an article by Jessica Roberts (Universidade Catolica Portuguesa, Lisbon, Portugal) published in Journal of Information, Communication and Ethics in Society Volume 17 Issue 4 (2019)
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to consider the implications of the shift from citizen journalist to social media user by examining how ethics are addressed on social media sites compared to citizen journalism sites.
Design/methodology/approach
This paper applies the framework of a 2012 study of ethics on citizen journalism sites to social media sites’ guiding documents to compare how they discuss ethics and what they ask of the users, offering suggestions for how social media sites might imbue users with a sense of their responsibilities and obligations.
Findings
The analysis finds that ethics are largely ignored on social media sites, written in legalistic language and framed in negative terms, rather than in terms of responsibilities or obligations.
Originality/value
When citizen journalism was subsumed by social media, much of the language – lacking as it may have been – around users’ responsibilities to each other was lost. This paper suggests social media sites should seek to raise rather than lower the barriers to entry, and imbue users with a sense of the responsibility they accept when sharing information online.
Showing posts with label citizen_journalism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label citizen_journalism. Show all posts
Monday, 9 December 2019
Monday, 13 October 2014
Framing fraud: Discourse on benefit cheating in Sweden and the UK
an article by Ragnar Lundström (Umeå University, Sweden) published in European Journal of Communication Volume 28 Number 6 (December 2013)
Abstract
This article analyses discourse on benefit fraud in Swedish and British newspapers. It furthermore compares discourse on fraud in newspapers and political blogs in the two countries. In Sweden, fraud is primarily articulated as a collective social problem in policy discussions related to the health insurance programme. In the UK, it is often articulated employing strategies commonly associated with crime news narratives, and centred on images of individual cheaters.
The main result of the analysis presented here is that these observed differences between British and Swedish media representations are related to the ways in which the relationship between the welfare state and the citizens traditionally have been constructed in liberal and social democratic contexts respectively. Political attempts to highlight the issue of benefit fraud, and dominant media representations of such attempts, must therefore be understood not as attempts to combat fraud, but rather as attempts to delegitimise the more general aim and purpose of the welfare state.
They challenge the deservingness of welfare recipients in general, not just the ones that cheat, and they thereby transform the conditions for public trust in the welfare state. News discourse on fraud in both countries establishes a neoliberal, financialised and individualised notion of welfare dependency, through which the relationship between social and structural circumstances on the one hand, and poverty, exclusion and inequality on the other, become blurred.
The comparison of newspapers and blogs suggests that although dominant media representations are contested through citizen-created journalism in both contexts, they also limit the conditions for discursive struggles over the issue of benefit fraud significantly.
Abstract
This article analyses discourse on benefit fraud in Swedish and British newspapers. It furthermore compares discourse on fraud in newspapers and political blogs in the two countries. In Sweden, fraud is primarily articulated as a collective social problem in policy discussions related to the health insurance programme. In the UK, it is often articulated employing strategies commonly associated with crime news narratives, and centred on images of individual cheaters.
The main result of the analysis presented here is that these observed differences between British and Swedish media representations are related to the ways in which the relationship between the welfare state and the citizens traditionally have been constructed in liberal and social democratic contexts respectively. Political attempts to highlight the issue of benefit fraud, and dominant media representations of such attempts, must therefore be understood not as attempts to combat fraud, but rather as attempts to delegitimise the more general aim and purpose of the welfare state.
They challenge the deservingness of welfare recipients in general, not just the ones that cheat, and they thereby transform the conditions for public trust in the welfare state. News discourse on fraud in both countries establishes a neoliberal, financialised and individualised notion of welfare dependency, through which the relationship between social and structural circumstances on the one hand, and poverty, exclusion and inequality on the other, become blurred.
The comparison of newspapers and blogs suggests that although dominant media representations are contested through citizen-created journalism in both contexts, they also limit the conditions for discursive struggles over the issue of benefit fraud significantly.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
