White lies: a racial history of the (post)truth

In the aftermath of the 2016 election of President Trump, a veritable cottage industry of opinion pieces, blogs, and articles emerged overnight, most of which seemed to agree that only the post-truth could explain how a racist, misogynistic, neo-nationalist member of the economic elite could win a presidential election. This article, in contrast, is inspired by Barbara Christian’s injunction that we question why a given statement, concept, or theory is now acceptable when before it was not. Operating in this spirit, we critique post-truth critics for neglecting the material tradition of ideological criticism in favor of epistemological explanations for understanding post-truth literature; we then offer two case studies—American drug policy and housing policy—to illustrate the racial amnesia required for claiming that only now do we live in a post-truth era.     

Scaling up Content Analysis

ABSTRACT

Employing a number of different standalone programs is a prevalent approach among communication scholars who use computational methods to analyze media content. For instance, a researcher might use a specific program or a paid service to scrape some content from the Web, then use another program to process the resulting data, and finally conduct statistical analysis or produce some visualizations in yet another program. This makes it hard to build reproducible workflows, and even harder to build on the work of earlier studies. To improve this situation, we propose and discuss four criteria that a framework for automated content analysis should fulfill: scalability, free and open source, adaptability, and accessibility via multiple interfaces. We also describe how to put these considerations into practice, discuss their feasibility, and point toward future developments.     

Contesting Communities

This introductory article to the combined special issue of Journalism Studies and Journalism Practice provides an overview of some of the key contemporary approaches to studying journalism and social order. It argues the need to step beyond a functionalist framework when considering the news media’s central role in shaping social connections, community and cohesion. To advance our understandings of social order, our paper suggests a greater emphasis of the significance of journalism’s relationship to the wider social sphere along with three other key considerations, including (1) a critical focus on the relationship between media, politics and social order, especially in defining and/or negotiating “anti-social” practices and social disintegration; (2) a more refined focus on the “imagined” and geographic boundaries of news audiences in digital spaces; and (3) the changing relationship to norms and conventions of journalism practice from trust and legitimacy to the role of journalists as arbiters and connectors across social spaces.     

Tim Henman,British tennis and the social construction of English identity in the 1990s and 2000s

Tim Henman was inarguably the best English player, and the most popular and socially significant British player, since Fred Perry. Throughout his career, media constructions of him fluctuated from being heralded as a potential Wimbledon champion, to a weak, underachieving perennial loser. Throughout his career, and despite the constant transition of dominant narratives, Henman’s quintessential ‘Englishness’ remained a key component, expressed through his image, appearance, ostensible personality/character and playing style. His ‘Englishness’ was especially apparent against the backdrop of the Wimbledon Championships, which used Henman’s success in its marketing of ‘tennis in an English garden’. This paper assesses the shifting meanings behind, and values of, Henman’s sustained image, and examines how changes in the narratives of Henman as a player reflected broader shifts in English identity. It is argued that Henman played a significant role in how Englishness was constructed, both in Britain and abroad, during the 1990s and 2000s.