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The fourth speaker in this session at the ICA 2024 conference is Michael Dieringer, with yet another systematic review of the journalism studies literature, focussing here especially on epistemological and methodological approaches and trends specifically in qualitative journalism research work over time. Such shifts reflect the key issues of the time, as well as fashions in research approaches.

The most common perspective that this study found was a sociological perspective, followed by an implicit use of grounded theory approaches. Articles that did not directly use a theoretical framework often developed one of their own, drawing on a multi-stakeholder approach. Discourse …

Next up in this ICA 2024 conference session is Yangliu Fan, who presents a bibliometric study of journalism studies publications. This study focussed on the published literature in the field since 1995, examining these publications by understanding their citation patterns. It drew on the full set of publications from the five major journalism journals between 1995 and 2022 – some 6,770 articles – from the OpenAlex database, and examined their co-citation networks: these occur when two earlier articles are cited together in one or more later articles.

The resultant network contained some 5,700 articles connected by 305,000 links, and identified …

The next speaker in this session at the ICA 2024 conference is Yoonmo Sang, whose focus is on journalism ethics research over the past decades. Such research is critical especially in an increasingly challenged news media landscape. The present study examined some 1,170 journalism ethics studies published from 2013 to 2022 in Digital Journalism, Journalism, Journalism Practice, and Journalism Studies, drawing on LDA topic modelling to identify the underlying themes in these articles.

The annual volume of articles on journalism ethics grew substantially over this time. Early on, professional practices were a key theme; trust emerged …

The next session at the ICA 2024 conference reflects on the recent history of journalism studies, and starts with the excellent Raul Ferrer-Connill and a paper on the past 20 years of scholarship on citizen journalism. His team reviewed a sample of some 170 articles on citizen journalism to explore the theories, contexts, and methodologies of their research.

Some 50% of these studies did not identify a clear theoretical framework; the other half used structuration theory, field theory, uses and gratifications, gatekeeping, and a variety of other theoretical frameworks. Some one third of these studies focussed on North America, while …

The post-lunch session at the ICA 2024 conference that I’m attending has been organised by the Global Journalism Innovation Lab (GJIL) project, and focusses on AI-generated content in the news. Elizabeth Dubois starts us off by defining generative AI as a type of artificial intelligence system which is capable of generating text, images, and other media in response to prompts. Such generative AI models learn the patterns and structure of their input training data, and then generate new data that have similar characteristics.

Michelle Bartleman now takes over by presenting an updated systematic literature review of journalism scholarship on automated …

The last speaker in this ICA 2024 conference is Francis Lee, whose focus is on the experience of media capture in Hong Kong. Typically, such media capture can involve ownership cooptation, advertising and other financial incentives, cognitive capture of journalists through constant interactions, legal measures and the criminalisation of journalistic activities, and even violence with impunity against journalists.

But not all such strategies are used in all countries where such media capture takes place, and governments may change their mix of these strategies over time. Their choice depends on local contexts (such as the exploitability of economic or legal systems …

The second speaker in this ICA 2024 conference session is the great Cherian George, whose focus is on the theory of media manipulation in autocratising electoral regimes. Autocracy or authoritarianism as a regime type is different from the process of autocratising and democratic backsliding, and the process is often related to media capture by political actors.

Existing autocracies are often born this way: this is the case for China or Iran, for instance; conversely, backsliding democracies like Turkey, Poland, or Israel experience a change in their democratic institutions. Singapore or Hong Kong, in turn, are something else and in between …

The next session at the ICA 2024 conference is on democratic backsliding, and begins with Kate Wright; her focus is on state-led democratic backsliding and its relationship with the political capture of public service media organisations. This is difficult to study due to the problems with gaining access to such media organisations, especially as the political capture is taking place; at best, we might review this after the fact through interviews with journalists.

The present study is in the unusual position of having been able to study the state capture of the Voice of America by the Trump administration both …

And the final speaker in this ICA 2024 conference session is Bingbing Zhang, whose focus is on perceptions of how political homophilous other people’s social networks are; such unrealistic perceptions could then lead to unfounded beliefs about ‘echo chambers’ and ‘filter bubbles’.

This might also be related to perceptions of media biases against one’s own political views: if media are believed to be biased, then this might also be seen as a reason for the emergence of such ‘echo chambers’. Greater political homophily social distance is therefore also assumed to relate to media bias perceptions and media scepticism.

The project …

The third speaker in this ICA 2024 conference session is Jisoo Kim, whose focus is on perceived polarisation in the United States. Such perceived polarisation refers to perceptions of other political groups’ positioning in comparison to one’s own, and may be moderated by political communication across political boundaries.

Patterns may further depend on the specific issues being discussed, and the focus of this paper is especially on foreign policy debates in the US, which may or may not be less politicised – at the moment, for instance, Democrats and Republicans are drifting apart in their attitudes about military aid to …