The changes introduced by the renewal of the contemporary media landscape are also reflected in the ideological configuration of subcultures, as in the case of the Free Party movement. However, in the field of subcultural studies, the relationship between media and subcultures has not been problematized in depth, since it has been common to adopt an anti-media conception of subcultures. Therefore, this article proposes an analytical framework to study the complex interrelations between media outlets and subcultures, adopting elements from subcultural theory, sociology of moral panics and communication. This is done through a discourse analysis of the interaction between macro and micro media, including the internet variable as something transversal in our analysis. In our case study, the results obtained will allow coining the concept of media-subcultural symbiosis, as the interaction that occurs between the media and the Spanish Free Party movement, seeing this linkage as a fundamental part in the authentication of these subcultural practices.
Bullfighting is a cultural tradition in South Europe and Latin America that has provoked strong reactions from supporters and critics since the nineteenth century. At this time, debates began about the cultural significance of bullfighting as a manifestation of 'Spanishness', as well as the associated stereotypes. However, opposition to bullfighting has grown significantly in the twenty-first century, with various groups opposing the practice on the grounds that it harms animals and rejecting its cultural status. Consequently, interest in the practice has declined considerably, with surveys carried out by the Ministry of Culture and Sport indicating that attendees at bullfighting events now account for less than 2 per cent of the population. Despite being entertainment for a specific demographic, bullfighting has therefore become a key cultural flashpoint in the political arena. In Spain, the far-right party VOX has increasingly used bullfighting as a political tool to defend a traditional conception of Spanish popular culture. This study sheds light on how bullfighting has gained new symbolic and cultural significance in political discourse as a cultural war. This is a distinctive instance within the Spanish context, yet it exemplifies a prevalent tendency across Europe towards the politicization of traditions in societies characterized by heightened political polarization.
This article investigates the delayed publication of the Italian Wikipedia entry on the Russian-Ukrainian war. While most language versions of Wikipedia promptly published articles on the conflict, the Italian version exhibited a notable delay. This study explores the reasons behind this delay, revealing that it was not driven by political pressures but rather by a distinct editorial philosophy within the Italian Wikipedia community. Unlike other language versions, Italian Wikipedia editors uphold a more conservative interpretation of what is appropriate for an encyclopaedia, favouring stability and verification over immediacy. Through a qualitative analysis of talk pages and sixteen semi-structured interviews with editors, this research highlights how these editorial norms shaped the approach to covering the war. The findings contribute to a broader understanding of how different Wikipedia communities negotiate knowledge production, emphasizing the role of cultural and epistemic values in shaping collaborative digital platforms.
Documentary films have emerged as potent tools for shaping public discourse and influencing societal and political agendas. Despite the growing acknowledgement garnered by Portuguese cinema at international festivals, its impact on public debate still needs to be explored. This article undertakes a comprehensive examination of how the financial crisis and austerity measures have been portrayed in Portuguese documentary production from 2010 to 2020. The analysis corpus includes 169 feature-length documentary synopses. We conducted a content analysis of films whose synopses explicitly mentioned crisis or austerity and addressed issues such as poverty, unemployment, the elderly, loneliness, territorial asymmetries and migrations. The narrative, visual choices, sound, time and space portrayed and the approach to the crisis were aspects considered in the analysis of the films. The findings reveal a limited emphasis on the portrayal of the crisis, which is seen from different perspectives, times and spaces as if permeating the national daily life. Defective distribution mechanisms also limit the ability of films to impact public debate.
