On the F-word: a corpus-based analysis of the media representation of Feminism in British and German press discourse,1990-2009

Research in social psychology has shown that public attitudes towards feminism are mostly based on stereotypical views linking feminism with leftist politics and lesbian orientation. It is claimed that such attitudes are due to the negative and sexualised media construction of feminism. Studies concerned with the media representation of feminism seem to confirm this tendency. While most of this research provides significant insights into the representation of feminism, the findings are often based on a small sample of texts. Also, most of the research was conducted in an Anglo-American setting. This study attempts to address some of the shortcomings of previous work by examining the discourse of feminism in a large corpus of German and British newspaper data. It does so by employing the tools of Corpus Linguistics. By investigating the collocation profiles of the search term feminism, we provide evidence of salient discourse patterns surrounding feminism in two different cultural contexts.

Corpus approaches to language in the media

The main aim of this chapter is to offer an overview of research that has adopted the methodology of Corpus Linguistics to study aspects of language use in the media. The overview begins by introducing the key principles and analytical tools adopted in corpus research. To demonstrate the contribution of corpus approaches to media linguistics, a selection of recent corpus studies is subsequently discussed. The final section summarises the strengths and limitations of corpus approaches and discusses avenues for further research.

Corruption in the media's gaze

This paper examines a government's incentive to engage in corruption in the presence of independent media. Different versions of a sequential-move game show how collusion between a media-firm and a government as well as a government's ability to ‘spin’ the media allegations can undermine corruption deterrence. Further, because of gains from exposing scandal, the media-firm can face incentives to raise false allegations. The paper shows how such false allegations can provide perverse incentives that favor corruption.

A prospective study of pressures from parents, peers, and the media on extreme weight change behaviors among adolescent boys and girls

The current study was designed to evaluate the role of sociocultural influences over a 16 month period on strategies to lose weight, extreme weight loss strategies, and strategies to increase muscles among adolescent boys (n=344) and girls (n=246). All participants completed measures of body dissatisfaction, body image importance, strategies to lose weight, extreme weight loss strategies, and strategies to increase muscles. Measures of perceived pressure to lose weight or increase muscles from mother, father, best male friend, best female friend and the media were also evaluated. Data were gathered on three occasions, 8 months apart. The results demonstrated that boys showed a decrease in strategies to lose weight and increase muscles over time, whereas girls showed an increase. Both boys and girls showed an increase in extreme weight loss strategies with girls demonstrating a greater increase than boys. The sociocultural influences generally were perceived by girls to relate to messages to lose weight, whereas for boys they were perceived to relate to increasing muscles. Messages from parents, particularly fathers, were strong predictors of both strategies to lose weight and increase muscles among boys, with the media and best male friend playing a limited role. For girls, the strongest influences were mothers and best female friends, with few influences from fathers or the media. The results of this study are discussed in terms of the importance of the various sociocultural influences in shaping body change strategies among young adolescent boys and girls, and the implications of these findings for intervention programs for adolescents.

The media and the development of the tourism industry during the 20th and 21st centuries: an analysis of four noteworthy cases

The aim of this paper was to explore the role of the media within the context of tourism, specifically with regard to how the media has influenced the activities and perceptions of the tourism sector. In this paper, the term ‘media’ is referred to as mass communication, specifically with regard to newspapers, magazines and broadcasting. It is important to gain a better understanding of the ways in which the media has interacted with the tourism sector, as this information can provide practitioners and academics with insights as to how the media can best be employed to benefit stakeholders of the tourism industry. Lessons can be learned from the past so that the experience gained from it can contribute to best practice in the future. In this way, strategies can be developed to minimise the vulnerability of the tourism sector to damaging or erroneous portrayals of it and its activities in the media.
The case study method was used to explore the role of the media within the context of tourism. Four case studies provided insights on this topic. The four case studies were selected based on their diversity, within the context of the tourism sector, and because they covered a considerable period of time. These variables provided the researchers with a wide-ranging perspective on the topic.
The paper firstly focuses on the 1920’s Waiters’ Strike in the resort town of San Sebastián, Spain, and discusses the role of the media in relation to this event. The second case investigates the use of the media as a destination-marketing tool and reflects on an early manipulation of this process by the German authorities in the documentary Olympia, a film produced for the summer Olympics in 1936. The third case study reports on the manner in which the media has created tensions between connoisseurs of fine food and drink and hospitality industry professionals, and its subsequent implications on service quality. The final case investigates the role of the media in reducing demand for hospitality services in Melbourne on New Year’s Eve 2000.
Through an analysis of these diverse, but important case studies, it can be seen that the media has had, and continues to have, an impact on the development of the tourism industry in both positive and negative ways. The limitations of this research are discussed and recommendations are made for further research that will assist in developing a more comprehensive typology of the media’s role in tourism.

