Media and Terrorism in France - new special issue of Media, War & Conflict

The journal Media, War & Conflict has published a new special issue on Media and Terrorism in France, edited by Katharina Niemeyer and Staffan Ericson. Following the Paris attacks of 2015, journalists as well as ordinary citizens in France have used different media to make sense of the events. The special issue offers a range of qualitative and quantitative studies, ranging from studies of street artists’ responses to the attacks to how big data can help us interpret such events, and that consider the impact of the attacks on French national identity as well as how international media reported the events.

Click here to read the articles.

Media, War & Conflict was first launched in April 2008. It is edited by NewPolCom’s Ben O’Loughlin along with co-editors Sarah Maltby, Katy Parry and Laura Roselle.

Paul Bernal - Why do governments always get internet regulation wrong? Tuesday 30th April 5pm Queens 170

This evening Paul Bernal from UEA will present a talk to NewPolCom entitled, Why do governments always get internet regulation wrong? Because they don't embrace the mess...

Time: Tuesday 30th April 5pm

Place: Queens 170

Please find details here of Paul’s talk:

Why do governments always get internet regulation wrong? Because they don’t embrace the mess…

Dr Paul Bernal–Research Group: Media, Information Technology and Intellectual Property Law, University of East Anglia.  

The clamour for governments to ‘regulate' the internet has never been greater. They’re worried about offensive speech, about trolling and cyber-bullying, about fake news and political manipulation, about piracy and other forms of copyright breach. The internet, according to some of these accounts, is a dangerous place, a ‘wild west’ that needs to be reined in and controlled. And yet their efforts are largely ineffective - or worse, are actually counterproductive. Plans to address trolling end up creating tools for trolls to use on their victims. Attempts to deal with ‘fake news’ end up making fake news more effective and pushed nearer to the top of search lists. More criminal offences and stronger enforcement make almost no inroads in trolling. The question is why this happens - and the answer, across the board, is a failure to face up to the complexity, the messiness of the internet, but instead to fall into a series of classical traps based on oversimplified views of how the internet works. In this talk, Paul Bernal will explain why and how this happens - and what can be done to improve the situation.

O'Loughlin to speak in Poland on UK soft power after Brexit

On 26 April 2019 Collegium Civitas in Warsaw will host a conference examining Poland and the UK in a Post-Brexit World. Poland and the UK have often had positive and significant relations within Europe, each trying to keep Germany and France in check at key moments, and both assertive in their postures towards Russia. All of this is achieved through communication - through diplomacy, signals and gestures. But with the UK likely to leave the EU, this leaves Poland alone to try to balance against a French-German axis and it leaves Britain to find a new voice outside of Europe and with which to speak to Europe.

At the conference, Ben O’Loughlin will consider how debates and strategies around UK soft power in the past five years indicate what voice and role the UK would most usefully find.

If you are in Warsaw, do join!

Programme:

A New Footing? Poland and the UK in a Post-Brexit World 

26 April 2019

Łazarski University, ul Świeradowska 43, 02-662, Warszawa

(Room 273F)

(Contact: kerry.longhurst@gmail.com Collegium Civitas)

10am Opening Remarks

Martin Dahl (Faculty Dean, Łazarski University)

Alister Miskimmon (Queens University, Belfast)

Stephen Steele (UK Embassy, Warsaw)

Katarzyna Szczepaniak (The British Council, Warsaw)

11.00 – 12.30

Jan Grzymski (Łazarski University) ‘Brexit and the Limits of Europe’ 

Quincy Cloet and Kerry Longhurst (University of Wales, Aberystwyth and Collegium Civitas) ‘Domestic Leakage and Polish Foreign and Security Policy’ 

Vahan Hunanyan (Krzysztof Skubiszewski Foundation) ‘Poland’s Eastern Policy’

Alister Miskimmon Chair (Queens University, Belfast)

LUNCH

14 – 15.30

Marcin Zaborowski (Łazarski University) ‘Implications of Brexit for Central and Eastern Europe’

Ben O’ Loughlin (Royal Holloway University of London)  ‘British Soft Power in a Time of European Disintegration’

Agnieszka Nitza (Collegium Civitas) ‘Exploring the Idea of Soft Power – Applicable Concept or Non-Starter?’

