The politics of distraction: Evidence from presidential executive orders

a column by Milena Djourelova and Ruben Durante for VOX: CEPR’s Policy Portal


Source: Djourelova and Durante (2019).

It is often suspected that politicians time announcements of controversial policies strategically to avoid public scrutiny.

This column reports evidence from a systematic analysis of executive orders issued by US presidents, showing that their timing is consistent with strategic behaviour. Presidents tend to issue executive orders, and specifically ones that are likely to generate negative publicity, in coincidence with other important events that distract the media and the public.

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I know that this piece is telling many people what they already know but it is good to see the evidence.
I would dearly love to see a similar analysis of political announcements made in the UK.

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Terrorist Masculinities: Political Masculinity between Fiction, Facts, and Their Mediation

an article by Rainer Emig (Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz, Germany) published in Men and Masculinities Volume 22 Issue 3 (August 2019)

Abstract

This essay proposes that terrorism manifests itself in a relation that encompasses masculinity as well as the media. The origin of this relationship is the joint performativity of gender and acts of terror. This makes terrorism an instrument of social and political change. But in order to legitimize themselves, terrorism as well as masculinity require authorization by a phantasmagorical power.

Drawing on the dominance of males among terrorists, this essay will look at an early depiction of terrorism in Conrad’s The Secret Agent, a contemporary representation in Sahota’s novel Ours Are the Streets and terrorism’s real manifestation in the Paris carnage of November 2015.

It will show that in the desire to satisfy an imagined “higher authority” and thereby assert an individual as well as political identity, masculinity and terrorism share a performative root. This also suggests a possible way of exposing and exploding terrorism and masculinity from within, by feeding into the mediated stream of its representations images and ideas of inferiority, ridicule, and failure.

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Political polarization is about feelings, not facts

posted by S. Abbas Raza in 3 Quarks Daily: Robert B. Talisse in The Conversation

Politicians and pundits from all quarters often lament democracy's polarized condition.

Similarly, citizens frustrated with polarized politics also demand greater flexibility from the other side.

Decrying polarization has become a way of impugning adversaries. Meanwhile, the political deadlock and resentment that polarization produces goes unaddressed. Ironic, right?

Commentators rarely say what they mean by polarization. But if Americans are to figure out how to combat it, they need to begin from a clear understanding of what polarization is.

My forthcoming book, “Overdoing Democracy,” argues that polarization isn’t about where you get your news or how politicians are divided – it’s about how a person’s political identity is wrapped up with almost everything they do.

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Hazel’s comment
Yes, this item is all about the USA but there are parrallels with the UK. I don’t know about Talisse’s book but this article uses a vocabulary I can understand. Not just the words but the words expressing ideas.

“Pour It Up, Drink It Up, Live It Up, Give It Up” Masculinity and Alcohol in Pop Music Videos

an article by Samuel Lindsay and Antonia C. Lyons (Massey University, Wellington, New Zealand) published in Men and Masculinities Volume 21 Issue 5 (December 2018)

Abstract

Music videos are popular, frequently aimed at young adult audiences, and easily accessible through online platforms. They often portray specific versions of masculinities and femininities and are increasingly linked to the alcohol industry.

This research explored how masculinity, femininity, and alcohol consumption are constructed within four mainstream popular music videos. Critical multimodal discourse analysis was employed to systematically examine dominant meanings across various modes of the videos (lyrics, sound, video, and editing).

Two major discourses were identified, namely, extreme consumption and freedom, and together these created “playboy” and “woman-as-object” subject positions. These positions are discussed with reference to hegemonic masculinity, postfeminist culture, and capitalist consumerism and considered in terms of the complex ways in which influential postfeminist and hegemonic discourses obscure the operations of power.

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How do children and their families experience food poverty according to UK newspaper media 2006‐15?

an article by Abigail Knight, Julia Brannen, Rebecca O’Connell and Laura Hamilton (University College London Institute of Education, UK) published in Journal of Poverty and Social Justice Volume 26 Number 2 (June 2018)

Abstract

This paper contributes to scholarship concerned with media representations of poverty by exploring newspaper coverage of food poverty as experienced by UK children and families.

