Politics

Third in this AoIR 2023 session is Reed van Schenck, whose interest is in the decline and reconstitution of the US alt-right after 2017 – from the ‘tiki torch’ marches to the 6 January 2021 coup attempt. A particular focus here is on Telegram, but much of the research so far has examined only the public Telegram channels, and not its private and secret channels where potentially even more problematic activities may be taking place.

The second paper in this AoIR 2023 session is by Marco Bastos and Raquel Recuero, whose focus is on the 8 January 2022 insurrection in Brazil, after the election loss of far-right president Jair Bolsonaro. They describe this insurrection as a form of connective action: a framework that has largely been applied to pro-social actions like Occupy or the Indignados, but can also be used to analyse anti-democratic actions.

It’s unreasonably early in Philadelphia, and we’re at the start of the AoIR 2023 conference proper. I’m in a panel on extremism, and we start with Shawn Walker, Michael Someone, and Ben Gansky, whose focus is on the 6 January 2021 insurrection in the United States.

The final speaker in this Future of Journalism 2023 conference session is Jasmin Surm, whose interest is in recent changes to global television news. The transnational TV news landscape has changed profoundly in recent times – with more highly ideological content and more overt alignment with political agendas.

The next speakers in this Future of Journalism 2023 conference session are María Luengo and Teresa Gil-López, whose interest is in the BBC’s breaches of its impartiality rules. Examples for such breaches were a presenter’s criticism of PM advisor Dominic Cummings for his breaches of lockdown rules; a presenter’s glee over the news roundup; and the well-publicised case of sports presenter Gary Lineker’s criticism of the UK’s inhumane treatment of refugees.

The next speaker in this Future of Journalism 2023 conference session is Tim Vos, whose focus is on the relationship between press and police in four liberal democracies. Journalism should usually maintain a critical distance from power, yet also have to have a transactional relationship with police in order to be able to do their work that sometimes gets rather too cozy; how are journalists now rethinking that relationship, especially in the wake of a wave of citizen-generated coverage of police violence and oppression?

The next session at Future of Journalism 2023 conference starts with my own presentation on behalf of our larger team, so here are the slides: