Journalism

Drawing on a close analysis of how the Abu Ghraib photographs originally were perceived and framed in the American news media, public debate, and in various cultural contexts, this article addresses the question of how iconic news media images exercise power in the shaping of news, politics, and public opinion. It specifically takes issue with the tendency among prominent communication scholars to assume that visuals mainly function to support dominant news frames and elite political discourse with little or no potential for independent influence on audiences. The key conclusion of the article is that the Abu Ghraib photographs were not in any simple way `spoken for' or tamed by the dominant news frames, but quite the opposite. The photographs have themselves come to function as a critical prism through which elite and popular views on US foreign policy are refracted, in the sense that the heretofore banned sight of American troops in the role of sadistic torturers has become an integral part of our understanding of the Bush administration's `war on terror'. The impact of these photographs is not least suggested by their proliferation in the wider culture, where they, through various creative and counter-framing practices, often have been transformed into sites of protest and opposition to the very deeds they represent.

This article develops the concept of non-closure in sustained news stories, based on the case study of Ron Arad, an Israeli soldier who was taken captive in 1986 and whose story still continues to produce headlines in the Israeli press. Coverage of the Arad case was examined in the three major Israeli daily newspapers for a period of 17 years, and the textual mechanisms through which the story has been kept alive were identified. The article offers an analysis of three central non-closure strategies: maintaining suspense, thickening the plot, and keeping the protagonist alive. It is suggested that these strategies enhance readers' involvement with the journalistic texts and function as a bridge between the ritual and information transmission functions of news. Non-closure is thus conceptualized as a force that operates alongside the well-studied forces of closure and renders individual news pieces as episodes in a serial narrative rather than self-contained narrative units.

Evidence suggests that the internet is the medium with the most success in attracting young people to news, while traditional media have been facing increasing trouble since the 1980s. The emergence of cynical and sceptical attitudes about politics and the media has resulted in most young people becoming `news grazers' instead of regular news consumers. Journalism students, however, should be exposed to political information not only as part of their civic obligation, but also in order to be fully equipped to make essential contributions as future analysts and brokers of news. By proposing a conceptual approach on how online news consumption contributes to critical reflective journalism, and drawing upon informed citizenry theory, the knowledge gap hypothesis, the diffusion of innovations model and the uses and gratification perspective, this article attempts to investigate the determinants and consumption patterns of online news by journalists-to-be in Greece. It is argued that conventional predictors such as possession of substantial cultural capital and longer surfing hours have supremacy over the perceived utility of self-education, job experience and simulation.

This article proposes a theory about how people negotiate news as a daily regimen. The theory of purposive attending proposes a feedback loop in which awareness increases relevance, which can increase attending, which can then reset awareness. This article focuses on two aspects of the broader theory: the ambivalence surrounding everyday news-attending and the role cultural identities such as gender and race might play in heightening that ambivalence. The work, influenced by Carey's call to treat news-attending in a ritual context, demonstrates how news-as-ritual and news-as-information-acquisition exist in daily tension. The work was developed using classic grounded theory methodology, which outlines protocols for building theory from data, which included interviews, participant observation with a book discussion group, and qualitative document analysis of news discussions in selected internet communities, letters to the editor, news articles, and industry reports.

Television news coverage of Hurricane Katrina's impact on Mississippi and New Orleans presented viewers with broadcast journalists who were on the scene but were largely left without access to traditional government sources. Through a textual analysis of transcripts of cable and network news reports, this study compares the media's performance during the six days following 29 August, 2005 to news coverage following 11 September, 2001. In this way, it interprets how and why the 11 September attacks produced a `sphere of consensus' unifying the media and the state, while Katrina produced the opposite dynamic. Central to this analysis is the normative concept of `media ritual', especially where the media's ritual consensus with government was `de-centered' by the federal government's de facto absence from the storm scene for that crucial week.