Journalism

Discursive and content analyses of media coverage of a 1998 Aotearoa/New Zealand partnership research project on the genetics of inherited stomach cancer show a decided preference for stories that depict the discoveries as the achievement of only one research partner, a genetics research team at Otago University. The coverage downplayed the major contribution of the genealogical research carried out by indigenous Maori researchers for families affected by the cancer. This contribution was included in a news release from the research funding agency, the Health Research Council of New Zealand. Through an array of discursive constructions and omissions, the media stories obscure the role of the Maori researchers in initiating and contributing to the genetics research and applying the findings of the overall project. We argue that what has been lost here is an opportunity to acknowledge and celebrate a major Maori contribution to international scientific advance and the health of people. Instead the media delivered another example of marginalizing colonial coverage of Maori achievement, denigrating existing work and potentially discouraging other such cutting-edge collaborative health research.

This article analyzes the San Francisco Chronicle’s coverage of the controversy over logging Headwaters, an ancient redwood forest in northern California. It contends that the Chronicle’s fundamental way of representing reality and judging the legitimacy of claims is through favoring an instrumental over ethical rationality. It concludes that this logic ends up limiting the ways that the main actors (Earth First! and Pacific Lumber) and the controversy itself are framed. This impacts the discursive landscape that the Chronicle creates because those in what Habermas (1984) calls the ‘systems world’ are favored over those in the ‘lifeworld’. The Chronicle’s coverage ends up setting up a set of unwritten criteria that embrace particular values and practices as necessary in order to be taken seriously as a political actor or speaker in relation to this environmental issue. This results from various journalistic routines and frameworks employed for constructing knowledge and legitimating actors and voices.

This article advances on existing studies in agenda-building theory, examining how a prominent sports magazine can build an agenda for mainstream press coverage, which in turn assists in building policy agendas. When Ken Caminiti, a former Most Valuable Player in the National League, admitted to Sports Illustrated in June 2002 that he used anabolic steroids during his award-winning season, mainstream newspaper journalists reported the revelations heavily, with many calling for changes in policy and the introduction of drug testing. As discussed here, policy-makers apparently listened: approximately three months after the magazine exposé appeared, baseball instituted a drug testing procedure. The study reveals how mainstream newspaper reports (n = 231) built on the Sports Illustrated investigation and how policy-makers reacted to a widespread condemnation of professional baseball, namely its apparent inability to police itself.

Based on a national survey carried out in 2001, this study provides a demographic and attitudinal profile of Ugandan journalists at an interesting time when we are not only witnessing increasing media globalization but also democratic, if shaky, transitions in Sub-Saharan Africa. The study explores the demographics and job conditions of news people in this East African country, their role perceptions, professional attitudes and beliefs, as well as the major constraints on journalistic freedoms in Uganda. Where it is possible and appropriate, comparisons are made to both African and western journalists.

The results show that Ugandan journalists highly value the so-called western journalistic functions of information, analysis and interpretation and investigation of official claims. They also show strong support for ‘populist mobilizer’ functions such as giving ordinary people voice and setting the political agenda. However, despite the relative press freedom in recent years, Ugandan news people work under conditions that pose major legal, political and economic limitations on their journalistic freedoms. In spite of such constraints, they showed a commitment to the public affairs benefits of their jobs.

This article attempts to contribute to a better theoretical understanding of news. Based on an examination of the vast body of literature known as the study of journalism, three points of consensus are identified and tested through a comparative case study analysis of the news coverage of an issue, VIH/AIDS, in four different countries (the United States, Portugal, Spain and Brazil) during a period of three months (October–December, 1993). The data show that news is ‘event-oriented’, that official sources dominate news, and that proximity is a basic news value of the members of this ‘interpretive community’ who are today called journalists.