Spheres of Influence: How National Systems and Journalistic Culture Influence Content on Climate Change Coverage around the World / Kathleen Inez Alaimo.
This multi-method qualitative study sets out to explore the influence of the social system upon newsroom practice and content among climate newspapers and journalists by conducting a cross-national comparison of countries diverse in geographical location and economic status, including the United Sta...
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| Format: | Thesis eBook |
| Language: | English |
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Ann Arbor :
ProQuest Dissertations & Theses,
2022.
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| Summary: | This multi-method qualitative study sets out to explore the influence of the social system upon newsroom practice and content among climate newspapers and journalists by conducting a cross-national comparison of countries diverse in geographical location and economic status, including the United States, the United Kingdom, Argentina, Mexico, Montenegro, Germany, Poland, India, the Philippines, Guyana, France, and China. Grounded in Reese and Shoemaker's Hierarchy of Influences, the research sought to expand upon our theoretical and operational understanding of Gatekeeping Theory while making space for normative critiques of the field by exploring how journalists in different parts of the world are conducting boundary work and how such (re)negotiation of the profession's tenets resemble Post-normal Journalism. To do so, the study was broken into three parts. In the first, this study relied on in-depth, semi-structured interviews to elicit journalists' tacit knowledge of the roles, norms, and practices that guide their coverage of climate change. Purposive sampling was used to recruit participants whose responses demonstrated both similarities and differences indicating that while the social system is implicated in journalists' understanding of their jobs, interpretation and enactment of the profession was also dependent upon identity within a beat. In other words, the presence of an interpretive community built upon shared interpretations and discourse was found at the national level as well as among science journalists and environmental journalists.The second part of this study relied on Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) of print news outlets from France, the United States, United Kingdom, China, and India. The use of CDA as a methodological approach not only takes into account textual characteristics, but also makes space for conversations on the locus of power by working at the contextual level. This analysis found that while all of the news outlets included (biophysical, critical, integrative) and excluded (dismissive) the same climate change discourses identified by Leichenko and O'Brien (2019) the way in which they were used, and the presence of textual and contextual elements combined to form a unique dominant cultural narrative of climate change that was related to the social and organizational setting. Evidence of differences between national contexts was more clearly found in textual analysis of news articles than from the interviews indicating that there may be a discrepancy between what is said and what is performed in the newsroom. Framing analysis was also performed to identify how journalist frames align with media frames to assess the level of journalistic autonomy in different locations around the world. Autonomy was found to be more of a function of organization rather than the social system, with journalists from online news magazines demonstrating greater alignment between journalist and media frames. The final part of this study explored the boundary work, if any, that was occurring within different journalistic communities by comparing interpretation of norms, roles, and practices identified by journalists to the characteristics of post-normal journalism, which is more interpretive, more subjective, multiperspective, and more contextual than traditional journalism. While this study did not find that any one culture exemplifies the qualities of post-normal journalism in total, it was clear that boundary work is happening among journalistic communities around the world especially in the redefinition of objectivity and the reconceptualization of professional roles. Although subjectivity, or the inclination to infuse stories with personal perspectives, was generally avoided, climate reporters from the United Kingdom pointed to a separation between subjective and objective identities that were contextually enacted. |
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| Item Description: | Source: Dissertations Abstracts International, Volume: 84-04, Section: B. Advisors: Skewes, Elizabeth Committee members: Ferrucci, Patrick; Willis, Erin; Pezzullo, Phaedra; Takahashi, Bruno. |
| Physical Description: | 1 electronic resource (280 pages) |
| ISBN: | 9798845409683 |
| Access: | This item is not available from ProQuest Dissertations & Theses. |