Spasimir Domaradzki Discussant (Łazarski University)

The political implications of Facebook’s shift to private messaging - James Dennis

Dr. James Dennis, Senior Lecturer at the University of Portsmouth and a recent PhD graduate from NewPolCom, explains what’s really going on with Facebook’s recent policy changes.

The political implications of Facebook’s shift to private messaging

In a lengthy statement, Mark Zuckerberg recently announced that the future of Facebook was in private messaging, declaring that he expected “future versions of Messenger and WhatsApp to become the main ways people communicate on the Facebook network”. These messages will likely be ephemeral, deleting themselves after a specified period. 

This announcement marks a seismic shift away from how Facebook currently operates. Its business model to date has revolved around the News Feed, the continually updating list of posts that feature on a user’s home page. In order to prioritise these posts, the News Feed algorithm draws on different forms of self-expression, from status-updates to the posts that a user clicks Like on. Crucially, this data is also used to inform the personalised advertisements that underpin the financial success of the company. So why make this change? 

To many, this announcement will not come as a surprise. Facebook, and its approach to privacy, has been under significant pressure from governments across the globe following the Cambridge Analytica scandal, which laid bare the dangerous lack of regulation that the organisation had in place to protect the data of its users. Furthermore, recent polls have shown that Facebook has experienced significant declines in user numbers, with Edison Research finding that the platform has 15 million fewer users in the United States than in 2017, the first such reduction since it began tracking Facebook usage in 2008. This is in stark contrast to the growing popularity of WhatsApp, which boasts more than 1.5 billion active monthly users. 

New research illustrates how this shift may reshape political communication. In Beyond Slacktivism, I used media diaries to understand how citizens use Facebook and Twitter to discuss the news and participate in political life. In contrast to my own expectations, I found that many of the civically-interested, heavy social media users that I recruited refrained from public forms of expression on these platforms. Instead, they were “listeners”, consuming political information from social media but taking to private and semi-public spaces for debate. Here, Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp became sites for rich political talk.

Some campaigning groups have devised creative forms of activism as a result. In her contribution to Political Communication in Britain, Abi Rhodes illustrates how Momentum, the political activist group founded in the wake of Jeremy Corbyn’s rise to leader of the Labour Party, used WhatsApp to mobilise voters. Around 400,000 people received messages on polling day in 2017, encouraging them to support the Labour leader.

For political journalists, however, this represents a significant obstacle, as Facebook seeks to transform the standards for news distribution across its services yet again. From encouraging publishers to create content to be consumed within its walled garden with Instant Articles, to the changes to the News Feed algorithm in 2018 that prioritised posts from friends over Pages, the company has long played an active role in shaping the style, format, and content of journalism on its platform. Given that many news organisations rely on traffic from the News Feed for a sizeable proportion of their audience, such a change requires a radical reimagining of how journalists engage with Facebook. 

Perhaps the biggest challenge facing Facebook and its “privacy-focused vision for social networking” is the difficulty of curbing the spread of misinformation and disturbing content on its messaging applications. The need for such measures was evident in the response to the tragic terrorist attack in Christchurch. Facebook removed 1.5 million copies of the disturbing video of the attack, with 1.2 million blocked automatically prior to upload and a further 300,000 removed after being reviewed by content moderators. Yet, many news organisations reported that these videos were still accessible hours after the attack took place and, increasingly, the working conditions of the content moderators who had to repeatedly relive this atrocity have been questioned.Still, with public-facing platforms, social media firms at least have some tools at their disposal. Private messaging apps are not as straightforward. 

By using end-to-end encryption, messages sent on WhatsApp can only be seen by the sender and the receiver. Even WhatsApp cannot access these conversations. This creates a real challenge in stopping the spread of false stories and harmful material. While Facebook has introduced a limit to the number of contacts a message can be forwarded to, currently standing at five, groups on WhatsApp can include up to 256 contacts, so there is still an obvious risk of amplification. With evidence of conspiracy theories being widely shared during the contentious presidential election in Brazil in 2018 and hoaxes in India leading to violence, this danger is real and immediate. While the commitment of Facebook to fund research into this problem is an encouraging sign, striking a balance between privacy and challenging misinformation will not be easy.

