Programme full

Friday 17 April 2015 11:00 - 12:30
PAPER SESSION 7
Accepting Pressure?: Exploring How Elite News Journalism Uses Political Framing and Media Logic to Shape
Participation for Interest Groups to Climate Change Coverage
Matthews, J.
(University of Leicester)
This paper examines the mediation of the 'alternative' perspectives of interest groups and non-profit organisations in
UK climate change coverage. Previous research has charted the successes and limitations of these groups
relationship with media over time. Noted are their communicative skills and scientific knowledge that have secured
their visibility and those journalistic practices to insert their delimited contributions within story parameters that follow
political and science discussion. To this literature, this paper suggests that exploring the politicization and mediation
of the climate change issue together can capture new and interesting insights into their role. Specifically, this uses
elite newspaper coverage to recover their opportunities produced when journalists mediate political framing according
to elite media logic. It finds that legitimacy offered in the framing combined with the openness of the elite logic
produces in this case opportunities for groups to define and comment on the issue and evaluate statements of political
actors operating on domestic and international stages. The paper concludes that these contextual factors remain
significant for explaining the dialogical nature of news discussions on climate change in addition groups' rehearsed
communication strategies.
British Fighters in Syria: Social Media, the Visual and Scapes of Affect
McDonald, K.
(Middlesex University)
Understanding online jihadism demands that we engage not only with changing practices of violence typical of 'new
wars', but also with the reshaping of public and private, affect and subjectivity at stake in new forms of social media.
Such transformations are central to emerging social media collaborations, from protest and activism to contemporary
extremist networks. This paper explores the structures and scapes of affect being generated through the social media
use of a small number of British fighters in Syria, with a particular focus on images and videos being communicated
through these practices. Drawing on contemporary analyses of visual communication and experience, this paper
highlights the importance of social media as a medium to constitute intimate co-presence, and examines the extent to
which these fighters are involved in communicating 'sensation' rather than 'meaning'. The paper considers the
implications of this form of communication, both in terms of the types of social scapes constituted, and in terms of
implications for paths into and out of action shaped by an imaginary of violence and the extreme. In the Syrian case
this analysis offers insight into the attraction of deterritorialized violence associated with groups such as ISIS when
compared to the imaginaries of violence associated with nationalist actors in the Syria conflict.
‘It’s The Sun Wot Won It’: Evidence of Media Influence on Political Attitudes and Voting from a UK Quasinatural
Experiment
Reeves, A., McKee, M., Stuckler, D.
(University of Oxford)
Do print media significantly impact political attitudes and party identification? To examine this question, we draw on a
rare quasi-natural experiment that occurred when The Sun, a right-leaning tabloid with the largest circulation in the
UK, shifted its support to the Labour party in 1997 and back to the Conservative party in 2010. Using the British
Household Panel Survey, we compared changes in party identification and political attitudes among Sun readers with
non-readers and other newspaper readerships. We find that The Sun's endorsements were associated with a
significant increase in readers' support for Labour in 1997, corresponding to about 525,000 votes, and its switch back
was associated with about 550,000 extra votes for the Conservatives in 2010. Although we observed changes in
readers' party preference, there was no effect on underlying political preferences. The magnitude of these changes,
about 2% of the popular vote, would have been unable to alter the outcome of the 1997 General Election, but may
have affected the 2010 Election.
261 BSA Annual Conference 2015
Glasgow Caledonian University