Deepfakes do not fool people, but still undermine trust in news

So-called deepfake videos do not deceive the audience, but they increase uncertainty and thus decrease trust in news. The result is reported by Loughborough University researchers Cristian Vaccari and Andrew Chadwick. They conducted an online experiment with a statistically representative sample of the British population (N = 2 005). The participants were first asked about … Continued

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Published: 2 Mar 2020

ARTICLE: BBC’s senior journalists are disconnected from the public

Prominent journalists working for the British Broadcasting Corporation are very different from their audience, Gary James Merrill, of University of Roehampton, writes. He investigated the social constitution of 66 senior BBC journalists and compared them to national data. Merrill also included samples of senior Conservative and Labour politicians in the comparison. The journalists have more … Continued

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Published: 9 Dec 2019
Picture: SH-60B helicopter flies over Sendai by United States Navy, public domain

ARTICLE: Western newspapers used a cultural framework when reporting the Great East Japan Disaster

The Great East Japan Disaster of 2011 provides an important case study through which to evaluate how the western media cover Japan. Besides the nuclear crisis, limited attention has been paid to news reporting across the multiple overlapping disaster. Jamie Matthews of Bournemouth University did a critical discourse analysis of coverage of the disaster in … Continued

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Published: 22 May 2018
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ARTICLE: Data journalism producing abstract categories

The world around us is not naturally organized into categories for statistical analysis. For the purposes of data journalism, discrete, unique incidents, events, and people must be rendered as similar, so that abstract categories may be created and compared, a new study states. Wilson Lowrey and Jue Hou, of the University of Alabama, studied data … Continued

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Published: 7 May 2018
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ARTICLE: Folk theories help to explain how “news avoiders” get information

Growing numbers of people access information in other ways than by reading newspapers or accessing a news organization’s website. There’s been a shift towards so-called ‘distributed discovery’, where people find information via a range of digital intermediaries and platforms. Benjamin Toff of the University of Minnesota, and Rasmus Kleis Nielsen of the University of Oxford, … Continued

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Published: 24 Apr 2018
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ARTICLE: The Guardian articles written by women and people of color received a disproportionate amount of abusive comments

Compared to men, articles written by women attracted a higher percentage of inappropriate comments, new study finds. Becky Gardiner of Goldsmiths, University of London, studied blocked comments on The Guardian website. In 2006, The Guardian opened most of its articles to reader comments. While the articles were commented frequently, at the same time many journalists … Continued

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Published: 27 Mar 2018

ARTICLE: How journalists give think tanks their authority

The way journalists cite think tanks can help construct them as authoritative sources, Andrew Chadwick, of Loughborough University, writes with Declan McDowell-Naylor, Amy P. Smith and Ellen Watts, all three of Royal Holloway, University of London. The authors analysed the way British broadcasters referred to the think tank Institute of Fiscal Studies (IFS) prior to … Continued

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Published: 23 Mar 2018
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ARTICLE: The BBC does not live out the ideals of public service broadcasting

Independent and strong enough public service broadcasters are often seen as a defence against overly commercialized or state-captured media. The BBC has been praised as a global standard bearer in broadcast radio and television. Even though its relationship with the government and the so-called establishment is not straighforward, the company is far from being totally … Continued

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Published: 13 Mar 2018