Whether or not this substantive change happens remains to be seen. Mark Zuckerberg has previous for making grand declarations on the future of Facebook that have not been delivered, such as his claim in 2015 that the News Feed would be primarily video by 2020. However, this time, the matter might be out of his hands. As increasing numbers of citizens, driven by fears about privacy and reputational damage, consume news and discuss political issues in private and semi-public messaging applications, our understanding of what social media is and how it impacts political communication must adapt accordingly. 

James Dennis is Senior Lecturer in Political Communication and Journalism at the University of Portsmouth

James will be celebrating the launch of his book, Beyond Slacktivism: Political Participation on Social Media, at the PSA Media and Politics Group reception on Monday 15 April in Nottingham. This event will also mark the launch ofPolitical Communication in Britain: Campaigning, Media and Polling in the 2017 General Election, edited by Dominic Wring, Roger Mortimore and Simon Atkinson. Tickets are free to delegates and non-delegates alike and are available here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/psa-media-and-politics-group-reception-tickets-59153331206

The drama of politics: Ellen Watts to present at PSA 2019, Nottingham

Recent NewPolCom PhD and current Teaching Fellow Dr. Ellen Watts is presenting at the Political Studies Association (PSA) annual conference on 15 April 2019 in Nottingham. She is part of a brilliant panel organised by the PSA’s Media & Politics Group (MPG) called The drama of politics, featuring Dr. Katy Parry and Dr. Beth Johnson (Leeds) as well as Prof. Kay Richardson (Liverpool). Ellen’s paper is on Celebrities as Political Representatives - you’ll find her abstract below.

Panel - The drama of politics 

This panel considers the intersections of politics and drama, exploring both the portrayal of politics on screen and the activism of actors off screen. We consider both the manner in which formal politics is represented in television drama through the fictionalised work of politicians and the way in which actors use their celebrity to fight for social and political change through varied political channels. Building on scholarship which argues that popular culture provides valuable spaces through which to examine political values and tensions (Corner & Richardson, 2008; van Zoonen & Wring, 2012), this panel looks at how interventions on and off screen potentially shape understandings of politics in the UK.

Ellen Watts - Celebrities as Political Representatives: Capital, Credibility, and Continuity

The ability of celebrities to become influential political actors is evident, but the process enabling this is not. While Driessens (2013) proposes conceptualising celebrity as a form of capital, it remains unclear how celebrities obtain political recognition. I argue that a return to the question of whether and how celebrities act as ‘legitimate’ political representatives is needed to address this (Street, 2004). Building on Driessens’ concept of celebrity capital, I argue that the ability of celebrities to exchange this for political capital is contingent on their claims to represent others (Saward, 2010). In this paper I take Emma Watson as a case study to explore how this process works in practice, drawing on ethnography of her online feminist book group Our Shared Shelf. I show how Watson uses her resources – including her large social media followings – to perform three types of claim to represent feminists. Through interviews with Our Shared Shelf members I explore why Watson is accepted as a representative - affording her political capital - by those who are not predominantly her ‘fans’. This demonstrates the interconnection between celebrity, politics, and representation; Watson is accepted as a legitimate political actor due to her ‘reach’, afforded by her social media platforms and ability to attract media attention. However Watson’s case also demonstrates that while celebrities can bring meaningful political change, their evaluation according to political and cultural hierarchies is more broadly indicative of continuity. Watson is accepted as a political representative not because she is a celebrity, but because she is ‘not like other celebrities’. These comparisons are based on Watson’s ‘connection’ to formal politics through her role as a UN Women Goodwill Ambassador (Saward, 2010), class-based assessments of her ‘appropriate’ behaviour, and her consistent self-presentation across fields and platforms. These resources enable Watson to negotiate what I argue is a ‘paradox of self-promotion’ in celebrity politics, whereby celebrities must attract attention to be accepted as credible representatives while avoiding accusations of ‘attention seeking’.

