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Appeals to relativist notions of truth have revealed that the way we judge truth has become a political as much as a philosophical debate. Thus, it is even more important that we carefully consider terms such as ‘truth’, ‘proof’, or ‘evidence’, particularly in the era of instant news, where the court of public opinion is constantly challenged to judge the truthfulness of information.
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Along with changes to the media landscape, low levels of trust in news media and government are often cited as creating a fertile environment for fake news and disinformation. According to polls and commentators, institutional trust reached a historical low in 2017. Edelman’s ‘Trust Barometer’ reports that governments and media are our least trusted institutions, with the number of respondents indicating their trust at 41% and 43% respectively. These and other similar findings by pollsters, such as the Pew Research Center, have been widely reported. Referring to his survey, Edelman declared in The Economist that ‘(t)rust—or, too often, the lack of it—is one of the central issues of our time’. Such an approach to trust makes several assumptions: First, that trust levels have indeed reached a point of ‘crisis’ that can be measured. Second, that trust and distrust stand in a binary relationship. And finally, that a pervasive lack of trust in society is one of the reasons we have ‘a broken media industry’. We will interrogate these assumptions, showing that while trust is indeed crucial to understanding today’s political developments, and fake news in particular, the way it is usually discussed is too simplistic and not conducive to finding adequate responses to fake news.
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The study investigates misinformation and disinformation on social media in the context of the rise of ‘fake news’ and the birth of the ‘post-truth’ era. Are these concerns substantiated by facts? What are the consequences of these phenomena for the information environment? Most importantly, do these phenomena pose a threat for our societal security? This study will provide actionable knowledge by answering to these questions.
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Blogs provide fertile ground for framing narratives. This chapter demonstrates that aside from the blog post itself, reader comments can make the narrative more persuasive. However, the absence of a social network structure for blogs inhibits the dissemination of these narratives. Social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook are used as vehicles to disseminate the content using cross-media and mixed-media tactics. The link between blogs and social media platforms is vital for understanding contemporary disinformation campaigns.
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This publication highlights how false information online brings about a number of security implications. We likened false information to the Lernaean Hydra, the mythical creature that could generate two new heads for each head it lost to the axe. According to the myth, Heracles slayed it by thinking outside the box, burning the stumps of the severed heads, and smashing the only true mortal head the monster had with a rock. Analogously, anyone who is battling disinformation online must think beyond simply debunking single stories.
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The entries presented here are intended to help the reader understand the key terms that are discussed throughout the research product. This unofficial terminology, updated as of 1st November 2017, is aimed at serving further research. The list is inclusive, i.e. it includes terms that are not used in the study, but are central to the discussion. Moreover, some of the entries were not intended to be descriptions in the original context: when this is the case, the “comments” section points it out. While the list is inclusive, only one definition is given for each term, in order to keep this glossary simple and easy to use.
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In the chapter entitled "Media vs. Madness. The Case of Massimo Tartaglia", Paulina Orłowska analyses the press coverage of Tartaglia’s aggression towards Silvio Berlusconi, prime minister of Italy at the time the attack took place (the 13th of December 2009). In order to get a closer look at themes the journalists overlooked and to explain their broader cultural context, the author employs semiotic instruments developed by Roland Barthes in his famous Mythologies. As a result, the mythical aspect of madness, to which the media had reduced the event, is disclosed. Correspondingly, the examined articles are shown as referring to the aggressor’s madness in terms of naturalization of history resulting in the extirpation of individual identity and the abrogation of the context. Instead of just reporting the criminal act, Italian newspapers extrapolated the mental illness from Tartaglia’s biography and delimited his identity to one common denominator—madness. This allows Orłowska to explore two paradigmatic forms of media madness narrative: the criminal one and the paternalistic one, both conveying the idea that madness is accounted for in emotional rather than rational terms.
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The article consists of four parts. In the first one, the author discusses the development of local communication studies in Poland and in the world. He points to the key texts of recent decades from the field of local communication. This field encompasses the research on communities of journalists, on the content of local media, on the structure of local media, and on their social reception. In the second part, an outline of the local communication theory is presented, this term is defined, and the factors that shape it are pointed out. The third part discusses the region as a communicational area. The author refers to significant Polish and non-Polish books. In the final part, the issue of infotainment and the phenomenon of tabloidisation of local media are discussed.
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Communication and media studies are the sum of related studies and disciplines that tackle various aspects of human communication. The dynamic of changes in the fields of communication and media studies makes it necessary to point to the object of study which will allow for a more or less full analysis of the transformations within media communication. The region of periodical media communication is such an object of study since, contemporarily, this type of communication becomes an alternative to the types of communication that generate post-truth content and post-facts. From the perspective of communication (and not communicating), the theoretical conception of periodical media communication and its regions makes it possible to produce knowledge on the processes of changes in communication mediated in spatial arrangement. The theory outlined in this article makes it possible to analyse media spaces of increasing density in territorial arrangements, communities shaped by means of traditional and new media, and processes of disintegration of communities or collectivities.
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The article analyses the issue of conducting audience research by means of local and regional media. Due to the ongoing commercialisation of media and the related necessity to gain advertisers, it is crucial – also for local and regional media – to carry out research on their audience. The authors discuss the aims and means of conducting such research basing on the CATI method and the case study – one of regional, private television broadcasters, Wielkopolska Telewizja Kablowa.
