This study delves into the progression of nuclear war risk perceptions during the initial 6 months of the Ukraine war. It particularly investigated the influence of Italian media coverage changes and the affective tone of war representation. Utilizing a mixed-methods approach, two separate yet interconnected studies were conducted. The first study employed web scraping and keyword selection techniques to assess emotional language and quantify war-related content in the headlines of Italian online newspapers from March to July 2022. Results demonstrated a linear decrease in war-related news and an emotional shift, with a significant decrease in fear and an increase in joy noted between March and May. The second study examined nuclear war risk perceptions at an individual level, surveying a panel of 397 Italians at three distinct points during the same time frame. The findings revealed a similarity between the media’s affective tone and individuals’ affective risk perceptions. Analytic risk perception, in contrast, showed a linear decrease that matched the decline in war-related news volume. The study found preexisting individual differences, among women and older participants, to be significant determinants in shaping risk perception evolution. These groups exhibited higher initial risk perceptions and more resistance to change as the scenario unfolded. This research contributes to the existing body of work that underscores the media’s role in influencing risk perceptions by illuminating the relationship between media representation of the Ukraine war and individual-level affective risk perception. Furthermore, it highlights individual differences as significant moderators of risk perception change during a crisis.

Generalizability of extant findings about media treatment of women in politics is uncertain because most research examines candidates for the legislature or heads of government, and little work moves beyond Anglo-American countries. We examine six presidential cabinets in Costa Rica, Uruguay, and the United States, which provide differing levels of women’s incorporation into government. These cases permit us to test hypotheses arguing that differences in media treatment of men and women cabinet ministers will decrease as women’s inclusion in government expands, and that media treatment of women is more critical when women head departments associated with masculine gender stereotypes. Results show that greater incorporation of women into government is associated with fewer gendered differences in media coverage, tone of minister coverage is more favorable for women who hold masculine stereotyped portfolios, and that the media does present qualifications of women cabinet ministers.

In Slovakia, women are poorly represented in politics and public life. Yet it is the first country in Central Europe with a female president. By applying a mixed-methods approach to analyzing an original dataset containing media coverage of leading presidential candidates (n = 1492), this study explores how the media covered them and discusses under what conditions gender-stereotypical coverage could be detrimental or beneficial to electoral outcomes. The results show media outlet type was not significantly associated with a gender-stereotypical attribution of communal and agentic traits to candidates. Tabloids and quality press equally perpetuated gender stereotypes. Irrespective of their gender, journalists were more likely to depict women candidates as possessing communal qualities perceived as incompatible with leadership. However, findings from the qualitative analysis suggest that when corruption perception is high, and public trust in institutions is low, communal traits stereotypically attributed to women are appreciated. Novelty also works to women’s advantage. These findings have important implications for women candidates’ campaign strategies.

How do the media describe the intersectional identities of elected politicians? Our study focuses on parliamentarians in the Netherlands who fall outside the prevailing norm in politics: women and female and male ethnic minorities. Drawing on 2,783 newspaper articles published between 1994 and 2012 and matched samples, we find that the media structurally emphasize the identities of all parliamentarians who are not white men. Women politicians are more often described in terms of gender, ethnic minorities in terms of ethnicity and Muslim politicians in terms of religion. Ethnic majority men, meanwhile, are most often described by their political ideology. We find that this works already for one minority identity, as well as multiple identities. By continuously highlighting the identities of politicians that diverge from the norm, the media, we argue, paint pictures of women and ethnic minority politicians as different and out of place.

This study provides an overview of the extent, nature and quality of reporting on mental health compared with physical health in Qatari newspapers. We analysed 1274 news reports from daily newspapers in Qatar. The majority of the articles provided general information and were either positive or neutral in tone, reporting purely on physical health matters. A small proportion made associations with violence or reported on suicide or substance use. Our results highlight the underrepresentation of mental health in Qatari newspapers. A collaboration between media and health professionals is recommended to improve reporting on mental health.

This article studies gender differences in media portrayals of political leadership, starting with the expectation that male politicians are evaluated more often on traits belonging to the male leader stereotype, and that female politicians have no such advantage. These gender differences are expected to be especially pronounced during non-campaign periods. To test these expectations, a large-scale automated content analysis of all Dutch national newspapers from September 2006 to September 2012 was conducted. The results show that male politicians received more media coverage on leadership traits in general, although the male and female leader stereotypes explain most of the variation in gender bias between leadership traits. These gender effects are found during seldom-studied routine periods but not during campaigns. As leadership trait coverage has electoral consequences, this gender-differentiated coverage likely contributes to the under-representation of women in politics.

Populism is being increasingly studied by political and social scientists. This article pays particular attention to the way in which ‘people’ can be approached and appealed to by their leaders. In particular, by undertaking a content analysis of the two most read daily newspapers in Italy, and by relying on the technique of correspondence analysis, this article shows that to fully understand the phenomenon of populism, the way in which ‘the people’ are approached by their leaders cannot be left aside. In doing so, this article empirically analyses and discusses three dimension of populism and contributes to a more granular understanding of this phenomenon in established democracies.

The Soviet occupation of Afghanistan and the two Russian wars in Chechnya were the longest, most protracted conflicts of the USSR and Russia after WWII. Both were conducted under conditions of unprecedented violence in peripheral territories. Despite their distance in time and space, both wars are closely linked to each other on the level of cultural representations in contemporary Russia. This paper analyses how the conflicts were represented in a key Soviet and Russian newspaper as the wars unfolded. It analyses the textual and visual coverage of the wars in the Krasnaia zvezda (1980–1986; 2000–2003), in order to disclose changing interpretations of violence and the Other. The paper argues, first, that Krasnaia zvezda told the story of two different types of violence prevailing in each conflict. The Afghan case was presented as one that put the social and cultural transformation of the population at the center of its attention – violence was hence not only physical and excessive but also cultural, as it aimed at the social fabric of society. The Chechen case focused on the recapture of territory and the restoration of sovereignty. Therefore, physical violence appeared more bluntly in the coverage of the conflict. Second, the paper shows that these two different types of violence implied two different visions of the Other. In Afghanistan, the Other was represented as becoming more and more similar to the socialist Self. This dynamic is visually underscored by numerous images of Afghans who have embarked on the path to Soviet modernity. In Chechnya, in contrast, the Other was presented as traditional, backward, and immutable. The Other was usually reduced to complete cultural difference and depicted a dehumanized fashion. This orientalization of the Other was a precondition for the use of excessive physical violence.

Using a sample of Chinese family firms during the period of 2004–2010, we examine the influence of media coverage on corporate philanthropic giving and the moderating role of family ownership. Specifically, we document that media coverage is significantly positively associated with corporate philanthropic giving, suggesting that media coverage as an informal system plays an important role in motivating Chinese family firms to establish business ethics, shape socially responsible images, and enhance corporate philanthropy. Moreover, family ownership attenuates the positive association between media coverage and corporate philanthropic giving. Our findings are robust to a variety of sensitivity tests and are still valid after controlling for the potential endogeneity between media coverage and corporate philanthropy. Our study is one of few studies to investigate the impact of media coverage on corporate philanthropic giving in an emerging market.