Uganda, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Rwanda, Burundi, Angola, Zambia, Chad, South Sudan, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, and Congo
CIMA is pleased to release A Clash of Cultures: Hate Speech, Taboos, Blasphemy, and the Role of News Media, by Jane Sasseen. The ability of individuals to openly speak their minds is a core principle not only of American journalism, but American democracy. Even when speech is insulting or disrespectful to others-speech that might run afoul of hate speech laws throughout Western Europe or be banned outright in much of the rest of the world-it is generally permitted in the United States. But the rise of the Internet and the instantaneous global communications it enables have raised a host of new questions about how to handle hate speech and other potentially offensive speech when it can be seen by audiences in other countries that do not share those values.
Institute for Security and International Studies (ISIS)
Abstract:
What role do media play in international relations is the major question that this article
attempts to answer. It argues that media have quite limited impact on international affairs and
foreign policy process and that the political discourse still prevails over the one of the media
and the public in the contest of power in democratic societies. The contribution of the article
is to conceptualize the highly scattered knowledge about media-international relations
interaction and to present a model which places media on the complex terrain of world
politics.
Topic:
International Relations, Communications, Media, and News Analysis
Olivier Blanchard, Jean-Paul L'Huillier, and Guido Lorenzoni
Publication Date:
10-2012
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Institute for Advanced Development Studies (INESAD)
Abstract:
We explore empirically models of aggregate fluctuations with two basic ingredients: agents form anticipations about the future based on noisy sources of information
and these anticipations affect spending and output in the short run. Our objective is
to separate fluctuations due to actual changes in fundamentals (news) from those due
to temporary errors in agents’ estimates of these fundamentals (noise). We use a simple forward-looking model of consumption to address some methodological issues:
structural VARs cannot be used to identify news and noise shocks in the data, but
identification is possible via a method of moments or maximum likelihood. Next, we
use U.S. data to estimate both our simple model and a richer DSGE model with the
same information structure. Our estimates suggest that noise shocks play an important role in short-run consumption fluctuations.
Peace and conflict are two of the most newsworthy subjects that can occur but how accurately
does the media report on them and are the levels of violence portrayed in countries actually
accurate? Media Tenor and the Institute for Economics and Peace (IEP) have come together to
jointly create a unique platform that utilizes a fact-based approach for analysing the global
media coverage on topics related to peace and conflict.
The aim of this study is to better understand the texture of
news coverage and its accuracy. This was achieved by
analysing Media Tenor’s extensive database consisting of
164,000 news items. These news items have been compiled
from 31 news and current affairs programs that air on four
continents. The data was further analysed and broken down
by country coverage with news stories from 101 different
countries. The aggregated country data was then compared to
the Global Peace Index (GPI) so as to rate the accuracy of the
coverage.
Topic:
Media, News Analysis, Arab Spring, Conflict, Violence, and Peace
The internet is fantastically enabling for the news media, creating previously unimagined possibilities in terms of distribution, audience interaction, and archiving. But it also presents new threats, such as in the area of defamation law, already a significant problem for many media outlets. This paper assesses these problems against international guarantees of freedom of expression and comparative national practice, through both law and self-regulation, highlighting solutions that are more protective of free expression, as well as those that are not. It also probes new ideas such as greater reliance on the right of reply—which the internet enables—and the notion that some spaces on the Internet should be protected against any defamation liability.
Topic:
Communications, Law, Regulation, Media, News Analysis, and Digital Policy