Why do we need investigative methods? Workshop 13th April 2019

This short post explains why we think the methods of investigative journalism might be relevant to academics, activists and others who research and write about political affairs. This is ahead of our workshop on investigative journalism on Saturday 13th April. Tickets available here.

Yoav Galai and Ben O’Loughlin

During a recent thesis examination, a question came up about a missing document - ‘Why didn’t the student file a freedom of information request for it?’ To be sure, the theoretical constructions that the student built around that particular unknown were sound and enlightening and its omission was not a serious failing. Still, given that the document exists, it was curiously missing. This led us to think: do academic researchers miss evidence that journalists or other kinds of investigators don’t miss?

Doctoral students in the social sciences and the humanities are trained to conduct rigorous analyses of slippery subjects. Our researchers regularly navigate through labyrinthian archives and pierce through covers of denial to explicate the manifestation of political power in social life. However, we rarely have conversations about how to negotiate access with gate-keepers and sources, or how to plan and organise our approach to often reluctant fields of study. 

In the New Political Communication unit at Royal Holloway, we embrace the inevitable trans-disciplinary nature of the study of political power. In our practice, it had become evidently clear that there is a productive conversation to be had between critical scholars and investigative journalists. In this pilot workshop we will explore this link and focus on the practice of journalistic investigation of complex political systems. 

The ‘freedom of information’ instance was an indicator that some of the tools that investigative journalists regularly use may come in handy for academic  researchers. However, the workshop is not tailored for academics. The skills you will learn from Pulitzer winning journalist Dean Starkman and Peter Geoghegan, the investigations editor at openDemocracy, are how to conduct a journalistic investigation.

Starkman has in the past drawn a distinction between access journalism and accountability journalism. Access journalism is based on access to elite figures, who may offer a personal or corporate view of a situation. Their words may provide an immediate account of precisely what happened. Those words will necessarily be partial and may be, in some cases, prone to PR. Accountability journalism seeks to speak to all those in an organisation who were involved in a situation, any relevant documents and financial trails, as well as interviews with communities affected by that situation. Access journalism may be an easier route to quick clicks but offers less scrutiny and potentially less understanding. Accountability is more difficult but offers a ‘thicker’ picture.  

Our doctoral students face these dilemmas. Will a PhD based on interviews with 30 prominent policymakers make for a substantial contribution to a field -- and potentially a book deal afterwards? Or is it a safer bet to conduct an anthropological study and take much longer building a holistic understanding of an organisation from within? What form of knowledge is more useful?

Starkman and Geoghegan will take us beyond that choice by showing how different data, tools and approaches to investigation can be mixed and matched. The point is clear: There is a lot out there we are not using. There is a lot out there we are not even finding. 

This workshop will be of great value to aspiring researchers, journalists, activists and others who gather and analyse data to tell stories about how political affairs work.  

Strategic narrative panels at the International Studies Association (ISA) convention in Toronto this week

For those at the ISA annual convention in Toronto on 27-31 March, there will be a number of panels exploring the role of strategic narrative in international affairs, including a debate about whether framing and narrative research can be unified in a productive way. Please find details below. There are also a range of other political communication-themed panels and talks, many of them convened by the International Communications (ICOMM) Section of ISA - find them on the official programme here.

TC13: Strategic Narratives, News Coverage, and Russia-U.S. Relations

Thursday, March 28, 1:45 PM - 3:30 PM Willow Centre, Sheraton Centre Toronto

Strategic Narratives, News Coverage, and Russia-U.S. Relations

• Chair: Philip Seib (University of Southern California)

• Participant: Alister Miskimmon (Queen's University, Belfast)

• Participant: Ben O'Loughlin (Royal Holloway, University of London)

• Participant: Laura Roselle (Elon University)

In their seminal work on strategic narratives, Miskimmon, O’Loughlin, and Roselle write, “Narratives are central to the identity and behavior of actors in the international system, the structures of the system itself, and how ideas, issues, and policies are contested.” Major powers, including Russia and the United States, rely heavily on strategic narratives to establish and maintain their influence within the arena of international relations. News media provide important venues for the communication of these narratives to global and domestic publics, and studying news coverage can provide insights about the construction and effectiveness of narratives. This roundtable will examine Russian and American strategic narratives as they are reflected in the two countries’ news media and will analyze ways that these narratives are affected by the evolution in media technologies and audience news consumption patterns.

