Media and Information in Times of Crisis: The Case of the COVID-19 Infodemic
Media play an important role in informing the public about issues on the political agenda, different opinions, and public statements, thereby establishing and bringing forth new spaces of information flow. One of the media’s main roles in democratic societies is to give publicity to central issues on the political and public agenda, especially in times of crisis. Nevertheless, studies have found that, in times of crisis, the public and the media tend to “rally ’round the flag,” leading to significant decreases in their criticality, alongside (almost) unreserved support for nation(al) or region(al) leaders. This paper aims to bridge the gap between both media and communication studies and ge…
Too good to be true: The effect of conciliatory message design on compromising attitudes in intractable conflicts
The aim of this article is twofold: first, to demonstrate how the use of experimental methods challenges the implicit assumption of progressive discourse analysts that ‘inspiring’ messages will have a positive effect on political attitudes and trust regardless of the recipients’ early political dispositions, and second, to examine the power of conciliatory message design to change political attitudes in favor of a peaceful solution to intractable conflicts such as the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. By employing the conceptual frameworks of progressive discourse analysis and experimental critical discourse analysis, we examined the most comprehensive hypothesis formulated thus far in the lit…
Climate of Opinion as a Driver of Collective Action: Evidence From the 2011 Israeli Social Protest Movement
What drives mass mobilization? A substantial body of theoretical work in diverse fields, including political science, communications, sociology, and economics, is built around the idea that an individual’s willingness to participate in a mobilization is driven by her beliefs about public opinion – that is, about what the majority of the public thinks. Despite the centrality of this idea, rigorous empirical evidence is scarce. We test this idea using original data collected during and after the massive street protests in Israel in the summer of 2011. Our analysis shows that individual beliefs about average societal support for the protest movement (i.e., the “climate of opinion”) are indeed …
Public opinion, media and activism: the differentiating role of media use and perceptions of public opinion on political behaviour
To what extent do perceptions of public opinion effect individual support and political participation in political action? To what extent might media use moderate the role of public opinion in pred...
Gendering political conflict: the racialized and dehumanized use of gender on Facebook
Although attacks against gendered others have proliferated around the world, there remains a paucity of research examining the gender-biased climate that normalizes and condones racialization and d...