forum for the social construction and contestation of crises, the aim of this paper is to explore how the print media mediated two audits commissioned following a high-profile salary cap breach in the National Rugby League (NRL) in Australia.

This paper draws upon critical discourse analysis to examine the media coverage of the two audits by the two major Australian media organisations, News Limited and Fairfax Media Limited. The analysis is based on a qualitative study complemented by quantitative techniques that explore critical incidents and representations in the daily press.

The paper illustrates the way in which News Limited, the owner of the infringing club, mobilised its media platform to promote favourable viewpoints and interpretations and how these were challenged in the Fairfax press. Evidence of both coverage bias and statement bias in the treatment of the two audits is produced.

This paper provides evidence that commercial interests of owner/publishers coloured media coverage of the two audits, which were central pillars of the crisis management strategy of News Limited and the NRL. Implications for the media's contribution to public accountability, accounting outputs and impression management, and the growing commercial diversification and reach of media outlets are considered.