Volume 41 (2020): Issue 1 (January 2020)

This article explores the mimicking of tabloid news as a form of covert racism, relying on the credibility of an established tabloid newspaper. The qualitative case study focuses on a digital platform for letters to the editor, operated without editorial curation pre-publication from 2010 to 2018 by one of Denmark’s largest newspapers, Ekstra Bladet. A discourse analysis of the 50 most shared letters to the editor on Facebook shows that nativist, far-right actors used the platform to disseminate fear-mongering discourses and xenophobic conspiracy theories, disguised as professional news and referred to as articles. These processes took place at the borderline of true and false as well as racist and civil discourse. At this borderline, a lack of supervision and moderation coupled with the openness and visual design of the platform facilitated new forms of covert racism between journalism and user-generated content.

This article opens a new perspective on Finland’s Cold War history by highlighting the role of the Finnish Broadcasting Company (YLE) in providing information about the German Democratic Republic as a particular polity, economy, and key player in the European Cold War landscape. The analysis is based on search results from the YLE digital database (Metro) from 1970–1989, and it is supported by documents from the German Broadcasting Archive [Deutsches Rundfunkarchiv] and the YLE company archive. The archive documents and metadata testify about a long-term interest in East Germany in Finnish television, as well as long-term contacts and collaboration between East German and Finnish television companies, in the executive as well as at grass roots levels.

Data visualisation – in the forms of graphs, charts, and maps – represents a text type growing in prevalence and impact in many cultural domains; education, journalism, business, PR, and more. Research on data visualisation reception is scarce, particularly that related to interactive and dynamic forms of data visualisation in digital media. Taking an approach inspired by grounded theory, in this article I investigate the ways in which young students interact with data visualisations found in digital news media. Combining observations from reading sessions with ten in-depth interviews, I investigate how the informants read, interpreted, and responded emotionally to data visualisations including visual metaphors, interactivity, and animation.

For years, social media platforms have been perceived as a democratic gain, facilitating freedom of expression, easy access to a variety of information, and new means of public participation. At the same time, social media have enabled the dissemination of illegal content and incitement to discrimination, hostility, or violence, fuelling several content regulation initiatives. From the perspective of freedom of expression, this development embraces two challenges: first, private actors govern freedom of expression, without human rights safeguards; second, this privatised governance of human rights is encouraged and legitimised by a broad range of EU policy initiatives. Informed by an analysis of Danish Facebook users’ attitudes toward public debate on Facebook, we pose the question: How do social media companies such as Facebook balance various human rights considerations on their platforms, particularly in relation to freedom of expression? We analyse the abovementioned challenges through a human rights lens, which serves as the analytical framework for this article. Further, we suggest some strategies for moving forward, drawing on recent recommendations from the UN human rights system.

Newspapers in Sweden are experiencing reduced revenues due to decreases in advertisement sales and reader subscriptions. Given such circumstances, one way of being more cost-effective is for journalists to recycle pieces of texts already published by others. In this article, I investigate to what extent and how the four biggest newspapers in Sweden do this. Following a close reading of 120 articles about the crisis in the Swedish Academy in 2018, I found that the newspapers included recycled quotations attributed to other media to a great extent. Moreover, recycled statements from other media were often intermingled with quotes from new interviews; however, social media were not used as sources very often. A discussion of the problematic aspects of “a culture of self-referentiality” concludes the article.

Most research on public relations (PR) roles takes the starting point of PR as an indispensable boundary-spanning function. Context may explain how PR is performed and which skills are important, but not the degree to which PR is necessary. In this article, we tackle the latter question by identifying and discussing the role of the low-flying communicator in the Danish region of North Jutland. The study is based on individual and focus group interviews with communication practitioners and students. The results show that many regional companies have established a communicative comfort zone “under the radar” of public attention. This leads to recruitment problems. Companies are less visible in the labour market and depend on graduates who stay in the region for personal reasons. A certain unwillingness to cross boundaries of social and public spaces feeds into sense-making but also contestable role understandings of PR practice and education in regional contexts.