Key Issues Facing Contemporary Journalism: Conflict and Climate Change - JJM472

• Title: Key Issues Facing Contemporary Journalism: Conflict and Climate Change
• Czech title: Klíčové problémy současné žurnalistiky: konflikt a klimatická změna
• Guaranteed by: Department of Journalism (23-KZ)
• Faculty: Faculty of Social Sciences
• Actual: from 2024
• Semester: summer
• E-Credits: 10
• Examination process: summer s.:
• Hours per week, examination: summer s.:1/1, Ex [HT]
• Capacity: unknown / unknown (unknown)
• Min. number of students: unlimited
• 4EU+: no
• Virtual mobility / capacity: no
• State of the course: taught
• Language: English
• Teaching methods: full-time
• Guarantor: doc. PhDr. Alice Němcová Tejkalová, Ph.D.
• Class: External course, not for registration

Annotation

The purpose of Key issues facing contemporary journalism is to enable students to concentrate on a topic, relevant for the overall aim of the programme, bracing journalists and journalism for the future. The topic will fall within three areas, each constituting a focal point for the challenges and opportunities facing journalism today: Society, Technology, and the Market. The topic can have a theoretical or a practical focus or seek to combine the two.

The purpose of the course is to enable students to (A) understand how the journalistic coverage of conflicts and climate change are embedded within broader issues linked to globalisation and its histories; (B) to discuss various positions — both as researchers and journalists — in relation to contested issues of power and justice within conflicts and climate change; and (C) to engage critically with both broader and situated questions of positionality within both the qualified analyses and production of journalistic coverage of conflicts and climate change.

Lecturer in Denmark: Henrik Bødker, Cecilia Arregui Olivera

Last update: Lábová Sandra, Mgr., Ph.D. (22.02.2023)

Aim of the course

Knowledge:
- identify challenges and opportunities facing journalism in light of the topic in focus
- reflect on the main theoretical discussions regarding the coverage of conflicts and/or climate change

Skills:
- use the methods relevant for analysing the identified challenges and opportunities facing journalism in light of the topic in focus
- reflectively apply the main theoretical positions in analyses of concrete cases of the coverage of conflicts and/or climate change
-use these theoretical insights as a way to analyse and/or produce journalistic content on these issues.

Competences:
- reflect on the relevance of the topic in focus in relation to the overall aim of the programme and insights acquired in the previous courses
- independently relate to the main theoretical positions within the coverage of conflicts and/or climate change.

Last update: Lábová Sandra, Mgr., Ph.D. (22.02.2023)

Literature

Kunelius, Risto. (2021). The difference between “alarmist” and “alarming”: Interview with Maxwell Boykoff: Nordic Journal of Media Studies, 3(1), 200-206. 

Nisbet, M.C. (2019). “Sciences, Publics, Politics: The Trouble With Climate Emergency Journalism”: Issues in Science and Technology, XXXV (4).

Bell, M. (2008). The death of news: Media, War and Conflict, 1(2), 221–231.

Harcup, T. & O’Neill, D. (2017). What is News? News values revisited (again): Journalism Studies 18(12), 1470-1488.

Parks, P. (2019). Naturalizing negativity: how journalism textbooks justify crime, conflict, and “bad” news: Critical Studies in Media Communication, 36(1), 75-91.

Hackett, R. A. (2017). Can peace journalism be transposed to climate crisis news? Pacific Journalism Review, 23(1), 14-24.

Ward, S. J. A. (2021). “Pragmatic objectivity for Global Ethics.” In Ward, S. J. A. (Ed.) Handbook of Global Media Ethics. Springer International Publishing (pp. 29-50). 

Callison, C., & Young, M. L. (2020). “Opening up journalism’s crisis.” In Callison, C., & Young, M. L., Reckoning: Journalism’s Limits and Possibilities. Oxford University Press (pp. 1-19). 

Parks, P. (2020). Researching With Our Hair on Fire: Three Frameworks for Rethinking News in a Postnormative World: Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, 97(2), 393–415.

Hanitzsch, T. & Hoxha, A. (2018). “Journalism of war and conflict: Generic and conflict-related influences on news production.” In Fröhlich, R. (Ed.) Media in war and armed conflict: The dynamics of conflict news production and dissemination (pp. 169-190). Routledge. 

Risso, L. (2017). Reporting from the front: First-hand experiences, dilemmas and open questions: Media, War & Conflict, 10(1), 59–68.

Stupart, R. (2021). Tired, Hungry, and on Deadline: Affect and Emotion in the Practice of Conflict Journalism: Journalism Studies, 22(12), 1574–1589. 

Last update: Lábová Sandra, Mgr., Ph.D. (27.02.2023)

Syllabus

The course will, firstly, introduce an overall theoretical frame focused on power and justice for discussing both theoretical and practical issues linked to the coverage of conflicts and climate change — both as separate issues and in combination. This will, secondly, be followed by a discussion of how such issues — both theoretically and empirically — are linked to core values of traditional and emergent journalisms, e.g. tensions between objectivity and activism. Based on the introduced frame and discussions of journalistic roles and positions, the course will work with a range of contemporary examples of the coverage of conflicts and/or climate change.

Session 1: Introduction: Conflict, climate and journalism

Session 2: The news value of conflict, crisis and emergency

Session 3: Challenges to the objectivity norm

Session 4: Journalism and climate change

Session 5: Journalism in war and conflict

Session 6: Issues of climate justice

Session 7: Networked ecology and (global) conflict journalism

Session 8: Peace journalism

Session 9: Post-coloniality and journalism + course summary

Last update: Lábová Sandra, Mgr., Ph.D. (27.02.2023)