FA24: Strategic Narratives and Frame Contestation: Unifying a Fractured Paradigm 

Friday, March 29, 8:15 AM - 10:00 AM Provincial South, Sheraton Centre Toronto

• Chair: Steven L. Livingston (George Washington University)

• Discussant: Carola Weil (McGill University, School of Continuing Studies)

Frames and Narratives: Conceptualizing Cultural Congruence

• Author: Natalia Chaban (University of Canterbury)

Theorizing Narratives of Revolution in the Russian and Global Media Download the Paper

• Author: Ben O'Loughlin (Royal Holloway, University of London)

RT Online Coverage of US Election 2016: Analyzing Strategic Narratives Related to Presidential Candidates Download the Paper

• Author: Laura Roselle (Elon University)

Inverting Cascades: Network Framing Contestation Following Chemical Weapons Attacks in Syria

• Author: Steven L. Livingston (George Washington University)

• Author: Jack Nassetta (The George Washington University)

Framing in a Fractured Paradigm: Impacts of Digital Technology on Ideology, Power and International Affairs

• Author: Robert Entman (George Washington University)

• Author: Nikki Usher (University of Illinois)

Recent years have witnessed an explosion in the number of non-peer reviewed investigations of digital network “disinformation” campaigns and “fake news.” The political exigencies of the times have prioritized often richly empirical though atheoretical demonstrations of probable links between particular narratives and their sources (often Russian trolls and bots) and amplifiers (often state-sponsored media and extremist websites and social media users). In many instances, this work has been remarkably insightful and highly relevant to the urgent need to understand emergent threats to the integrity of Western Liberal institutions and norms. Missing from this work is the development of a political communication theory of “disinformation.” Such is the purpose of this panel. The papers presented here focus on the development of theoretical constructs that help us explain politically intentional global information flows. The papers are anchored by Entman’s cascade activation model of frame contestation (2005) and Miskimmon, Roselle, O’Loughlin (2013) strategic narratives framework. In this way, the panel coheres around a discrete intellectual challenge (theory building) and similar empirical research questions.

SA18: Stickiness and Silence: Explaining the Failures and Successes of Strategic Narrative

Saturday, March 30, 8:15 AM - 10:00 AM Chestnut East, Sheraton Centre Toronto

• Chair: Alister Miskimmon (Queen's University, Belfast)

• Discussant: Ben O'Loughlin (Royal Holloway, University of London)

The Belt and Road Initiative and Central Asia: A Success Story? Download the Paper

• Author: Carolijn van Noort (University of the West of Scotland)

Narrative Stickiness or Narrative Resilience? Learning from the Clinton Administration’s Strategic Narratives and Varying Congruence in Multilateral Peace Operations Download the Paper

• Author: Raphaël Zaffran (University of Geneva)

Trump’s Greatest Sticks: Covfefe, Witch Hunt, and Beyond. Narrative Stickiness, for Better or Worse, and Approaching the Formula for Narrative Success Download the Paper

• Author: Devon Simons (Aberystwyth University)

Understanding How Citizens Narrate International Affairs - The Case of the UK Download the Paper

• Author: Thomas Colley (King's College London)

Narrating Russia in Times of Information Warfare: How Sweden, France and the UK Mediate Response to Russian Disinformation Campaigns

• Author: Maria Hellman (Swedish Defence University)

This panel seeks to describe and explain cases of strategic narrative success and failure. Why do some narrations of events stick for audiences while others fall silent? The panelists use a series of conflict-based case studies and theoretical approaches to discuss different measures and conceptualisation of success and failure, the conditions and temporalities of success and failure, and the ways in which success and failure exist independently of their narration of their own efficacy. This discussion builds directly on the Re-narrating Conflict: Media, Military and Public Translations of Strategic Narratives panel of ISA 2018. These panelists found surprising instances of narrative stickiness and silence: that UK audiences have forgotten 9/11 was related to the Afghanistan War; that elites in Kazakhstan tactically engage with the China’s Belt and Road strategic narratives to develop their own national identity narrative; that a hostile domestic press ignore Trump’s narrations yet with one curious exception; and that even when states achieve narrative congruence with multilateral allies there can be risk to clarity of mission. The new panel addresses a mix of old and new cases, making a distinct contribution to development forms of explanation and interpretation in the growing field of strategic narrative study.

