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The second session this morning at IAMCR 2023 is on cyberactivism, and starts with Dongwook Song. His interest is in the financialisation of daily life through stock market apps. He notes that Korean young adults were in a stressed social situation before the pandemic, and after COVID-19 there was a boom in investments, cryptocurrency and stock market speculation, and other financial activities in order to get ahead – everyday life has been financialised.

Dongwook investigated these developments by focussing on the Stockplus investment app, operated by the cryptocurrency exchange Upbit which is itself owned by a social messaging platform. He …

And the final speaker in this IAMCR 2023 session is Madhavi Ravikumar, whose interest is in the way the Indian press frames environmental issues. This is against the backdrop of the severe air pollution crisis in New Delhi, and the present study builds on interviews with Indian journalists.

The mass media have served as a crucial platform for raising and debating environmental since the rise of the environmental movement in the 1960s, and how they present these issues plays a significant role in shaping public opinion. Their selection and framing of issues is especially important in this process.

India is …

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2023 session is Donald Matheson, whose focus is on the journalistic reporting on invasive species in the US and Aotearoa New Zealand, as a case study of reporting on the biodiversity crisis more generally. Globally, some half a million non-native species have been introduced to new ecosystems; this demonstrates the impact of human factors such as colonialism, globalisation, tourism, and climate change. This in turn impacts on agriculture, health, and Indigenous cultures, and drives accelerating biodiversity loss. Indeed, the US and New Zealand have the two most threatened ecosystems globally.

The present project examines …

The second presenter in this climate change-themed session at IAMCR 2023 is Henri-Count Evans, whose interest is in South African press coverage of climate change negotiations. Climate change is a global threat, of course, but disproportionately affects poor and marginalised countries; there have been global efforts, facilitated by the UN, to address the crisis since at least 1995 and the start of the COP summits. These are often marked by conflicting interests and political agendas, resulting in substantial tension between the Global South and Global North.

Media representations of these debates often reproduce specific narratives, which in turn also further …

The final day at IAMCR 2023 starts with a paper by Hannah E. Morris, on climate journalism in the United States. There has been what seemed to be a striking shift in coverage in recent times, with the New York Times unusually highlighting the role of capitalism and neoliberalism as driving the climate crisis, for instance.

This is in line with the Biden administration’s desire for a new Washington consensus on contemporary issues, received possibly by the legacy press. This calls for a new industrial policy, led by the US, to address these issues, and builds on nostalgic post-war perspectives …

The final speaker on this third day of IAMCR 2023 is Gabriella Szabó, whose focus is on sympathy towards Ukraine in political rhetoric in Poland and Hungary. While usually there are considerable similarities in political rhetoric across the two countries, this is not true when it comes to the full-scale invasion of Ukraine by Russian forces: the governments of the two countries responded very differently to the invasion.

This divergence can be captured by examining the change in political rhetoric following the invasion. The key aspect to examine here is sympathy, which is itself the foundation for solidarity and moral …

Up next at IAMCR 2023 is Zheyu Shang, whose interest is in online propaganda in the Chinese Internet. This now works and looks quite differently from the historical forms of Chinese party propaganda that western observers may be familiar with; the Website of the Chinese Communist Party’s Youth League (CYL) looks more like a social media Website, for instance, and a Chinese army recruitment account on social media uses cartoonish imagery.

In addition, social media platforms are interactive, and ordinary users can create their own content online; they engage in many-to-many communication, also with state media accounts. State propaganda is …

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2023 session is Vaia Doudaki, who presents a discourse-theoretical analysis of Czech social media content about the construction of Europe. This is a suitable approach for the study of identities, as identity signifiers are objects of political struggle for hegemony. This builds on nineteen dimensions in the construction of the idea of Europe, and the present paper focusses on constructions of the European people and of European institutions.

Institutions are seen as durable, multifaceted social structures that are socially constructed and therefore subject to change; the people are variously constructed by populist or nationalist …

The final IAMCR 2023 session for today starts with Joseph Gotte, whose focus is on the elective affinity between political and religious discourses about the ecological apocalypse. ‘Elective affinity’ here is a concept referring to the relationship between religious beliefs and social formations, lifestyle, and economic behaviours; it is the process by which two cultural forms enter into a relationship of mutual attraction and influence.

This is applied here to the apocalyptic genre, which stems from biblical writings and describes an apocalyptic revelation; in recent times it has also been transformed into catastrophism, describing a cataclysmic, often ecological change or …

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2023 session is Sisanda Nkoala, whose interest is in science journalism on social media in South Africa. Science journalism is a specialised form of journalists covering science, medicine, and technology, and has gained particular prominence especially in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic; the pandemic has also exposed the value-laden aspects of science journalism, however, pointing to the centrality of politics in the scientific enterprise in the post-war era and the predominant Global North perspectives embraced by science journalism. This does not necessarily serve countries like South Africa well.

The present study examined the …