During the pandemic, panda craze had made waves in South Korea and beyond, with the giant panda Fu Bao becoming a zoo celebrity and icon of Korean popular culture. This article examines SBS Animal Farm, a South Korean documentary featuring the growth story of Fu Bao, and the 2023 photo-essay collection Omniscient Viewpoint of Fu Bao: Photo Essay Book by Everland Zoo. I ask how the Korean media has represented birth, childcare and early education as experienced by the pandas and how such representations are intertwined with anxieties over mass migration, gender norms and economic prospects in modern-day South Korea. Through discourse analysis, I find that while media representations of foreign species and interspecies encounters in South Korea often seek to alienate the foreign 'other' and problematize foreign masculinity, they are not categorically the same with popular representations of migrant workers and foreign brides. Unlike migrant workers and foreign brides whose cultural citizenship remains ambiguous at the discursive level, pandas as a foreign species are represented as constitutive of rather than external to 'Koreanness', thus complicating and contesting South Korea's ethnocentric and metrocentric discourses.
This article explores the interconnection between journalism, community and embodied experiences of nationalist politics. As journalists in Istanbul, Turkey, navigate political environment shaped by nationalist narratives and policies rooted in ethnic purity, this article asks what role do journalists envision themselves playing in imagining and realizing a more democratic and pluralistic community? To address that question, this study examines how these journalists imagine and conceptualize the idea of community and how such work is impacted by the gendered, ethnic and racialized experiences of their daily and professional lives. I argue that journalists imagine and envision community as an ideal through which to navigate and contend with a highly polarized political climate. I draw evidence from narratives and participant observation gathered from eighteen months ethnographic fieldwork in Istanbul. Through these, I trace how the ethnic, racialized and gendered hierarchies embedded in the history and the contemporary politics of Turkey come to bear on journalism, and how journalism can function as a community-building practice.
Community broadcasting emerged in Chile at the end of the dictatorship, but so far, there have been no coordinated or consistent public policies aimed at promoting the sector. Using a conceptual framework on the multiple dimensions of sustainability and the social benefit of community communication, this article presents the results of a collective work that systematizes the sector's demands on state institutions in which I took part as a consultant. The conclusion is that a public policy that promotes and strengthens community broadcasting will only be effective in the current scenario if it is cross-sectoral, with the Ministry of Culture at the head - providing specific support that ensures organizational continuity - and in coordination with other state and government institutions, conceiving these media as cultural community organizations whose particularity lies in their potential to boost and strengthen their communities of reference through a participatory appropriation of multiple media channels.
This study analyses 14,854 news articles about refugees from 72 English-language newspapers worldwide in 2016. Using a combination of topic modelling and network analysis, we inductively identify the frames used to depict refugees and then examine the factors that help shape the news framing of the issue between various countries. We unveiled five frames: cultural and everyday life, Global North politics, aid, violence and international conflict. We also identified significant correlations between distance to country of origin and political stability and news frame usage, giving insights into the political, economic and cultural contexts that interact in the frame-building stage of the coverage of refugees in different countries. From a theoretical perspective, this study advances the understanding of news coverage of refugees, particularly the differences emerging between the Global North and the Global South countries.
The article is interested in the role of humour employed in memes on X by the government of Ukraine in the war following the invasion by Russia in 2022. It brings insights from cultural and humour studies as well as psychology into politics and shows how and what kind of humour the government around President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, a professional comedian, uses in their meme communication via social media in order to communicate with the public, seek global legitimacy and support, as well as depict and attack the enemy. It shows that the government uses a broad set of different humour types, styles and theories while completely avoiding self-deprecation as a humour style and humour which corresponds to relief theory. While this absence may not seem surprising at first in a situation of war in which there is a need to maintain tension towards the enemy, to galvanize support and avoid emphasizing own faults which might make it appear weak, the void of such forms of humour should be reconsidered. While this absence may not seem surprising during a war - a time in which there is a need to maintain tension towards the enemy, to galvanize support and to avoid emphasizing one's own faults so as not to give the appearance of weakness - the void of such forms of humour should be reconsidered. The article calls for further research on the benefits and limitations of laughter in war. It argues that both relief theory and self-deprecation can be effective tools of crisis communication as these forms of humour can contribute to the portrayal of confidence and strength, while also providing a means of dealing with the difficult and traumatic experiences the population is facing in times of war.
