Suchergebnisse

1. Introduction -- 2. Theorising legitimacy in civil society and the media -- 3. Civil society in the news : case studies -- 4. The good society : virtues, interests, and justice -- 5. Uncivil action : legal and moral legitimacy -- 6. Representation and its alternatives : political legitimacy -- 7. Civility in the public realm : social and personal legitimacy -- 8. Conclusion.

© 2017, © The Author(s) 2017. Theorists of left and right agree that periods of crisis are fertile times at which to precipitate change. However, protesters on the periphery of the public sphere must overcome barriers, or what Habermas called 'sluice gates', if their discourse is to be publicly and politically influential. This study of newspaper discourse and activity in parliament and the public sphere over a 6-year period takes tax justice campaigning in the United Kingdom as a case study, and in particular protest group UK Uncut's attempt to mobilise opposition to austerity by advocating a crackdown on tax avoidance as an alternative to cuts. It finds that while UK Uncut successfully amplified arguments previously raised by experts, trade unions and the left-leaning press, austerity barely figured in debate about tax avoidance once it was picked up by other actors in the public sphere on the other side of the 'sluice gates'. The reasons for this were both structural and discursive, related to the role and interests of receptive actors at the institutional centre of the public sphere and their ability, along with the conservative press, to transform the moral framing of tax avoidance from the injustice of making the poor pay for the financial crisis through cuts into the 'unfairness' of middle-class earners paying higher taxes than wealthier individuals and corporations. The latter reifies the 'hardworking taxpayer' and implies a more instrumental and clientalistic relationship to the state and an essentially neoliberal sense of fairness. Where neoliberal ideology was challenged, it was in social conservative terms – nationalist opposition to globalisation, framing multinational corporations as a threat to the domestic high street – rather than protesters' social democratic challenge to market power and social injustice. This indicates how a progressive message from the periphery can be co-opted into the currently resurgent right-wing populism.

This article examines the use of personal narratives in two tabloid newspaper campaigns against a controversial welfare reform popularly known as the 'bedroom tax'. It aims firstly to evaluate whether the personal narratives operate as political testimony to challenge government accounts of welfare reform and dominant stereotypes of benefits claimants, and secondly to assess the potential for and limits to progressive advocacy in popular journalism. The study uses content analysis of 473 articles over the course of a year in the Daily Mirror and Sunday People newspapers, and qualitative analysis of a sub-set of 113 articles to analyse the extent to which the campaign articles extrapolated from the personal to the general, and the role of 'victim-witnesses' in articulating their own subjectivity and political agency. The analysis indicates that both newspapers allowed affected individuals to express their own subjectivity to challenge stereotypes, but it was civil society organisations and opinion columnists who most explicitly extrapolated from the personal to the political. Collectively organised benefits claimants were rarely quoted, and there was some evidence of ventriloquization of the editorial voice in the political criticisms of victim-witnesses. However, a campaigning columnist in the Mirror more actively empowered some of those affected to speak directly to politicians. This indicates the value of campaigning journalism when it is truly engaged in solidarity with those affected, rather than instrumentalising victim-witnesses to further the newspapers' campaign goals.

Newspaper campaigns embody newspaper' most emphatic claims to speak for 'the people', and as such are generally regarded as populist. However, they can be oppositional, engaging in dissent of one sort or another, and often assume a certain amount of political engagement with that dissent on the part of the audience. This article examines the potential of newspaper camapigns to facilitate the political engagement of citizens through the politics of protest. It draws on qualitative analysis of seven campaigns that ran in the Scottish press between 2000 and 2005, and semi-structured interviews with relevant journalists. The distinction between legitimate protest and manipulative populism is made in terms of: (a) the rhetoric and strategies of political representation, participation and influence and (b) the construction of political legitimacy in terms of the public interest and the moral authority of the 'victim'. It is argued that populist impulses dominate, driving a tendency to use discourses of emotional authenticity and offence to legitimise demands for a plebiscitary response to popular of 'victim' preference and to close down controversy and debate, with the principal objective marketing the newspaper as an influential community champion.

Campaign advocacy is a common but rarely researched practice in British tabloid journalism. Newspaper campaigns give an account of 'public opinion' to politicians, make explicit claims to speak for 'the public' and authentically represent them, and also address readers in an unconventional way in order to recruit their support. This article therefore examines the effect to which agency is attributed to readers and other publics in two such campaigns, and argues that publics were portrayed as active only in relation to the newspaper's activity, and as primarily as reacting emotionally to the problem. The campaigning press promote themselves commercially and politically as quasi-representatives who challenge distant and 'out of touch' political representatives with the populist impulses of 'public' demands, but without enhancing the democratic process, or publics' position within it.

Campaign journalism is a distinctive but under-researched form of editorialised news reporting that aims to influence politicians rather than inform voters. In this it diverges from liberal norms of social responsibility, but instead campaigning newspapers make claims to represent the interests or opinions of publics such as their readers or groups affected by the issue. This could be understood as democratically valid in relation to alternative models such as participatory or corporatist democracy. This essay examines journalists' understanding of the identity and views of these publics, and how their professional norms are operationalised in their journalistic practice in relation to five case studies in the Scottish press. The campaigns are analysed in terms of four normative criteria associated with corporatist and participatory democracy: firstly, the extent to which subjective advocacy is combined with objectivity and accuracy; secondly, the extent to which civic society organisations are accorded access; thirdly, whether the disadvantage of resource-poor groups in society is compensated for; and finally, to what extent the mobilisation of public support for the campaigns aims to encourage an active citizenry.