Our content analysis of six contrasting print newspapers from 2006‐15 finds that reporting of children’s and families’ food poverty begins in 2011, peaks in 2014 and is dominated by articles about foodbanks.

Narrative analysis identifies differences as well as similarities in the ways the problem is constructed in papers with different political stances as well as notable absences in the coverage, including the broader dimensions of food poverty and the views of children themselves.

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Lifehacker: How to Teach Your Kids to Spot Fake News

a post by Leigh Anderson for the Offspring blog [with grateful thanks to ResearchBuzz Firehose]


Image: www.vpnsrus.com via Flickr

How to teach kids to spot fake news?

First: Teach everyone to spot fake news.

When I was a child, my parents had access to only a few news sources: our local paper, the big-city dailies (for us, the Washington Post and the New York Times) and the nightly news. Kids today have … the entire internet, with every crackpot theory and faked moon landing right at their fingertips. Even the distinction between “media” and “journalism” has blurred to the point that many adults don’t know if anyone can be trusted at all.

Which means that parental responsibilities now include giving your kids the tools to assess whether a given story is real – backed up by solid reporting – or biased, or totally and completely fake. Or Russian propaganda. To this end, educators are developing curricula to encourage “media literacy” in the face of an onslaught of, well, media bullshit and a president who’s actively trying to discredit responsible journalism. To get an idea of how parents can help their kids separate fact from fiction, I spoke to two people who are deep in the media-literacy trenches.

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Information inequality

a column by Patrick Kennedy and Andrea Prat for VOX: CEDPR’s Policy Portal

Real news is an antidote to fake news, but how much political information do we access and where does it come from? Based on an analysis of news consumption in 18 countries, this column shows that low-income, low-education voters use fewer information sources. This pattern is reflected at the aggregate level, with countries with high income inequality also demonstrating high information inequality. News sources that cater to information-poor audiences have greater ‘media power’, and there is no evidence that public service broadcasting reduces information inequality.

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Perceptions of surveillance: Reflexivity and trust in a mediatized world (the case of Sweden)

an article by André Jansson (Karlstad University, Sweden) published in European Journal of Communication volume 27 Number 4 (December 2012)

Abstract

Even though the field of surveillance studies has expanded during the last decade, there is still a need for studies that empirically explain and contextualise people’s perceptions of the increasingly mediatised ‘surveillance society’.

This article provides a ‘middle range’ social theorisation, following Giddens, as well as an updated empirical account, based on a nationwide Swedish survey, of how various forms of surveillance are perceived as social phenomena.

Through factor analysis three dimensions are elaborated:

• state surveillance, 
• commercial surveillance, and
• mediated interveillance.

The article argues that the realm of interveillance blurs the line between systemic and social trust, and thus calls for context-specific modes of routinised reflexivity.

Whereas such modes of boundary maintenance may potentially run across social lines of division, the results suggest that the management of interveillance primarily constitutes an instance of sociocultural structuration.

Hazel’s comment:
This item is, of course, not even remotley connected to careers information but the blurb about my blog says “with the emphasis on” not “exclusively about”!

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Framing the riots

an article by Allison Cavanagh (University of Leeds) and Alex Dennis (University of Sheffield) published in Capital & Class Volume 36 Number 3 (October 2012)

Abstract

An analysis of commentary on the UK’s August 2011 riots reveals shifts in the way the media and politicians now construe concepts of youth, race, criminality and deprivation.

By comparing the response to these events with that which followed the riots of 1981, these changes can be clarified and illuminated.

This analysis reveals that discussions of ‘social problems’ exploited by ‘infiltrators’ (1981) have been replaced by notions of ‘pure criminality’ and ‘mob rule’.

The implications of these changes for contemporary protest, and some ways in which the riots and other forms of protest can be related, are drawn out.

Hazel’s comment:
Are the youth of today so very different from the youth of 30 years ago? I doubt it. What is different, as this article makes clear, is the authority’s language in response is very different.
I am aware that the activities of last year were more extreme and that the looting was on a scale that has rarely been seen in England but that does not, to my mind, make the perpetrators any less victims of social problems which need to be sorted.

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