Sociological Review

Sociological Review

News Media in the Social Networks Era: Polarization and Changing Nature of News Reporting (Semiotic Analysis of the BBC Farsi Instagram Page)

Document Type : علمی وپزوهشی

Authors
Mohammad Mollaabbasi
Saber Jafari kafiabadi
Assistant Professor in Sociology Department, Allameh Tabatabayi University, Tehran, Iran
10.22059/jsr.2022.88956
Abstract
In recent years, social networks have become the main place for the exchange of news and information and have marginalized traditional news media. Traditional media have tried to withstand these developments by changing their news policies and maintain their authority and importance. In this direction, some controversial characteristics of the social networks space, and the issue of polarization at the top of them, are more visible in the field of news media than in the past. In this research, an attempt has been made to investigate the news coverage of one of the most important media active in the Persian-language virtual space, that is, BBC Farsi's Instagram page, with a preliminary theoretical preparation to measure the issue of polarization in the field of news media. For this purpose, we have semiotically analyzed 1200 photos and news headlines that have been published in this media for twenty days. The obtained results show that more than 74% of all the news that BBC Persian has published about Iran during this period contain polarizing elements.
Keywords
the principle of dispersion
the principle of cohesion
the principle of extremes
the principle of integration
polarization
BBC Farsi
  • آذری، سیدحسن (1391) «تحلیل گفتمان انتقادی پروپاگاندای بی‌بی‌سی فارسی و صدای آمریکا علیه ایران» در: مطالعات ماهواره و رسانه‌های جدید، پاییز 1391، شمارۀ 1، صص: 87-120.
  • احمدی، علی، سید محسن عسگرزاده و ریحانه مفیدی (1400) مقایسه تطبیقی پوشش خبری بحران کرونا در شبکه خبر و بی‌بی‌سی فارسی»، در: فصلنامه علمی رسانه‌های دیداری و شنیداری، دوره پانزدهم، شماره 37، صص 133-162.
  • غفاری، قدیر و بهروز یاوری (1396) «بازنمایی دوران دفاع مقدس (جنگ عراق و ایران) در سایت و شبکه بی‌بی‌سی فارسی» در: مطالعات دولت‌پژوهی در جمهوری اسلامی ایران، شماره بهار و تابستان 1396، صص 133-164.
  • کوزر لوئیس (1373). زندگی و اندیشۀ بزرگان جامعه‌شناسی، ترجمۀ محسن ثلاثی، تهران، انتشارات علمی.
  • Atton, C., & Hamilton, J. F. (2008). Alternative journalism. Sage.
  • Rusbridger, A. (2018). Breaking News: The Remaking of Journalism and Why It Matters Now. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
  • Jewitt, C. E., & Goren, P. (2016). Ideological structure and consistency in the age of polarization. American Politics Research, 44(1), 81-105.
  • Oxford Dictionaries, “word of the year 2016”, Available in: https://languages.oup.com/word-of-the-year/2016/
  • Adamic, Lada A., and Natalie Glance. "The political blogosphere and the 2004 US election: divided they blog." Proceedings of the 3rd international workshop on Link discovery. 2005.
  • Conover, Michael, et al. "Political polarization on twitter." Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media. Vol. 5. No. 1. 2011.
  • Marozzo, Fabrizio, and Alessandro Bessi. "Analyzing polarization of social media users and news sites during political campaigns." Social Network Analysis and Mining1 (2018): 1-13.
  • Howard, Philip N., et al. "Opening closed regimes: what was the role of social media during the Arab Spring?." Available at SSRN 2595096(2011).
  • Phillips, Whitney. This is why we can't have nice things: Mapping the relationship between online trolling and mainstream culture. Mit Press, 2015.
  • DiMaggio, Paul, John Evans, and Bethany Bryson. "Have American's social attitudes become more polarized?." American journal of Sociology3 (1996): 690-755.
  • Baldassarri, Delia, and Peter Bearman. "Dynamics of political polarization." American sociological review5 (2007): 784-811.
  • Tucker, Joshua A., et al. "Social media, political polarization, and political disinformation: A review of the scientific literature." Political polarization, and political disinformation: a review of the scientific literature (March 19, 2018)(2018).
  • Silverman, C. (2015). Lies, damn lies and viral content. Tow Center for Digital Journalism White Papers, available at https://academiccommons.columbia.edu/catalog/ac:vdncjsxkvx
  • Shin, Jieun, and Kjerstin Thorson. (2017). “Partisan Selective Sharing: The Biased Diffusion of Fact‐Checking Messages on Social Media”. Journal of Communication. 67(2): 233–255
  • Crockett, M. J. (2017). Moral outrage in the digital age. Nature human behaviour, 1(11), 769-771.
  • Montell, A. (2021). Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism. HarperCollins.
  • Lorentzen, Christian (2021) “Like Rain on Your Wedding Day: Between the sentimental, the gothic, and the ironic” published in: Available in: https://www.bookforum.com/print/2802/between-the-sentimental-the-gothic-and-the-ironic-24490.
  • Calcutt, A., & Hammond, P. (2011). Journalism studies: A critical introduction. Routledge.
  • Bright, J. (2018). Explaining the emergence of political fragmentation on social media: The role of ideology and extremism. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 23(1), 17-33.
  • Aldera, S., Emam, A., Al-Qurishi, M., Alrubaian, M., & Alothaim, A. (2021). Online extremism detection in textual content: a systematic literature review. IEEE Access, 9, 42384-42396.
  • Schackmuth, A. (2018). Extremism, fake news and hate: effects of social media in the post-truth era.
  • Hogg, M. A. (2015). Social instability and identity-uncertainty. Social psychology and politics, 307-370.
  • An, S. K., & Gower, K. K. (2009). How do the news media frame crises? A content analysis of crisis news coverage. Public relations review, 35(2), 107-112.
  • Campbell, B., & Manning, J. (2018). The rise of victimhood culture. Microaggressions, safe spaces, and the new culture wars, The Rise of Victimhood Culture: Microaggressions, Safe Spaces, and the New Culture Wars, 1, 265.
  • Jeffery, L., & Candea, M. (2006). The politics of victimhood. History and Anthropology, 17(4), 287-296.
  • Brown, Z., & Tiggemann, M. (2020). A picture is worth a thousand words: The effect of viewing celebrity Instagram images with disclaimer and body positive captions on women’s body image. Body image, 33, 190-198.
  • Eyears, Sophie (2019). “How BBC News Built a More Engaged Audience on Instagram” in: Meta Journalism Project, Available at: https://www.facebook.com/journalismproject/bbc-news-instagram
Sociological Review
Volume 29, Issue 1
June 2022
Pages 41-76