'Kindling the fire' of NHS patient data exploitations: The care.data controversy in news media discourses.

This paper explores news media discourse about care.data: an NHS England programme of work for amalgamating and sharing patient data from primary care for planning and research. It was scrapped in 2016 after three years of public outcry, delays and around 1.5 million opt-outs. I examine UK news media coverage of this programme through the 'fire object' metaphor, focusing upon the visions of purpose and value it inspired, the abrupt discontinuities, juxtapositions and transformations it performed, and the matters of concern that went unheeded. Findings suggest that, in care.data's pursuit of a societal consensus on NHS patient data exploitations, various visions for new and fluid data flows brought to presence narratives of transforming the NHS, saving lives, and growing the economy. Other realities and concerns that mattered for certain stakeholders, such as data ownership and commercialisation, public engagement and informed consent, commitment and leadership, operational capabilities, and NHS privatisation agendas, remained absent or unsettled. False dichotomies kept the controversy alive, sealing its fate. I conclude by arguing that such failed programmes can turn into phantom-like objects, haunting future patient data schemes of similar aspirations. The paper highlights the role news media can have in understanding such energetic public controversies.

Media representations of synthetic biology in China.

Media representations of emerging biotechnologies in the media can influence public attitudes and have the potential to impact on policy decisions and law-making. We discuss the unbalanced portrayal of synthetic biology in Chinese news media and how it might affect the perceptions of the public, the scientific community, and decision-makers.

Femicide in Mexico. Who Are the Slain Women According to News Media? A Quantitative Study of Social Representations of Victims and Perpetrators.

Research on femicide news revealed discriminatory narratives against the victims in specific cases and social contexts. This article uses a quantitative approach to analyze the news content that serves to create social representations of victims and perpetrators. We propose a methodology based on examining independent elements in the descriptions, identifying extratextual patterns, and providing the data to compare the social representations of intimate partner violence (IPV), familiar, and non-IPV femicides. Three online news outlets were analyzed from July 2014 to December 2017, creating a corpus of 2,527 articles. The results revealed that it is more common to create negative representations of victims than negative representations of the perpetrators.

Reactions of industry and associated organisations to the announcement of the UK Soft Drinks Industry Levy: longitudinal thematic analysis of UK media articles, 2016-18.

BACKGROUND: The UK Soft Drinks Industry Levy (SDIL) was announced in March 2016, became law in April 2017, and was implemented in April 2018. Empirical analyses of commercial responses have not been undertaken to establish the scale, direction or nuance of industry media messaging around fiscal policies. We aimed to develop a detailed understanding of industry reactions to the SDIL in publicly available media, including whether and how these changed from announcement to implementation. METHODS: We searched Factiva to identify articles related to sugar, soft-drinks, and the SDIL, between 16th March 2016-5th April 2018. Articles included were UK publications written in English and reporting a quotation from an industry actor in response to the SDIL. We used a longitudinal thematic analysis of public statements by the soft-drinks industry that covered their reactions in relation to key policy milestones. RESULTS: Two hundred and ninety-eight articles were included. After the announcement in March 2016, there was strong opposition to the SDIL. After the public consultation, evolving opposition narratives were seen. After the SDIL became law, reactions reflected a shift to adapting to the SDIL. Following the publication of the final regulations, statements sought to emphasise industry opportunities and ensure the perceived profitability of the soft drinks sector. The most significant change in message (from opposition to adapting to the SDIL) occurred when the SDIL was implemented (6th April 2018). CONCLUSION: Reactions to the SDIL changed over time. Industry modified its media responses from a position of strong opposition to one that appeared to focus on adaptation and maximising perceived profitability after the SDIL became law. This shift suggests that the forces that shape industry media responses to fiscal policies do not remain constant but evolve in response to policy characteristics and the stage of the policy process to maximise beneficial framing.

"In these pandemic times": The role of temporal meanings in ambient affiliation about COVID-19 on Twitter.

This paper explores the role of a particular set of commonly occurring temporal meanings relating to the shared experience of being in a pandemic (e.g., in these unprecedented times) and how these foster ambient affiliation on Twitter. Temporal meanings can be realised as a range of grammatical structures in texts and are linguistic resources that add meaning - in terms of dimensions such as manner, time, or place - to the main activities, entities or events in a clause. While often viewed in terms of their role in how experience is represented, we suggest they play a pivotal interpersonal role in how values are positioned and how social bonds are offered to ambient audiences. The paper also draws on communing affiliation, a system in the ambient affiliation framework for understanding how people share and contest values in social media environments, to show how these temporal meanings are functioning. Corpus-based discourse analysis of the contribution of temporal meanings to communing affiliation in a large of corpus of COVID-19 tweets was undertaken. Three major affiliation strategies that these temporal meanings were involved in were observed: centring in the service of convoking affiliation, contrasting in the service of finessing affiliation, and accentuating in the service of promoting affiliation.

