Reality and Representations
The Narrative Framework of Sex Abuse Scandals: Analysing the Influence of ‘Old’ and ‘New’ Media in the Formation of Dominant Discourses
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Anneke Meyer
This paper offers a comparative analysis of two major sex abuse scandals of recent times – the British Coronation Street scandal in 2014 and the international Harvey Weinstein scandal in 2017 – to investigate the relative powers of mass vs. social media in the formation of dominant discourses and narrative frameworks. The two scandals share a number of significant features which make them comparable – e.g. enormous publicity, rape allegations, multiple victims making allegations, allegations spanning several years, the media industry setting, celebrity involvement – but the outcomes were very different; as the Coronation Street scandal ended in public victim-blaming, the Weinstein scandal sparked off the #MeToo campaign and set in motion a cultural shift towards victim-believing. This paper traces the mass and social media histories of these two scandals; analysing newspaper coverage, celebrity Twitter accounts and hashtag campaigns, this paper reveals a complex, enmeshed media landscape in which narrative changes (Gamson 2001), winning discourses, and the very activation of scandals (Greer and McLaughlin 2013) are far from inevitable and contingent upon a range of interacting factors.
A Comparative Analysis of Pakistani English-language Newspaper Editorials: The Case of Pakistan’s ‘Kim Kardashian’- Qandeel Baloch
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Shiza Nisar
This research analyses the representation of Pakistan’s social media starlet, Qandeel Baloch and the incident of her assassination in the editorials of four English language Pakistani newspapers, The News, Dawn, The Nation, and Express Tribune from June 20, 2016, to August 20, 2016. Baloch hailed from a remote rural area in Pakistan and belonged to a conservative family. She gained nation-wide popularity due to her blunt, risqué social media posts, and candid selfies with a famous religious cleric, Mufti Qavi. Weeks before her murder, media outlets disclosed her original name, exposed her personal details and put her life in danger. Constantly under media surveillance and scrutiny, Baloch’s honour killing sparked a debate on the role of media in creating a security risk for the social media starlet. This research also explores how newspapers framed the religious cleric, Mufti Qavi, after the murder of Baloch and use news frames to construct a comparative analysis of the editorials of four leading Pakistani newspapers.
From Scandal to Flak: A Case Study of Solyndra in The Washington Post and National Review, 2011-2012
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Brian Michael Goss
Via a case study of the solar energy firm Solyndra, this paper’s critical approach to journalism diagnoses what is wrong with news media in the west in general (and USA in particular) with at least implicit suggestions of remedies. Solyndra obtained the first loan from the Obama administration’s American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. Due to the declining price of crystalline silicon, Solyndra hurtled quickly after into bankruptcy. While this is a common occurrence in an emerging industry, Republicans rallied to Solyndra’s bankruptcy and articulated it as a synecdoche for ostensibly problematic Keynesian economic management and for Obama’s stimulus program in particular. Congressional Republicans convened hearings by the end of 2011 to channel scandal memes and to conjure news discourse around the party’s preferred, politically impregnated articulations of the meaning of Solyndra’s bankruptcy. These articulations and the power-driven ideology that backs them were, in turn, readily insinuated into prestige, mainstream news media as demonstrated by an analysis of the (personalizing, scandal-driven) reportage in The Washington Post. A well-established right-wing journal of opinion, National Review, went further in exaggerating scandal through the tactic of political warfare known as flak in an effort to disable the Obama administration and its economic recovery program—although, over the course of years, the loan program actually paid for itself by seeding promising firms in green industries across the decade. The importance of this study is in empirically demonstrating the systemic flaws in conventional, objective news as well as ideologically-driven opinion through a case study.
