ECREA16-Abstract

Friday, November 11

1 8 : 0 0 – 1 9 : 3 0

PP 477

Insecurity and Democracy? Trust in News and Information Sources and the Radicalization of the Public Discourses

J. Macek

, A. Macková

Masaryk University, Department of Media Studies and Journalism, Brno, Czech Republic

Masaryk University, International Institute of Political Science, Brno, Czech Republic

The paper presents a qualitative pilot study opening a research project awarded by Fulbright-Masaryk scholarship for academic year 2016–2017. The pilot

data – qualitative interviews with members of media audiences –will be collected in spring 2016.The project focuses on the role of audiences’trust in news

and information sources in radicalization and polarization of the Czech public discourses and politics. This shift in the public and political sphere revives im‑

portant questions about the democratic role of media as sources of a shared agenda, trustworthy content and public knowledge and as platforms for public

negotiations of societal and political consent: Namely it remains apparent that new as well as broadcasting and print media – as communication platforms

and institutions – can yet play their part in moderating the radicalization of public opinion. However, a topical, detailed, evidence-based and theoretically

rich understanding of the situation is thus far missing. The situation can be partly explained as a result of a long-term crisis of democracy linked with

a distrust in democratic institutions accompanied by a decrease in traditional forms of political participation (elections, political party membership, etc.)

and an increase in alternative forms of political and public participation, often linked with various uses of new media. At the same time, the crisis is usually

linked with economic situation of the country and with individuals’economic insecurities. Nevertheless, such explanations do not provide the full picture.

Our preliminary hypothesis is that rather than just economic insecurity, an overall sense of an anomic insecurity – or, more specifically, a lack of sense

of Giddensian ontological security – has to be considered as one of the key sources of the radicalization. And, at the same time, we consider important

the way it is linked with reception of media agendas as well as the way it is amplified by discourses on social networking sites and by so-called alternative

information sources (represented in the case of the Czech media landscape by independent pro-democratic civic journalism projects and in contrast, by

servers with pro-Russian, counter-Islamic and conspiracy-theories-based content). In other words, in the project we focus on the relation between (a)

the social actors’ trust/distrust in particular information/news sources, (b) their attitude towards the political sphere and (c) their experience of the locus

of control (expressed in external and internal efficacy and in the sense of ontological security).

PP 478

Citizen (Making) Journalism: Reconceptualising Citizen Journalism as Political Acts in the (Post)Colonial Society

B. Blaagaard

Aalborg University, Communication, Copenhagen SV, Denmark

This paper argues that the current debates of citizen journalism – citizens’production of and engagement with news and public debates through mobile-

and digital media devices – may be understood more fully in light of the cultural and political journalistic performativity and production of subjectivity

in (post)colonial societies. Despite the fact that colonial subjects were not legally citizens, the paper argues that the practice of journalism constitutes

a way of addressing a public, whereby its readers are engaged as political citizens. Focusing on the citizen-making practices of journalism as foundational

to the concept of citizen journalism, theoretically the paper builds on and develops Engin Isin’s idea about the political act (Isin, 2002; Isin and Nielsen,

2008; Isin and Ruppert, 2015). Isin takes a relational approach to citizens’ acts within publics and defines ‘being political’ as a relationship, which can be

either a relationship of affiliation or of agon and estrangement (Isin, 2002, p. 32). Agon acts are acts through which the citizen is producing“ruptures from

social-historical patterns”(Isin and Nielsen, 2008, p. 11).These kinds of political acts are indicative of (post)colonial struggles for citizenship and subjectivity.

The paper argues that journalistic practices in (post)colonial societies may shed light on how journalism conducted by citizens or subjects rupture the social

patterns of colonialism. Citizen journalism may then be understood as a political act: What characterises citizen journalism as concept and practice is its

function as political act and addressor of a public as oppose to purely the the developments in technological dissemination and the following paradigm

of‘I have a voice’(Chouliaraki, 2013), for instance. The paper illustrates this theory through the case of the (post)colonial newspaper The Herald (1915–25),

which was published in the Danish colony of St. Croix.TheWest Indian islands, St.Thomas, St. Croix and St. John, were colonies of Denmark from respectively

1671, 1733, and 1718 and were all sold to the United States of America (US) in 1917. In 1915 political agitator, schoolteacher and lawyer David Hamilton

Jackson travelled to Denmark to argue for his right to free speech and print. He was granted the opportunity to found and produce The Herald, which he did

throughout the last years of Danish colonial rule and through the first years under US jurisdiction. In the paper, it is argued that Jackson’s work as founder,

writer, and editor of the newspaper The Herald engaged with the African Caribbean people on the islands as citizens. The newspaper was a part of an as‑

semblage of political acts produced by Jackson. In The Herald, Jackson often brought together writings by New York -based political activists and writers

of the early civil rights movement and the African American minority press in the US as well as translated opinion pieces and political debates from Danish

newspapers. Within the shared space of the newspaper pages, The Herald thereby addressed and produced a ‘cosmopolitan’public, rendering the newspa‑

per an (early) example of citizen journalism.