Damming news: Geospatial media discourse analysis of dams.

Dams are a globally important social-ecological issue, and the practice of removing aging or obsolete dams is increasing in many countries where rivers have been used to fuel industrial growth. News media play an important role in providing information and raising awareness about dam-related decision making and patterns in news media coverage can shape public sense-making about potentially controversial dam decisions. This research focuses on spatial patterns of news media references to "dam removal" georeferenced to a New England dams database, the types of dam removal characteristics that contribute to newsworthiness, and specific media framing strategies. We develop a method, known as DAMMDA, that combines a large geodatabase of dam features and corpus of news media articles. We find that spatial patterns of "dam removal" news media coverage do not necessarily coincide with the actual occurrence of removed dams, nor the distribution of extant dams, in the landscape. Instead, a minority of dams with specific characteristics make up the majority of dam media references. Such "newsworthy dams" are capable of generating hydroelectricity, are situated on large rivers, are located in urban areas, or have already been removed. Further, references to newsworthy dams are often used to frame discussions about future dam decisions in other locations in New England and across the United States. We conclude by reflecting on how this approach is relevant for understanding complex and interconnected factors that can shape controversial sustainability issues, such as the relationships between news media and social-ecological characteristics of infrastructures within landscapes.

Lessons From the UK's Lockdown: Discourse on Behavioural Science in Times of COVID-19.

In recent years behavioural science has quickly become embedded in national level governance. As the contributions of behavioural science to the UK's COVID-19 response policies in early 2020 became apparent, a debate emerged in the British media about its involvement. This served as a unique opportunity to capture public discourse and representation of behavioural science in a fast-track, high-stake context. We aimed at identifying elements which foster and detract from trust and credibility in emergent scientific contributions to policy making. With this in mind, in Study 1 we use corpus linguistics and network analysis to map the narrative around the key behavioural science actors and concepts which were discussed in the 647 news articles extracted from the 15 most read British newspapers over the 12-week period surrounding the first hard UK lockdown of 2020. We report and discuss (1) the salience of key concepts and actors as the debate unfolded, (2) quantified changes in the polarity of the sentiment expressed toward them and their policy application contexts, and (3) patterns of co-occurrence via network analyses. To establish public discourse surrounding identified themes, in Study 2 we investigate how salience and sentiment of key themes and relations to policy were discussed in original Twitter chatter (N = 2,187). In Study 3, we complement these findings with a qualitative analysis of the subset of news articles which contained the most extreme sentiments (N = 111), providing an in-depth perspective of sentiments and discourse developed around keywords, as either promoting or undermining their credibility in, and trust toward behaviourally informed policy. We discuss our findings in light of the integration of behavioural science in national policy making under emergency constraints.

"How Do They Even Know They Love?" The Image of Polyamory in Polish Expert Discourse.

The article presents the results of a thematic analysis of statements about polyamory made in the media by Polish psychology and sexology experts. The analysis was conducted on the basis of 20 pieces of material released in the Polish national press, radio, and television between July 2012 and October 2018. The results show that most of the analyzed experts approach polyamory with suspicion. In most cases, the decision to be in a polyamorous relationship is assessed very negatively, and in the eyes of the therapists it is evidence of psychological defects in people who make such attempts or it is seen as a harbinger of unfavorable outcomes for the relationship. This negative psychological evaluation is often accompanied by a strong moral assessment and a clear willingness to discourage society from this relationship model. The results show that representatives of psychology and medical sciences in the Polish media support and legitimize the social and moral order that promotes mono-normativity. The true reasons for the aforementioned negative assessment are hidden behind a veil of scientific objectivity.

Curating and Exhibiting for the Pandemic: Participatory Virtual Art Practices During the COVID-19 Outbreak in China.

Since China's lockdown of major cities in response to COVID-19, different forms of online participatory initiatives led by self-organizing groups of volunteers have greatly contributed to information circulation, patient admission support, and other aspects of coping with the pandemic. Although often overlooked by those studying online cultural production during the pandemic, a massive spontaneous and participatory creative outpouring of individual and collaborative artworks related to "fight the pandemic" are being published through platforms including Kuaishou, TikTok, and WeChat public accounts. This article argues that while these participatory online exhibitions published through WeChat opened up a temporary space of expression that both offset the lack of information and enabled alternative ways of understanding of and expression about the crisis, they were not only subject to pervasive state surveillance, but also co-optation by state media.

Making a murderer: Media renderings of brain injury and Aaron Hernandez as a medical and sporting subject.

