ABSTRACT
To alleviate the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on tourism, tourist facilities in Bali are informing visitors of the relevant health protocols, using posters to describe the appropriate behaviours. Using critical discourse analysis, this study examines the microstructure of the texts in these posters to identify their semantic, syntactic, lexical, and rhetorical elements. The study findings show that the semantic aspects consist of background, intention, and detail. The syntactic elements involve coherence and the use of the pronouns 'you' and 'we', and of the imperative, and the declarative. The lexical aspects include abbreviations and vocabulary, related to the health protocol. The textual messages are delivered in official language, supported by pictures and photographs.
ABSTRACT
Purpose>Partisan news media, which often publish extremely biased, one-sided or even false news, are gaining popularity world-wide and represent a major societal issue. Due to a growing number of such media, a need for automatic detection approaches is of high demand. Automatic detection relies on various indicators (e.g. content characteristics) to identify new partisan media candidates and to predict their level of partisanship. The aim of the research is to investigate to a deeper extent whether it would be appropriate to rely on the hyperlinks as possible indicators for better automatic partisan news media detection.Design/methodology/approach>The authors utilized hyperlink network analysis to study the hyperlinks of partisan and mainstream media. The dataset involved the hyperlinks of 18 mainstream media and 15 partisan media in Slovakia and Czech Republic. More than 171 million domain pairs of inbound and outbound hyperlinks of selected online news media were collected with Ahrefs tool, analyzed and visualized with Gephi software. Additionally, 300 articles covering COVID-19 from both types of media were selected for content analysis of hyperlinks to verify the reliability of quantitative analysis and to provide more detailed analysis.Findings>The authors conclude that hyperlinks are reliable indicators of media affinity and linking patterns could contribute to partisan news detection. The authors found out that especially the incoming links with dofollow attribute to news websites are reliable indicators for assessing the type of media, as partisan media rarely receive links with dofollow attribute from mainstream media. The outgoing links are not such reliable indicators as both mainstream and partisan media link to mainstream sources similarly.Originality/value>In contrast to the extensive amount of research aiming at fake news detection within a piece of text or multimedia content (e.g. news articles, social media posts), the authors shift to characterization of the whole news media. In addition, the authors did a geographical shift from more researched US-based media to so far under-researched European context, particularly Central Europe. The results and conclusions can serve as a guide how to derive new features for an automatic detection of possibly partisan news media by means of artificial intelligence (AI).Peer review>The peer review history for this article is available at the following link: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/OIR-10-2020-0441.
ABSTRACT
The COVID- 19 pandemic has brought many changes to the ways scientific conferences are being run. After an exhausting period, the relaxation of the COVID-19 restrictions finally arrives in 2022, and with it also a maneuvering space for the organizing committees of a conference. It is thanks to the gradual mitigation of the pandemic that the conference in Kosice was able to be organized in a physical format after a long hiatus. In the second half of May 2022, the Department of Political Science of the Faculty of Arts of the Pavol Jozef Safárik University in Kosice held a scientific conference for students and young researchers entitled Truth vs. Post-Truth: "It's not true, but it could be". Moreover, on May 20, 2022, a conference was opened in the Platón building at the UPJS campus. Due to the presentational format of the conference, the audience could ask questions to the panelists in person or via the Sli.do application.
ABSTRACT
Since the 1988 U.S. presidential campaign, I have had the privilege every four years of editing the special issues of the American Behavioral Scientist. The 2020 campaign for the U.S. presidency has been historic in so many ways: campaigning in a global epidemic, a truncated spectacle debate series, over $14 billion spent on political advertising, two presidential candidates with distinctly different approaches to Covid 19 and its importance as an issue which dictated/hardly impacted the style, strategy and tactics of their respective campaigns. All of this occurred within a Burkean scene as the most divisive time in the United States since the Civil war, and a failure of presidential leadership to find commonalities that unite us, opting instead to focus on division and rancor us. Within this complex political mosaic is the omnipresent debate on the role and responsibility of the press and social media in crafting dueling mediated realities - some based on fact, with others rooted in fear and rabbit hole conspiracy theories. This spurious spectacle culminated in an unprecedented, domestic terrorist attack by Trump supporters on the U.S. Capitol. In addition, a focus of debate and dialogue after election day in America is the state of polling, as many well-known entities were embarrassed with predictions that did not pan out with the voting public.
ABSTRACT
Scientific literature has repeatedly shown that populism feeds on crises, exploiting divisions which grow within societies. Populist narratives that flourished during the COVID-19 pandemic argued that the health crisis is yet another pretext for the “corrupt, globalist elites” to strip ”the honest citizens” of their fundamental values, amongst which those of religious nature. In Romania, the nationalist conservative Alliance for the Unity of Romanians (AUR) won 9 percent of the votes in the parliamentary elections held in December 2020. A newcomer in Romanian politics, AUR vowed to rest its political action on four main pillars, i.e. family, nationhood, faith and liberty – all of them strong religious symbols. Moreover, in its political programme, AUR claims to fight against the persecution that Christianity has allegedly been subjected to in recent decades. The current paper looks into how AUR used political advertising in social media to frame elites as anti-religious, thus illegitimate to represent Romanians or to influence national politics. It is usually that the party’s scapegoating strategy targets high-profile national or supranational political figures (most often European Union officials or institutions), blamed for their loose, if not severed, connections with ordinary citizens. The study also shows that during a crisis, populist political advertising makes extensive use of its religious dimension. © 2021, Universitatea Babes-Bolyai, Catedra de Filosofie Sistematica. All rights reserved.