Democratic Debacles
News Framing as Propaganda in Political Communication: Radio Nigeria News on Cultural Diversity
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Sulaiman Adeshina/ S.A. Osho
The concept of framing of news conveys the ideological nature of news and the use of media as propaganda machinery in political communication. Thus, radio news is being used to frame government agendas in the cultural diversity of Nigeria to meet certain agendas. This paper examines the critical discourse analysis of Radio Nigeria's national news on cultural diversity in Nigeria, to identify the missing links in the unending ethnic, religious, and cultural conflicts in the Africa’s most populous country. It uses the “manufacturing consent” theory of Herman and Chomsky (1988) to observe the political economy nature of news framing. The study applies the five propaganda devices of the theory on Radio Nigeria news to measure how the news framing affects the nature of the ethnic conflicts. The paper concludes that the framing of the radio news has impact on the suspicions among the ethnic and religious groups in Nigeria.
Deliberation in Dysfunctional Democracies: The Need for Critically Renewing Habermas's Public Sphere Concept
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Michael Hofmann
Donald Trump skillfully exploits the growing inability of all commercial media to provide American citizens with the investigative reporting and news analyses necessary to conduct the public discourse of an informed electorate in times of military, economic, and political crises. Against the background of the insufficient information used to justify America's entrance into World War I, Walter Lippmann's modern classic "Public Opinion" (1922) offered the first systematic analysis of the structural weaknesses inherent in the role that democratic theory ascribed to the news media regarding the daily gathering, evaluating, and contextualizing of increasingly complex domestic and foreign intelligence. John Dewey's famous rejoinder "The Public and Its Problems" (1927) started a debate in public philosophy whose relevance has grown exponentially due to the tragic consequences of the Vietnam and Iraq Wars. Significantly, the Lippmann/Dewey debate is not included in Juergen Habermas's global academic best seller "The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere" (1962/1989). Only recently did the eminent Habermas scholars Richard J. Bernstein and Craig Calhoun address this omission. This paper presentation will continue where Calhoun's Tanner Lecture "The Problematic Public: Revisiting Dewey, Arendt, and Habermas" (2013) left off.
The Role of the Technical Communicator in Combating Digital Disinformation
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Joshua Taylor
Disinformation was rampantly spread over social media during the United States 2016 presidential election. This paper examines how these lies were spread to target specific audiences via use of data analytics in an effort to influence their vote. This intentionally misleading content was sent to specific audiences who were determined to be most susceptible to persuasion based on their social media data. By focusing on the case of "Pizzagate," this work applies technical communication theory to the spread of disinformation in order to argue that technical communicators in digital spaces have a responsibility to respond to this ongoing and pervasive problem.
Political Advertisements, News, and Political Communication in Local Places
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Danilo Yanich
The election of 2016 was unlike any we have seen. Political advertisement spending remained around the level of the 2012 campaign--$9.8B in total with $4.4B going to local television stations. Most of the local buy was for down ballot races. In the Presidential race, the losing candidate bought 75% of the ads, while the winning candidate reaped the benefit of $5 billion in free media. While much attention is directed toward the Presidential race, the more significant political ad spending occurs in Congressional election spending. Local candidates require political ads to convey their message. Citizens are inundated with political ads on local TV that often proclaim mutually exclusive visions of problems and solutions. The 2016 campaign laid bare the lack of trust that the public has in the media, especially in the breakdown of the “newsroom-community connection.” And, in this era of fake news, citizens are increasingly left to their own devices to sort out fact from fiction. In this mixed methods research project, we coded the content of 1552 local newscasts from September 5 to November 7 in ten TV markets across the U.S.—including battleground states—to examine the relationship between political ads and political stories. The data revealed almost 30,000 stories (4,000 political stories). That was measured against the 263,000 political ads that were aired within the markets. Our questions include, what was the relationship between local television news broadcasts and the political ads? What political stories are covered? What might it mean for political communication in communities?