This paper examines the entanglement of medicine, brain injury, and subjectivity within newspaper discourse and through the case of ex-American footballer Aaron Hernandez. In 2017, two years after being found guilty of murder and five years after scoring in the Super Bowl, Aaron Hernandez died by suicide in his prison cell. Hernandez was posthumously diagnosed with Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE), a neurodegenerative disease associated with violence, depression, and dementia-like symptoms. I examine newspaper coverage of the Hernandez case, focusing upon the murder, arrests, conviction, suicide, and diagnosis of CTE in order to examine understandings of Hernandez's subjectivity. I make three conclusions: First, the disease is not mentioned prior to diagnosis with family instability, friendship groups, individual psychology, and the entitlement of celebrity foregrounded. Second, CTE is foregrounded after the diagnosis and is used to explain much of Hernandez's behaviour. Third, the diagnosis of CTE goes someway to normalizing the behaviour of Hernandez, rendering his behaviours comprehensible. I conclude by considering how the specific narrative of CTE-as-acquired-dementia shapes depictions of Hernandez's subjectivity and discuss how this case troubles existing literatures on the neurologization of selfhood.

Chinese News Media Discourse of Doulas and Doula Care.

This article highlights the relationships among Chinese society, the discourse about doulas and doula care in childbirth, and Chinese women. The author used a critical feminist lens to analyze the discourse about doulas, doula care in childbirth, and women in Chinese mainstream news media. This analysis showed that the Chinese news media and government encouraged and promoted becoming a doula as a profession and doula care in labor in terms of cultural, social, and political factors. An argument was presented that these discourses obscure a nuanced understanding of Chinese women's maternal health in general.

Neymar, defensor da tradição brasileira / Neymar, defender of brazilian tradition / Neymar, defensor de la tradición brasileña

O objetivo deste artigo é analisar como jovens universitários de Teresina-PI se apropriam da mensagem de uma reportagem do programa televisivo Esporte Espetacular. Fez-se uso da técnica de grupos focais e do método analítico-descritivo para coleta e análise dos dados. A amostra foi constituída por 24 jovens universitários, na faixa etária entre 18 e 24 anos. A reportagem pauta a responsabilidade de Neymar em seguir a "tradição" dos brasileiros que chegam ao Barcelona e sagrar-se como o melhor jogador do mundo. Para tal feito o único empecilho a ser vencido é o colega de clube, Lionel Messi. Os sujeitos da pesquisa afirmaram que o discurso veiculado pela reportagem pode reproduzir e criar uma realidade por vezes onírica, uma vez que objetiva conferir a Neymar grande importância no tocante à identidade nacional.

The purpose of this article is to analyze how university students of Teresina-PI appropriate of the message of a report of the television show Esporte Espetacular. There was use of the technique of focus groups and analytical-descriptive method for collecting and analyzing data. The sample consisted of 24 university students, aged between 18 and 24 years. The report features Neymar as responsible to follow the "tradition" of Brazilians and to be crowned as the best player in the world. The subjects of research said that the speech conveyed by the report can reproduce and create a reality sometimes dreamlike, because objective to confer to Neymar great importance with regard to national identity.

El propósito de este artículo es analizar cómo los estudiantes universitarios de Teresina-PI hacen la lectura de un informe del programa de televisión "Esporte Espetacular". Hubo uso de la técnica de grupos focales y método analítico-descriptivo para recopilar y analizar datos. La muestra estuvo conformada por 24 estudiantes universitarios, con edades comprendidas entre 18 y 24 años. El informe agenda responsabilidad de Neymar de seguir la tradición de los brasileños que vienen a Barcelona y consagrarse como el mejor jugador del mundo. Por esta hazaña el único obstáculo que hay que superar es su compañero de club, Lionel Messi. Los sujetos de la investigación dijeron que el discurso del informe puede crear una realidad, a veces sueño, ya que tiene como objetivo introducir a Neymar una gran importancia con respecto a la identidad nacional.

Mídia e a produção do sujeito jogador de futebol profissional / Media and the production of the professional soccer player

Este artigo tem como objetivo visibilizar e problematizar a constituição do sujeito jogador de futebol profissional na sociedade contemporânea. Como ferramenta metodológica, utilizou-se a análise das práticas discursivas provenientes de materiais midiáticos, articuladas com as regularidades de enunciados construídos pelos campos de conhecimento na produção dos modos de subjetivação deste profissional. Para a análise, selecionou-se o material proveniente da mídia impressa – Jornal Zero Hora, de Porto Alegre, especialmente, em um período que caracterizou-se pelo surgimento de um atleta jovem na categoria profissional. Como resultado, pode ser visibilizado que o jogador de futebol profissional é constituído na contemporaneidade pelos modos de subjetivação através dos imperativos dos investimentos técnicos e do lucro. O sujeito é submetido a intensa produção de metodologias dos campos de saber para aperfeiçoamento para um alto-rendimento e por consequência estar de acordo com as exigências de qualificações do mercado profissional...