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Engaging in the discussion on legal aspects of communication, this paper tackles the question of the legal classification of the part of websites in which news on various local and regional events is uploaded. In order to achieve that, two possible classifications are introduced; one of them treats such materials as simple press information, whereas the other – as a right to reprint eligible under the Act of Copyright and Related Rights, and Press Law Act. The issue discussed is even more interesting since some of the changes indicated have been changed by the document enacted on 11 September 2015; it concerns the changes within the copyright law and the related rights, and the Gambling Act, adjusting them to the European Union Law, and, particularly, the directive 2001/29/WE of 22 May 2001 on the harmonisation of certain aspects of copyright and related rights in the information society. The paper is a theoretical and juridical analysis of normative regulations and the doctrine through the exegesis of legal acts related to the issues tackled, operating within the framework of historical interpretation.
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This article presents the results of an analysis of the „Dziennik Zachodni” editorial board’s level of interest in Women’s Day, Men’s Day, Mother’s Day, and Father’s Day between 2015 and 2016. What was also verified was the image of the woman, the man, the mother, and the father created in this regional daily newspaper, as emphasised in chosen publications. The research method used was a quantitative and qualitative content analysis of selected materials.
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Receiving radio messages along with its culture is present in our everyday life and social reality, frequently accompanying their rituals. Against the ubiquitous primacy of the image, the capabilities of audial editing privilege the importance of sound and spoken word within the space of social communication and its various strata. Language is the oldest and the most basic substance media work with. It serves the purpose of attributing particular characteristics to people and things, which is of greater importance when it comes to the spaces operating solely with sound (and thus speech). An exceptional case of a broadcasting medium is that of the university radio station, whose target consists of young recipients; its principles make it similar to a local community sharing a particular interest. The recipients include not only people between nineteen and twenty-four, but also those who inhabit a particular region or are somehow connected with a university which the radio station is rooted in. In order to describe the specificity of the university radio stations and their broadcasts, the programmes transmitted by Lublin-based “Centrum” [“The Centre”] (Maria Curie-Skłodowska Univeristy) and Opole-based “Sygnały” [“The Signals”] (Opole University) have been examined in this paper. Interviews, political and cultural programmes, and news have been analysed with regard to the overall quality of the content broadcast as well as these programmes’ engagement with the local. Such an analysis is interesting especially because the audial narrative broadcast by the aforementioned stations differs significantly from those transmitted by the local ones which are not rooted in academic facilities. The other distinctive feature of the university radio stations is that of the “young generation” standing at the helm; precisely, they constitute a space for students and prioritise the voice of the young people. In the era of the Radio 2.0 – which is ceaselessly entangled in convergence and the intensification of feedback – university radio stations turn out to be the broadcasters unusually open towards the social media, which affect the local public space immensely.
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The concept of regional press is used in Russian media studies to determine various media subjects on the market. Consequently, it leads to a confusion of terms. The contemporary structure and condition of the Russian regional press happen to be bequeathed from the Soviet times. This paper classifies and proposes a typology of the contemporary regional press in Russia. Moreover, it characterises its most influential types. In the course of such an analysis, social and political conditions as well as economic and juridical background, contributing to the contemporary Russian regional press and constituting its types, are also taken into consideration. The paper points to the patterns recurring while local spaces of communication in Russia are being formed. In the conclusions it is emphasised that many processes taking place in the regional spaces of communication mirror greater tendencies occurring on the national scale.
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Although countries tend to differ when it comes to the implementation of multiculturalism, the shared element is that of giving access to media to various ethnic groups. Media systems functioning throughout the world do not meet the needs and expectations of the whole society and all of the cultural minorities; rather, they represent interests, opinions, and events belonging to either a dominating group or an elite influencing the media. Still, there are countries whose media politics strives for including the interest of the minorities (including the ethnic ones), which makes community media a significant – or the third – sector of their systems. The following reflections focus on the ethnic community radio in Australia broadcast by and for the members of minorities that, therefore, becomes a means of the transcultural communication. The purpose of this paper, in turn, is to analyse the systemic solutions and to describe the third radio sector in general terms with regard to the ethnic community radio in Australia understood as a form of social communication. In order to achieve that, a variety of factors are taken into consideration, including the acts regulating the media market, the official records containing statistical data and reports of inspection and regulatory bodies, as well as the websites of the radio stations. These have been analysed with regard to their histories, their presenters and programmes, languages in which programmes have been broadcast and their respective content. The ethnic community radio in Australia and its procedures, described in this paper, provide us with an example of effective systemic solutions, which – even if implemented partially – might serve as a basis for further regulations concerning radio stations in Poland.
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The paper aims at presenting the results of the research examining the input of adolescents in creating local media in Poland and Latvia. The research was conducted during three stays in Latvia: the first two were related to the practice programmes at the Daugavpils University in 2014, whereas the last one – to Erasmus+ exchange with the Riga Teacher Training and Educational Management Academy in 2015. Simultaneously, the research was carried out at the Humanities Faculty of the Siedlce University of Natural Sciences and Humanities. The group of 160 young Poles and 108 Latvians between twenty and twenty-six were surveyed. The method of the study was a diagnostic survey, whereas the technique was a poll, including questionnaires and unstructured interviews. The paper discusses the need for local media, identifies the types of local media that attract the respondents the most, and emphasises the participation of young people in creating both the image and the content of local media.
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