Astonishing images: TV news and accountability processes

Critical Studies in Media Communication, 2009

This article examines the role of the news media in enforcing different forms of accountability, such as political, professional, and legal, in crisis situations. It is argued that demands for accountability cannot be regarded as merely procedural, since these demands often depend on how social actors define events, how they assign blame to wrongdoing, and how they attribute responsibilities for perceived problems. Taking into consideration a case of extreme urban violence that was broadcast live during four hours—the hijacking of the 174 Bus line in Rio de Janeiro on 12 June 2000—this study evinces that frame contestation and public debate that occurs through news media, supported by critical actors in the public sphere, play an important role in activating political accountability. The findings show the conflicting role of the news media in societies where democracy is being constructed, as they may support accountability mechanisms that become mere façades as well as civic demands for democratic innovation.

International Journal of Press-politics, 2009

This article examines the role of the media as a mechanism of social accountability. Adding to the work of Enrique Peruzzotti and Catalina Smulovitz, the article argues that the media act as a mechanism of social accountability by providing a forum for debate for a plurality of actors to establish who should be held accountable, what they should be held accountable for, and how they should be held accountable. An analysis of this role of the media is applied to the newspaper coverage of an incident of police violence against social protest in Argentina. The debate in this case contributes to the reframing of excessive police violence against social protest in Argentina as unacceptable, thus acting as a form of preventive accountability.

Journalism and Media

The purpose of this article is to discuss to what extent the coverage of urban violence by local television news in Brazil has been impacted by journalists’ fear and their distancing from regions of armed conflict, leading to the development of new professional routines and, in particular, the use of WhatsApp. Our methodology included in-depth interviews with 13 journalists occupying different positions in the hierarchy of the newsrooms of the 4 main TV stations in the country. The testimonies suggest that aggression and hostility against journalists drove professionals away from certain territories and turned them toward new technologies and citizen co-production as ways out for local crime coverage. On the other hand, this dynamic creates challenges for journalism itself. One of the main concerns is the verification of content.

Canadian Journal of Law and Society, 2005

Genocide Studies and Prevention, 2016

The media plays an important role in communicating mass atrocities to audiences across the globe. This article critically examines how journalists' framing of mass atrocities may contribute to public discourse on the responsibility to protect principle, in particular the perceived obligation to intervene in cases of mass atrocities. It will draw from a broader conceptual framework on bystander responses to mass atrocities and utilise evidence from the analysis of newspaper accounts of the Rwandan and Bosnian genocides. It will argue that, in some cases, media narratives may actually erode political will and encourage passivity in response to mass atrocities.

This paper deals with the presentation of police activities and crime in the mass media. We carried out a literature review in which we focused upon the construction of a theoretical framework for further qualitative research of media reports about a selected case of police activity. The paper has two objectives: first, to find out how the media report police activities and crime and, second, to compare and contrast reports from different media. In this case we have focused especially on the media representation of police activities concerning a specific case, a bank robbery in Ljubljana. In the theoretical part of the paper we explain our views on media reports about crime, factors that influence people working within the media (for example, the occupational context of journalist and editor roles) and the influence of the media on crime perception and fear of crime. We have also focused on the connection between media interests (defined by their commercial nature as private companies) and the consequence of such commercial characteristics upon the media content. In the second part of the paper we present our qualitative research in which we have used macro-preposi­tion analysis of media reports to focus upon media coverage of the bank robbery in Ljubljana and subsequent police activities.

Canadian Journal of Criminology & Criminal Justice, 2014

The objective of the study is to contribute to the discourse about media by investigating frames and journalistic techniques used by the corporate mass media to establish boundaries for understanding police and protesters at the 2010 G20 Summit, any temporal changes, and the applicability of the hierarchy of credibility at this international protest event. Using data from 2009 to 2011in two national and one local newspaper, a frame analysis seeks to uncover how the media frame behaviour and events, what are the primary and second definers of reality, and how the police and protesters are depicted as social problems. The findings suggest that media portrayals of the social actors are framed within an inferential structure that shifts from protester violence before the summits to police violence afterward. Episodic coverage and the decontextualization of people and events create the boundaries for discussion, through the use of the attribution-of-responsibility, conflict, economic-consequences, and human-interest generic frames in the areas of security, social problems, and controversy. We conclude that the results depart from previous research by suggesting a reconceptualization of the hierarchy of credibility. Within conflict and human interest frames, this crisis event destabilized the police as primary definers of crime in favour of citizens and protesters.

Policing Politics, Culture and Control : Essays in Honour of Robert Reiner

Cinema Journal, 2014