Welcome to Visiting Scholar Prof. Øyvind Kalnes

Prof. Øyvind Kalnes is visiting us on a sabbatical from Inland Norway University and will be based in the New Political Communication Unit. He will spend this time writing various articles about the representation of global risks in news and entertainment media. He has recently published on crisis communication and pandemics, documentary film and peace facilitation, and social media between hate politics and cosmopolitanism. His new work will examine the Ukraine crisis in Norwegian mass media, narrative layers of the 22 July memory in Norway, and the challenges Ebola of the new media ecology for risk communication.

He took his Cand.polit.-degree at the University of Bergen in 1990, specializing in Comparative Politics. After that he started academic work as assistant professor at the Institute for Comparative Politics in Bergen, and got his present position in 1995. In 1997-99 he was Dean and Vice Dean at the Faculty of Cultural, Media and Social Sciences; in 2003-04 Dean at the Faculty of Social Sciences; and in 2015-18 Head of Section for International Studies and History.

In the fall of 2007 he was visiting scholar at the University of Wollongong and visited the University of California, Berkeley during Winter 2014/15. At the present time he is on sabbatical and a visiting scholar at Royal Holloway from Mid-March to late May 2019.

A warm welcome to Øyvind and we hope you have a productive stay with us!

Ben O'Loughlin - Thinker in Residence, 2019, Flemish Royal Academy, on Democracy & Disinformation

Ben O’Loughlin has been appointed Thinker in Residence for 2019 by the Flemish Royal Academy of Sciences and the Arts. Alongside Anja Bechmann, Ben will spend time in Brussels, Leuven and other venues in the coming months discussing disinformation with a range of business, government, civil society and technology groups as well as university scholars and students.

Youthquake and young cosmopolitans - James Sloam talk this Wednesday 20th March 4.30pm

This Wednesday 20th of March at PIR Research Seminar we are very happy to have Dr James Sloam giving his talk “Youthquake 2017: the Rise of Young Cosmopolitans in Britain since the Financial Crisis'?” Please join us for a discussion of this fascinating topic. The event will take place in FW101 and starts at 4.30 pm.

You can find and abstract and bio below. 

Abstract:

James will discuss the reasons behind the 2017 youthquake – which a significant increase in youth engagement, and an unprecedented gap in youth support for Labour over the Conservative Party. The talk explores changes in youth political participation in the UK since the onset of the 2008 global financial crisis – from austerity, to the 2016 EU referendum, to the rise of Corbyn – up until the June 2017 General Election. He identifies the rise of cosmopolitan values and left-leaning attitudes amongst Young Millennials, particularly students and young women. The situation in the UK is also contrasted with developments in youth participation in other established democracies, including the youthquakes inspired by Obama in the US (2008) and Trudeau in Canada (2015). The book, Youthquake 2017: The Rise of Young Cosmopolitans in Britain, from which the research is taken can be accessed free here:https://www.palgrave.com/it/book/9783319974682#aboutBook

Bio

James Sloam is reader in politics at Royal Holloway University, and founding convenor of the UK Political Studies Association (PSA) specialist group on young people’s politics. James has published widely in the area of youth, citizenship and politics in Europe and the United States, including articles inWest European Politics, Comparative Political Studies and New Media and Society. James is currently leading a project for the Greater London Assembly and the London Mayor’s Office (with the NGO, Bite the Ballot) investigating the key policy issues for young Londoners and ‘youth voice’ (with reference to the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals). He is a fellow of the UK All-Party Parliamentary Group on Democratic Participation, and authored the chapter on ‘electoral participation’ for the 2016 United Nations World Youth Report.