Past studies have indicated that the British public consider human trafficking to be remote from their personal experiences. However, an increase in local press reporting, alongside the emergence of locally co-ordinated anti-modern slavery campaigns, is starting to encourage communities to recognise the potential for modern slavery and human trafficking to exist in their own localities. In this article, we examine how local media and campaigns may be influencing public perceptions of modern slavery and human trafficking. We draw upon a content analysis of local newspapers to review how reports represent cases of modern slavery, and use focus group discussions to understand how local coverage modifies—and sometimes reinforces—existing views. We find that, whilst our participants were often surprised to learn that cases of modern slavery and human trafficking had been identified in their area, other stereotypical associations remained entrenched, such as a presumed connection between modern slavery and irregular migration. We also noted a reluctance to report potential cases, especially from those most sympathetic to potential victims, linked to concerns about adequacy of support for survivors and negative consequences relating to immigration. These concerns suggest that the UK's 'hostile environment' to migrants may be undermining the effectiveness of 'spot the signs' campaigns, by discouraging individuals from reporting.

Introduction: The new terrain of mediated politics / James Morrison, Jen Birks and Mike Berry -- The origins and development of political journalism in Britain / Brian Cathcart -- Partial news : election editorializing in inter-war Britain / Dominic Wring and David Deacon -- Reinventing political reporting : outsides, disruptors and innovators / Erik Neveu -- Political news and the 'celebrity frame' / John Corner -- Evolving journalism norms : Objective, interpretive and fact-checking journalism / Jen Birks -- The Scottish independence referendum, political journalism and the news media landscape / Marina Dekavalla -- Local political journalism : systematic pressures on the normative functions of local news / Julie Firmstone and Rebecca Whittington -- Political journalism in a hybrid media landscape : a Scandinavian policy perspective / Sigurd Allern -- Hungary's clientelistic media system / Péter Bajomi-Lázár -- Political journalism in the Russian media system : journalistic professionalization in the context of digital media / Elena Vartanova -- Internet-led political journalism : challenging hybrid regime resilience in Malaysia / Niki Cheong -- Journalism in Myanmar : freedom, Facebook and fake news / Tina Burrett -- The new populisms : a key dynamic of mediated populisms / Michael Higgins -- The renewed visibility of populism : is social media the culprit? / Delia Dumitrica -- Strategies of alternative right-wing media : the case of Breitbart News / Jason Roberts and Karin Wahl-Jorgensen -- Putin, partisanship and the press : comparing Russian media reporting of Alexander Litvinenko and Sergei Skripal / Tina Burrett -- Political journalism by other means : an African perspective / Herman Wasserman -- What kind of Italy? The cultural battle waged by a European populist leader against Brussels / Paul Rowinski -- Populist candidates in the age of social media : media portrayals of Jair Bolsonaro's presidential bid in Brazil / Heloisa Sturm Wilkerson -- 'How can you say you didn't overspend and end up bankrupting this country?' Power, propaganda and public understanding of the economy / Mike Berry -- The resiliency of partisan selective exposure / Jacob Nelson -- Digital media and the proliferation of public opinion cues online : biases and vulnerabilities in the new attention economy / Andrew Ross, Cristian Vaccari and Andrew Chadwick -- Gate-watching and news curation / Axel Bruns -- 'Viral journalism', is it a thing? Adapting quality reporting to shifting social media algorithms and wavering audiences / Anastasia Denisova -- Walking the line. Political journalism and social media publics / Marcel Broersma -- Reporting on white supremacy : challenges of amplification, legitimization and mainstreaming for political journalism / Tina Askanius and Sophie Bjork-James -- Protecting the citizen : political journalists as gatekeepers in the digital age / Darren Lilleker and Shelley Thompson -- Media effects on perceptions of societal problems : Belief formation in fragmented media environments / Adam Shehata -- Agenda-setting theory in a networked world / Jason Martin -- Influencing the public agenda in the social media era : questioning the role of mainstream political journalism from the digital landscape / Andreu Casero-Ripolles -- The delegitimizing potential of internet memes in political communication : a case study of the 2020 US election / Andrew S Ross -- Telling tales : gender and political journalism / Emily Harmer -- The role of audiences in television leaders' debates and political journalism / Richard Danbury -- Journalistic work in cultures of protest : a transnational review / Daniel H. Mutibwa -- Who's punching who? Examining advocacy reporting and commercial restraints in TV satire programming / Allaina Kilby -- Pluralist public sphere or elitist closed circle? Elite-driven agendas and contributor 'chemistry' as determinants of pundit choice on a flagship BBC politics / James Morrison -- The importance of space in photojournalists' accounts of the anti-austerity protests in Greece / Anastasia Veneti, Paul Reilly and Darren G. Lilleker -- Scotland and period poverty : a case study of activists' media and political agenda-setting / Fiona McKay -- Continental drift : historical perspectives on the framing of 'Europe' in the British press / Simon Gwyn Roberts -- 8M and the Huelga General Feminista, 2019-2020 : feminist engagement with state, capital and Spain's 'clase política' / Stuart Price.