The International Journal of Press/Politics

Following the death of twenty-two-year-old Mahsa Jina Amini, tens of thousands of protestors took to the streets in Iran—and the whole world watched through their screens. Several Iranian diaspora journalists stepped up to cover the events in Iran for western news outlets. In this study, we interviewed fourteen Iranian diaspora journalists on how they define their role when reporting on Iran and how they navigate the balance between their personal experience and their reporting. Implications for this study include journalistic expectations for international news coverage and the role of the diaspora journalist within that coverage.

This study investigates how news flows have shaped the mediated conversations among BRICS countries by examining aspects such as news geography, underlying topics, authorship attribution, and references to media sources. The authors conducted a quantitative manual content analysis of 3,945 discursive articles that were published between 2011 and 2019 by leading newspapers in BRICS countries, which covered ten dailies in four languages. The findings reveal that the most discussed countries reflected the traditional structure of international news, which includes trade partners, neighboring countries, and elite nations. Among the BRICS member states, China and Russia received the most media attention. China-related issues often intersected with economic topics, while articles on Russia predominantly centered around violent conflicts and security. Conversely, Brazil, India, and South Africa had limited visibility, with Brazil and South Africa often being discussed within the BRICS framework. Notably, South Africa led with the highest share of articles on the BRICS states altogether (19%), surpassing the share of U.S.-related articles (13.41%). Correspondent-authored articles on BRICS countries were comparatively recurrent in Chinese and Russian newspapers. Moreover, Chinese and Russian media footprints were scarce. More balanced coverage and denser news flow across BRICS media systems remain necessary to boost South–South communication and convey BRICS as more than a Chinese-Russian alliance “plus others.”

Scholars have increasingly turned their attention to the ways in which the public trusts an array of media content, outlets, and platforms. However, the bulk of this work has focused on audience research in Western democracies. This study uses surveys of journalists in Rwanda, Uganda, and Kenya in 2019 to examine the metajournalistic discourse surrounding how press freedom levels, technological advancements, and various sociopolitical factors impact public trust in the news media. Findings indicate that Kenyan journalists believe that public trust in the media is high, while Rwandan journalists perceive the lowest levels of public trust in the press. Findings also suggest that journalists in these three East African nations believe the public is more likely to trust the press when journalists are committed to advocating for the public and maintaining peace in the country. This study also highlights the importance of understanding journalists’ perceptions about their audiences when examining journalism practice around the world.

Changes in global journalism are reflected in myriad cross-national professionalization efforts, including the development and exportation of models for journalism practice. Literature on peace journalism, for instance, suggests that its adaptation across contexts is shaped by forces on several levels, including the influence of individual media practitioners. However, little research examines those likely to practice peace journalism nor the implications of these social profiles on the diffusion of the model more broadly. Drawing on field theory and 20 in-depth interviews with East African journalists conducted between 2020 and 2021, this study explores such questions by identifying shared dimensions of position and habitus across those who attend peace journalism trainings. Findings suggest that these individuals tend to be well educated, share common experiences with conflict, and hold similar interventionist role conceptions. Such findings illuminate the types of social transformations peace journalism may undergo as it is adapted across contexts, with implications for journalism theory and practice.

Taking a discursive approach, this study applies the concept of metajournalistic discourse to the study of press freedom debates in a postcolonial context stretching from 1993 to 2023 between the Zimbabwean public and private press. Based on a textual analysis of press freedom debates, combined with interviews with various news media stakeholders held between December 2022 and January 2023 in Harare, the study finds support for the previous argument that the idea of journalistic interpretive communities does not really hold under contested contexts beyond liberal Western democracies. The study extends this idea by reconceptualizing journalistic communities beyond liberal Western democracies as fractured interpretive communities. The study further argues that rising polarization and epistemic contests under liberal Western democracies now threaten journalistic interpretive communities as previously understood. This is especially so for those journalists who operate under a contested and polarized news media and political environment, without a single dominant national ideology.