Vibrant, oppositional culture : the media and Australian political culture, 1880-1910

The notion that Australia has an entrenched “utilitarian political culture” has predominated in representations of political life and political culture in this country. Ostensibly, political life has been characterised above all by materialism and pragmatism, largely devoid of meaningful debate over ideas. There has, however, been a growing recognition that Australian political culture has been richer, more complex and less settled than commonly believed.

This paper examines the experience in late nineteenth and early twentieth century Australia, focussing on the role of the media in tandem with a burgeoning reading public as integral elements of a vibrant oppositional culture. Here, a passion for knowledge and self-improvement combined with a strong sense that cultivation of the mind was intrinsic to goals of moral, political and social development existed. The print media was centrally important in catering to and stimulating the interests, outlooks and aspirations of a diverse community of readers. Radical papers and journals jostled for attention alongside the mainstream press, supported by a spreading carpet of Mechanics Institutes and Schools of Arts, bookshops stocking a vast array of titles, and a comparatively large and increasingly professionalised literary-artistic intelligentsia.

Many different publics were being engaged and indeed constituted, from the very pragmatic to the strongly idealistic; from anarchists through to conservatives; from the strongly nationalistic through to those deeply loyal to God and Empire. Moreover, potentially quite complex patterns of understanding and attachment were being stimulated during this time. Taking clearer account of the media’s contribution to intellectual and literary pursuits during this period increases our understanding of the diverse and often contradictory traditions that have been part of Australian political culture.

‘CHOU GAGS CRITICS IN BANDOENG or how the media framed Premier Zhou Enlai at the Bandung Conference, 1955

At the Asian-African Conference at Bandung, Indonesia, in April 1955, the world's press concentrated its gaze on Premier Zhou Enlai of the People's Republic of China. Premier Zhou's every gesture, interaction and statement was scrutinized for evidence that his motivations at Bandung were antagonistic to Western interests. This preoccupation with the motivations of the Chinese was, however, no new phenomenon. By 1955, literary tropes of the ‘Yellow Peril’ had been firmly established in the Western imagination and, after 1949, almost seamlessly made their transition into fears of infiltrating communist Chinese ‘Reds’.

The first half of this paper explores the historical roots of the West's perceptions of the Chinese, through the literary works of Daniel Defoe to the pulp fiction of Sax Rohmer's Dr Fu Manchu series, which ran from 1917 to 1959. It then examines how this negative template was mobilised by the print media at the height of the Cold War to characterize Premier Zhou Enlai, not only as untrustworthy, but also as antagonistically anti-Western. This reading of representations of Premier Zhou at Bandung, as well as the literary tropes propagated in support of eighteenth and nineteenth-century imperial expansion, exposes a history of Western (mis)interpretations of China, and sheds light upon the media network's role in constructing a Chinese enemy in the mid-1950s.

Public relations & the media : a new influence in "agenda-setting" and content

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NGO's use of the media to create changes in corporate activities and accountabilities : evidence from a developing country

This paper investigates how social and environmental NGOs use the news media to create changes in the operations and associated accountabilities of multinational companies operating in, or sourcing products from, a developing country. In this research, we explicitly seek the views of senior officers from global and local NGOs operating in Bangladesh, as well as the views of journalists from major global and local news media organisations. Our results show that social and environmental NGOs strategically use the news media to effect change in the operating and disclosure policies pertaining to corporate labour practices. More particularly, both the NGOs and the news media representatives stated that NGOs would be relatively powerless to create change without media coverage. Our results also show that the media agenda has been responsible for creating improvements in working condition within Bangladesh, but further improvements are necessary. This is the first known study to specifically address the joint role of NGOs and the news media in creating changes in the social and environmental operating and disclosure practices of organisations operating in developing countries.

Examining representations of women's leadership in the media and Australian universities

Examines how diverse academic women educational leaders experienced and negotiated media representations of leadership in their work. The thesis argues that feminist leadership analyses assume a commonality of women's interests, ignoring the diversity, which exists between different groups of women and the material impact of diversity upon female leaders' work.

Law-and-order politics, public-opinion polls, and the media

Over the past two decades, considerable political rhetoric has focused on the need to get tough on crime. Justification for this hard-line approach has been the public's apparent concem about rising crime rates and its increasing dissatisfaction with criminal sentencing. In this paper, we consider characteristics both of the measurement of public opinion and of the influences upon public opinion that may contribute to the depiction of a fearful, punitive community. In particular, we identify sources of bias in the methods and contexts of opinion-polling that promote a distorted representation of the discrepancy between community expectations of sentencing and the practices of the judiciary. We argue that the practices of pollsters, politicians, and media combine to create a self-sustaining obstacle to considered community discussion of crime and criminal sentencing.