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Reporting Daily Events in Prime Time News |
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Since December 1995 television viewers in
Slovenia have had the opportunity to watch two prime time
news programs. What are the similarities and what are the
differences between these two news broadcasts? Who is given
opportunity to address the Slovenian public? How frequently
do civil society, minorities and marginalized social groups
appear in these news broadcasts? These are the issues addressed
by Marko Prpič in his analysis of the prime
time news broadcasts.
The period of monitoring was March 2006. The two news programs
are similar in structure, with only minor differences in certain
segments and the length of airtime devoted to commercials.
The analysis by thematic blocks showed relatively little difference
between the two programs. The commercial television gave more
airtime to the set of topics covering internal politics, wars,
conflicts, crime and security, and the set dealing with culture,
entertainment, sports and leisure time. Coverage of crime
stood out in terms of the length of airtime given to it on
the commercial channel, while public television placed more
emphasis on international conflicts. Both news programs mainly
reported on the events related to the capital of Slovenia,
Ljubljana, while the absence of regional and local coverage
was most conspicuous within the set of topics dealing with
economic issues. Topics related to minorities and weak social
groups were most noticeable by their absence. The analysis
of interlocutors who appeared in news programs revealed that
politicians prevailed; women accounted for less than one-fifth
of the interlocutor group, and when they did appear in news
programs, they usually gave statements about topics related
to public services, welfare state, humanitarian work, society
and religion, or they were featured as anonymous interlocutors.
Both news programs demonstrated an Euro-centric attitude in
covering international affairs, so, for example, there was
not any report dealing with South America or Australia during
March 2006. In the author's opinion, the most worrying is
the fact that all negative trends typical of commercial televisions
– domination of politics, the absence, or at best the modest
representation of minorities and civil society, the prevailing
Ljubljana-centric approach to domestic affairs and Euro-centric
approach to international affairs, the inordinately low number
of women appearing in news – is also characteristic of the
public service broadcaster.
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Sandra
B. Hrvatin, Lenart J. Kučić, Iztok Jurančič
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Media Ownership and Its Impact on Media Independence |
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The authors of the report on media ownership
in Slovenia, Sandra Bašič Hrvatin, Lenart J. Kučić
and Iztok Jurančič, focused on the implications
of the current structure of media ownership and state's interests
in the media for the autonomy of Slovenian media. The stakes
held by the state are the result of a specific form of media
privatization during the early 1990s. The authors point out
that the data on media owners found in companies' registers
and the lists of official media owners do not reveal the real
state of affairs. In order to obtain the wider picture, it is
necessary to expose the links among people sitting on boards
of companies that are official media owners and of those which
have no media stakes but are in the position to pull levers
by which they can influence media operation. To illustrate this,
the authors present the ownership structure of the main national
daily, Delo, and explain how it affects the autonomy of journalists
and the newspaper. The exposure of the interplay of politics,
media ownership and media content further reveals another form
of political pressure, one exerted through advertising strategies
employed by the largest advertisers, say, telecommunication
and insurance companies whose significant shareholder is the
state. The authors also examined some controversial legislative
changes, particularly those introduced during the last two years,
including state subsidies to the media. A comparison of the
financial reports of broadcasters whose programs enjoy the status
of special significance (and which were entitled to subsidies
between 2002 and 2005) and financial reports of other broadcasters
showed that subsidized broadcasters had lower return on capital,
but their labor costs were also lower than the average in this
sector. Another peculiarity that emerged was that seventeen
radio channels had no employees, and fifteen had only one employee. |
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Roman Kuhar analyzed media representation of
minorities, the Roma, Muslims and gays and lesbians. The period
analyzed was February 2006. Kuhar employed quantitative method
and discourse analysis to establish who was given opportunity
to speak, what they said, whose views and interpretations were
reproduced, what the underlying assumptions were and which discriminatory
practices were present. The majority (78%) of the texts analyzed
(249 altogether) related to Islam and Muslims, because of the
coinciding protests provoked by the cartoons of the Prophet
Muhammad. Of the 390 interlocutors, most of whom were politicians,
89% were men. The author describes the circumstances surrounding
the cartoons episode and ensuing protests as a form of moral
panic among the media underpinned by stereotypical representations
that created the impression that violence is characteristic
of the entire Muslim community. Another problematic technique
used was generalization, whereby the »voice of the Muslim world«
was presented as unified and frequently identified with the
most radical attitudes. Many texts lacked the context, fostering
the impression that all Muslims were non-civilized radicals.
The group of interlocutors in media texts about Muslims included
290 men and 26 women; 13% of interlocutors were the representatives
of the Roman-Catholic community. The topics related to Muslims
and Islam were most frequently discussed by European and American
politicians, and the ratio of “western” to Muslim interlocutors
was two to eight.
Nearly 20% of all media texts about the Roma were featured in
the crime section of daily newspapers and dealt with criminal
offences committed by the Roma. There were 45 male and 15 female
interlocutors altogether, most of them non-Roma. In most media
texts analyzed here, the Roma appeared as passive objects who
present a problem, are uneducated and lazy. The most frequently
used expression was »problematic Roma issues,« with education
and employment being in focus. Generally, the media image of
the Roma connotes negative, different, and uncivilized attributes.
The 14 texts covering gay and lesbian issues confirmed the
thesis that homosexuality was a marginal topic. Media still
present homosexuality as an excess or an exotic phenomenon.
Generally, the media no longer treat homosexuality as a medical
phenomenon as they did in the past, but discourses reproducing
stereotyped images still find way into the media.
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