This paper aims to visualize and problematize the constitution of the professional football player in contemporary society. As a methodological tool, it is used to analysis the discursive practices from media materials, articulated with the regularities of statements constructed by knowledge fields in the production of professional modes of subjectivity. It was selected for analysis, a media material came from diaries, especially the period characterized by the emergence of a young athlete in the professional category and have earned attention from media. As a result, it can be visualized that the contemporary professional soccer player is composed by the modes of subjectivity through the imperatives of technical investment and profit on body. It is remarkably seen the production of methodological knowledge on athletes, that turns to a high performance...

Mídia e a produção do sujeito jogador de futebol profissional / Media and the production of the professional soccer player

Este artigo tem como objetivo visibilizar e problematizar a constituição do sujeito jogador de futebol profissional na sociedade contemporânea. Como ferramenta metodológica, utilizou-se a análise das práticas discursivas provenientes de materiais midiáticos, articuladas com as regularidades de enunciados construídos pelos campos de conhecimento na produção dos modos de subjetivação deste profissional. Para a análise, selecionou-se o material proveniente da mídia impressa – Jornal Zero Hora, de Porto Alegre, especialmente, em um período que caracterizou-se pelo surgimento de um atleta jovem na categoria profissional. Como resultado, pode ser visibilizado que o jogador de futebol profissional é constituído na contemporaneidade pelos modos de subjetivação através dos imperativos dos investimentos técnicos e do lucro. O sujeito é submetido a intensa produção de metodologias dos campos de saber para aperfeiçoamento para um alto-rendimento e por consequência estar de acordo com as exigências de qualificações do mercado profissional.(AU)

This paper aims to visualize and problematize the constitution of the professional football player in contemporary society. As a methodological tool, it is used to analysis the discursive practices from media materials, articulated with the regularities of statements constructed by knowledge fields in the production of professional modes of subjectivity. It was selected for analysis, a media material came from diaries, especially the period characterized by the emergence of a young athlete in the professional category and have earned attention from media. As a result, it can be visualized that the contemporary professional soccer player is composed by the modes of subjectivity through the imperatives of technical investment and profit on body. It is remarkably seen the production of methodological knowledge on athletes, that turns to a high performance.(AU)

Influencing forces or mere interview sources? how key constituencies shaped health care media discourse.

Agenda-building theory explains how groups articulate and transform their interests into issues that garner attention, public approval, and responsiveness from public officials. This study indicates that news sources interviewed during the U.S. health care reform debates articulated their interests through strategic use and avoidance of specific tactics. In-depth interviews were conducted with 14 news sources. Narrative analysis of interview transcripts revealed that news sources utilized external messaging, industry networking, distinguishing factors, and continuing education, yet avoided partisan politics, inflammatory language, and emotional appeals. These findings extend agenda-building theory by suggesting that groups can transfer interests to the public agenda by avoiding certain tactics.

Envelhecimento e consumo: as representações da velhice feminina no discurso midiático / Aging and consumption: the representation of elderly women in media discourse

Este trabalho se propôs a discutir a velhice feminina, por meio da análise de um artigo presente na revista Veja, do mês de Agosto de 2009. Utilizamos para tal, os pressupostos teóricos da Análise de Discurso de linha francesa, oportunidade em que se constatou a articulação entre um tipo ideal de velhice (velhice positiva) e o consumismo em que as mulheres são instigadas a consumirem produtos diversos, valores para mascarar os sinais de envelhecimento e manterem a juventude eterna.

This study aimed to discuss the old women, through the analysis of an article in Veja magazine of August 2009. We used to do such, the theoretical analysis of French Discourse, at which time it was found a link between an ideal type of aging (positive aging) and consumerism in which women are urged to consume various products, amounts to mask the signs of aging and maintain eternal youth.

Envelhecimento e consumo: as representações da velhice feminina no discurso midiático / Aging and consumption: the representation of elderly women in media discourse

Este trabalho se propôs a discutir a velhice feminina, por meio da análise de um artigo presente na revista Veja, do mês de Agosto de 2009. Utilizamos para tal, os pressupostos teóricos da Análise de Discurso de linha francesa, oportunidade em que se constatou a articulação entre um tipo ideal de velhice (velhice positiva) e o consumismo em que as mulheres são instigadas a consumirem produtos diversos, valores para mascarar os sinais de envelhecimento e manterem a juventude eterna.(AU)

This study aimed to discuss the old women, through the analysis of an article in Veja magazine of August 2009. We used to do such, the theoretical analysis of French Discourse, at which time it was found a link between an ideal type of aging (positive aging) and consumerism in which women are urged to consume various products, amounts to mask the signs of aging and maintain eternal youth.(AU)