Capsule reports on framing patterns in news coverage on cultural themes, in a small, easy-to-swallow dose!
Welcome to NewsFrames’ first edition of Culture Shots. This is a new type of regular feature we're experimenting with, exploring patterns in news coverage on cultural topics. Culture Shots will look at how different communities, countries and languages report on culture as a bridge into—or way of looking at—similarities and difference in different communities’ ways of looking at the worlds.
It seemed fitting to make our first “shot” about the word culture—or cultural—itself. Take a look, for instance, at this graphical representation of US- and UK-centric reporting in August 2017:
Here are a few themes and articles that caught our eye. Related to the topic of culture war:
The theme of immigrants, too, occupied center stage, but it's possible some people may have missed little articles like this one:
In the United States, corporate culture seemed to be an important topic, with trending articles on Uber and Google in particular:
But musical topics like Hip-hop also gained some attention:
Across the Atlantic, the topic of culture was linked to the issue of UK foster children, because of a particular case related to religious upbringing:
The term princess also commanded some attention, as August 31 marked the 20th anniversary of Princess Diana’s fatal car crash:
(Since we’re on the topic of princess culture, we'll share this one too):
So what is distinctive about any national culture? This selection of August 2017 stories on the topics of companies and music, or immigrants, children and princesses reveal the varying assumption about and transformations in culture at the front and center.
Stories from the Global Voices archive like the ones below also offer insights that amplify or challenge notions of culture:
But we didn't want to include just US- and UK- comparisons. So we started exploring what outlets oriented toward France reported in August 2017, and started exploring the notion of patrimoine, sometimes translated as “heritage”.
A search provided this interesting article on the destruction of patrimoine:
- Crime culturel, crime de guerre
L'Express: 22 August 2017
“La destruction délibérée du patrimoine est enfin reconnue comme acte criminel.”
- Culture crimes are war crimes
L'Express: 22 August 2017
“Deliberate destruction of heritage (patrimoine) finally recognized as a felony”
But we’ll have to leave that exploration for another day. In the meantime, keep well until next time!