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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences
Journalists, Numeracy And Cultural Capital, Steven Harrison
Journalists, Numeracy And Cultural Capital, Steven Harrison
Numeracy
Journalists are tasked with holding power to account; often, that means evaluating and interpreting numbers. But anecdotally, journalists are ill at ease with figures. This shortcoming is worrying both in terms of the quality of news provided to the public, and the implications for informed democratic debate. This paper tests the assertion that journalism as a profession is numeracy-challenged through a small-scale study of the numeracy capabilities of journalism students. Some oft-cited reasons for these shortcomings are discussed, including the pressures of deadlines and the tyranny of the 24-hour news cycle, where the mantra of “never wrong for long” appears …
The Impossibility To Protect? Media Narratives And The Responsibility To Protect, Kjell Føllingstad Anderson, Ingjerd Veiden Brakstad
The Impossibility To Protect? Media Narratives And The Responsibility To Protect, Kjell Føllingstad Anderson, Ingjerd Veiden Brakstad
Genocide Studies and Prevention: An International Journal
The media plays an important role in communicating mass atrocities to audiences across the globe. This article critically examines how journalists’ framing of mass atrocities may contribute to public discourse on the responsibility to protect principle, in particular the perceived obligation to intervene in cases of mass atrocities. It will draw from a broader conceptual framework on bystander responses to mass atrocities and utilise evidence from the analysis of newspaper accounts of the Rwandan and Bosnian genocides. It will argue that, in some cases, media narratives may actually erode political will and encourage passivity in response to mass atrocities.