This study examines marginalized communities in postcolonial states, in particular transgender people, and attempts to understand the tension between globalized or transnational 'queer' language and local vernacular 'Indigenous' language. Drawing upon postcolonial concepts of appropriation and abrogation - typically only limited to the 'literary studies' tradition - this article analyses how colonial aesthetics are articulated and rejected on social media by multilingual transgender activists in the Pakistani context. By using the case study of the Indigenous khwajasira - Pakistan's transgender community - we analyse 600 social media posts from public Instagram accounts of four activists including Mehrub Moiz Awan, Shahzadi Rai, Hina Baloch and Nayyab Ali. Using a multimodal critical discourse analysis combined with the theoretical framework of postcolonial appropriation and abrogation, we find that khwajasira activists deploy innovative linguistic and textual strategies such as code- switching, codemixing, metonymy, interlanguage and neologisms to negotiate their hybrid identities. We argue that contestation between 'the global' and 'the vernacu- lar' is manifested through code-switching from one language to the other or between formal and informal registers, creating culture-specific neologisms or lexical items, colloquialisms, metaphors and slang. Through deploying visual modality, iconic global symbols, 'trans' colours, emojis and clothing artefacts, khwajasiras create new meanings on social media. Lastly, this study critically shows that transgender activ- ists challenge and co-opt normative conventions as they draw on the past, Indigenous knowledge(s), spirituality, religious terminologies and historical allusions in their linguistic repertories to resist and dismantle dominant power relations.
This article examines the media coverage of the break-up and fall of the Espirito Santo banking group, Portugal's biggest financial institution. Inspired by Dean Starkman's analysis of the coverage by the US business press of the 2007-08 mortgage crisis, our study asks whether Portuguese journalism acted like the proverbial watchdog of investigative reporting in the years leading up to the collapse of the Banco Espirito Santo (2012-14). The results of our content analysis reveal the near absence of true investigative journalism during the period and the concentration of reporting in the few months before the collapse of the banking group. This analysis is complemented by an investigative reporting project of two authors of this article. The watchdog barked too little, too late.
This article examines the semantics of populist rhetoric and conspiracy narratives in the Philippines to understand how they can be operationalized for governmental purposes. Focusing on Rodrigo Duterte's presidency (2016-22), I argue that conspiracy narratives simplify socio-economic issues and aid the transformation of collective discontent into an instrument of governmentality. Evidence from public speeches, news articles and online ethnographic research shows that these narratives enable populist actors to emotionally charge the political landscape, framing society in moral binary terms: the virtuous people, depicted as victims of corruption, vs. a morally compromised elite. In this context, populism simultaneously forges an antagonistic frontier and promotes an elitist agenda, thereby silencing dissent and leaving little space for resistance. The findings suggest that while populism can inspire and mobilize marginalized communities, its co-option for governmental purposes can subvert its emancipatory potential.
In debates on the 'mainstreaming' of populist radical right parties (PRRPs), the media's role is central. This article explores how PRRPs are covered by Brusselsbased media focused on EU politics whose coverage caters to an elite readership working in European affairs amplifies their influence over the pan-European political agenda. This research constructs a conceptual framework combining work on 'mainstreaming' and 'pariahing' with studies on how media participate in boundary maintenance between the acceptable and unacceptable within a democracy, especially Hallin's identification of 'spheres of reporting'. It uses this framework to French presidential election. The analysis indicates that in EU media, Le Pen is moving towards the line between mainstream and pariah parties, with comparisons to Zemmour aiding her mainstreaming, though neither candidate is fully treated as mainstream.
Investigative journalism is experiencing a new golden age facilitated by digital technologies for reporting and international, cross-border collaboration. Despite and often because of the vital role investigative journalism plays in democracy by holding powerful elites accountable, several challenges necessitate a deeper understanding of the obstacles investigative journalists encounter. This study applies the adapted hierarchy of influence model by Kunert et al. (2024) to investigative journalism in Austria. Investigative journalists' capabilities as watchdogs of public interest are ascertained against the background of the so-called Ibiza affair as Austria's Watergate scandal. The findings indicate that while the importance of investigative journalism over the past decades has grown in Austria, several obstacles on all five levels of the model still pose severe challenges to investigative journalism. Among the most significant problems are pressure from politics and the closeness between journalists and political actors in the microcosmos of Vienna.
