Contemporary American television news centers pundits as key voices in national political discourse. The most prominent pundits anchor their own programs, often during primetime hours, reaching large audiences . This paper analyzes pundits’ performance of a type of news talk that is designed to appear unscripted and therefore authentic, enhancing parasocial interaction (PSI) with viewers and affirming pundits’ roles as experts. Data collected from two of the most-watched pundit-helmed news shows— Hannity and The Rachel Maddow Show—suggests that pundits use greeting tokens, personal pronouns, repetition, and rhetorical questions during their opening monologues. We discuss the mechanisms through which punditry may contribute to political polarization by creating emphasis frames.

While journalism awards can enhance social capital and signify quality, they often reinforce a limited, negative perspective of what is newsworthy. This study builds on existing research examining award-winning photojournalism by focusing on the understudied population of student photojournalists. Via a qualitative analysis of 229 photographs from the National Scholastic Press Association’s Photo of the Year Contest, this research analyzes major visual themes and prevalent news values in award-winning scholastic photojournalism. The results from this exploratory study indicate that student journalists visually represent high school as a place for connection, collaboration, and citizenship and present a uniquely positive portrayal of their world. The findings also suggest that conventionalization of topics, tone, and techniques is present in student photojournalism award contests although the themes that are reinforced by this conventionalization are dissimilar to what has been observed in professional photojournalism contests.

Over the last decade there has been a massive spike in use of the word ‘narrative’ in both media reportage and political discourse. This essay interrogates the rhetorical function and theoretical assumptions of this widespread usage, arguing that narrative rhetoric operates as a form of metajournalistic discourse shaping coverage of domestic politics and international relations while revealing an anxiety about the authority of contemporary news media. The prominence and semantic variability of the word narrative in public discourse is both a symptom of and a response to an epistemological crisis wrought by information overload and a fragmented public sphere in the digital age. The essay examines usage of the familiar phrase ‘control the narrative’ to reveal how journalistic discourse self-reflexively frames the dynamics of cultural debate. In this formulation, ‘the narrative’ operates as a synonym for what Chadwick (2017) calls the ‘political information cycle' in a hybrid news system, signifying an ongoing discursive struggle in which news media construct their moral and epistemological Others in a global communications network: social media, foreign state-run media, and competing news media. By tracking the phrase in coverage of the global COVID-19 outbreak and the notorious Steele Dossier in five major US dailies throughout 2020, this article demonstrates how the metajournalistic quality of narrative rhetoric facilitates an intramedia struggle for moral and referential authority in the networked public sphere.

This paper, based on in-depth interviews with 57 local journalism entrepreneurs in the UK, develops the idea that these emergent and small-scale local news organizations prioritize a form of “vernacular journalism.” Driven by a democratic impulse, vernacular journalism reflects the preoccupations, experiences and histories of ordinary people and their communities, providing a vehicle for representation and voice, which is often missing from more established news organizations. Vernacular journalism seeks to (1) make a difference in the local community, and (2) represent the nature of the community, providing a “first draft” of its history from its inhabitants’ perspective. The ability to provide such vernacular journalism is premised on knowledge of the community, cultivated through long-standing presence. The provision of a vernacular journalism which reflects the world from the bottom up is a unique selling point for local journalism, against the top-down orientation of larger regional and national outlets.

This research examines six Egyptian female podcasters whose work sits at the theoretical intersection of public pedagogy and autotheory, loosely defined as a first-person narrative form of feminist expression used to challenge hegemonic discourses as a means of activism. The two theories supplement each other, especially since feminism aims to abolish sexism, and public pedagogy is a means to obtain that result. The researchers adopted American-Canadian cultural critic Henry Giroux’s (2004) theory of public pedagogy because it allows for critical dialogue to address discrimination and push for egalitarian transfiguration. Autotheory was chosen for its relation to the podcasters' life experiences and their perceived desire to disrupt traditional social and cultural norms in Egypt. A qualitative critical analysis of the podcast episodes investigated the utilization of public pedagogy highlighting societal issues, advocating for decolonization through social change and responsibility, and critical learning through personal experience. The results confirmed that public pedagogy and autotheory were prevalent in the podcasts and established that this medium could have a meaningful impact on the Egyptian digital public sphere.

This study set out to understand how student audiences make sense of fictional representations of journalism in television series. To do so, we conducted five focus groups with American students. First, participants expressed a need for more diversity in representations of journalism in terms of narratives and characters as they see fiction as a complementary source of information on the profession. They relied on non-fictional reference media, normative journalistic discourses, and if applicable, experiences with working in (school) newsrooms to make sense of these representations. Second, they discussed how public opinion on journalism is influenced by fiction and consequently fear that one-sided and stereotypical representations of journalism contribute to increasing the already low levels of mistrust in U.S. news media. This fear was also found to be gendered as the participants expressed concerns about the stereotypical representation of female and minority journalists as “bitchy” and “promiscuous.” This manuscript puts forward journalism fiction as a metajournalistic discourse in which non-fictional and fictional journalism blur in confounding ways.

A US experiment ( n = 1506) demonstrated how a new approach to writing protest stories challenges press patterns in the United States of underrepresented groups. News stories that explain the goals and background of a protest—a concept called legitimizing—and that humanize—rather than criminalize—a person whose death sparked a protest led news audiences to better understand the protest and those involved in the social movement. We also found that those with conservative political beliefs perceived these stories as less credible than those written following journalistic norms typical in the United States that tend to cast protesters and their causes in a negative light, although the opposite was true for those with liberal views. Results are discussed in relation to the protest paradigm.

Data permeates nearly all spheres of society, and journalism is no exception to this since data has become a cornerstone of reality construction and perception. This contribution sets out to historicize the datafication processes in digital journalism and the way in which European institutions of media (self-)regulation have dealt with ethical issues regarding the use of data in algorithmic journalism in three areas: accountability, transparency, and privacy. The article shows that the process of datafication in journalism cannot be observed and analyzed in isolation, given that there is a double reflexivity between data-driven societal transformation processes and what happens in journalism. However, almost all press councils in Europe have so far ignored data-driven phenomena like algorithms or news automation. As a consequence, if self-regulators do not regulate, other institutions will, with the risk of news organizations being forced to make decisions on the grounds of regulatory frameworks that are not primarily intended for journalism.

This study conducts a corpus-assisted discourse study of framing responsibilities for climate change in China Daily (CD) and The New York Times (NYT). Based on the distinction between causal and treatment responsibilities, it focuses on the framing of human and non-human causal responsibilities as well as developed and developing countries’ causal and treatment responsibilities for climate change in the two newspapers. The findings suggest that CD tends to show consensus on the human causes of climate change while NYT is inclined to problematize human causes for climate change. While both newspapers favor treatment over causal responsibilities, CD prefers to underline developed countries’ historical causal responsibilities for climate change and urges developed countries to take more treatment responsibilities for climate change, whereas NYT prefers to underscore developing countries’ current causal responsibilities for climate change and their shared treatment responsibilities for climate change.