The rise of fake news poses a significant challenge for governments worldwide, prompting the European Commission to address the urgency of combating disinformation. In the contemporary 'market of attention', where economic considerations often overshadow democratic and societal concerns, disinformation thrives. This study asserts that financial viability within news media markets is a critical yet overlooked factor in the fight against disinformation. The authors define financial viability as the capacity of institutions to balance income and expenses, positing that a financially sound news media market creates a resilient news landscape less susceptible to disinformation-induced harm. The research employs a comprehensive approach to assess this claim, commencing with a literature review on the financial viability of news media markets that leads to the development of a conceptual framework consisting of nine indicators to measure the financial viability of news media markets in relation to disinformation. Subsequently, primary and secondary data are collected from official and non-official data sources for each of the indicators across ten European countries and compared to the perceived exposure to disinformation in each country. Findings from the analysis reveal that financially viable news media markets exhibit greater resilience to disinformation. This underscores the significance of incorporating financial considerations into governmental efforts to counter disinformation. The article concludes by emphasizing the implications of the research for policy-makers, the news media industry and future research endeavours.
The Godfather Doctrine: A Foreign Policy Parable (2009) was written by two US 'realists' John C. Hulsman and A. Wess Mitchell who contended that the challenges which confronted the Corleone crime family in Francis Ford Coppola's classic The Godfather (1972) were analogous to the geopolitical problems facing the United States in the early twenty-first century. Accordingly, when Don Vito Corleone becomes subject to a 'hit', the responses of his sons Tom Hagen (Liberal Institutional), Santino 'Sonny' Corleone (Neo-Conservative) and Michael Corleone (Realist) provide options on how the United States could position itself in the multi-polar world. This article will situate Hulsman and Mitchell's arguments within a growing literature concerning international relations theory and popular culture and provides a critique of their realist perspectives and considers whether such popular cultural analogies to US foreign policies have a validity.
Review of: Beijing’s Global Media Offensive: China’s Uneven Campaign to Influence Asia and the World, Joshua Kurlantzick (2022) Oxford: Oxford University Press, 560 pp., ISBN 978-0-19751-576-1, h/bk, £27.99
Review of: Shadow of the New Deal: The Victory of Public Broadcasting, Josh Shepperd (2023) Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 244 pp., ISBN 978-0-25208-725-7, p/bk, $28
What characterizes the administrators (or admins) of social media groups dedicated to social change and protest against institutional injustices? The article analyses the characteristics of such admins using the activism for justice for Roman Zadorov in Israel as a case study. The findings demonstrate a phenomenon of ‘ad-hoc activism’: The background of the admins is heterogeneous, with most having no history of activism before their involvement in the activism for justice for Zadorov. In addition, these admins have negligible involvement other activism causes – they gather ‘ad hoc’ only through justice for Zadorov activism. The socio-demographic and other characteristics of the admins are discussed. Implications regarding the character of contemporary online activism and of the people leading it are discussed.
How do young members of disadvantaged communities in countries like Brazil, which have been affected by attacks from far-right populist politicians on women’s rights, make sense of messages on reproductive health in the misinformation age? Two focus groups were conducted in 2021 in collaboration with the Brazilian NGO Reprolatina to assess how disadvantaged women’s groups from Campinas, Sao Paulo, were making sense of messaging on reproductive health within a highly politically polarized local context. The findings revealed also how many women from lower income groups are exposed to a lack of information, as well as even ‘myths’, around fertility treatments and reproductive health matters in the mediated public sphere. The results showed how these groups of women from different age groups felt that there is need for better coverage of reproductive health, and of ‘scientific’ information on health matters more generally, in both the mainstream media and online. This study concludes in favour of improving health literacy approaches, as well as the overall communications on sexuality and reproductive health.
