Many studies in recent years have addressed the notable ways that Internet features such as blogs and search engines have democratized the community of information seekers and providers, however, fewer investigations have addressed the darker element that has emerged from that same democratic sphere. That is, the huge resurgence and transformation of racist communities across cyberspace. This article presents a new theory of information laundering to explain the process by which racial hate speech is becoming legitimized through a borrowed network of online associations. This Internet‐specific theory builds upon research of “information‐based” racist propaganda to explain how today's search engines, social networks, and political blogs unwittingly enable purveyors of bigotry to infiltrate into mainstream spaces of public discourse.
This research sought to identify how 2 news outlets, Israel's Ynetnews and Iran's Islamic Republic News Agency (IRNA), framed the Iranian nuclear issue and Israeli-Palestinian conflict beyond the scope of objective reporting. The study examines the embedded strategy of journalists to spiritually elevate a national cause against the assumed enemy nation. Fifty-two news stories were examined under the chosen pretext of international conflict reporting. The findings show that IRNA typically framed the nation of Israel as a ''savage regime,'' Zionist oppressors, and general enemies of Islam. Ynetnews demonstrated a more narrow characterization of Iran's president rather than his countrymen, regularly casting the Iranian leader as the chief supporter of Islamic terrorist action and immediate threat to the Jewish State.
Since 2008, Anonymous has been a rising presence in global affairs, although the group has remained relatively hidden behind the margins of media scrutiny. This study uses content and frame analysis from the review of 200 articles in 10 countries to examine the reception of Anonymous in the global press. The analysis revealed a disparity in how journalists chose to represent Anonymous and what they actually reported. Hacktivists were framed mostly as malicious pranksters, even though 82% of their operations were motivated by a defense of free speech or political causes. A crossexamination of hacktivist operations suggested an economically motivated news bias in support of those corporate and government organizations targeted by Anonymous. The study also investigated hacktivist methods and targets, highlighting the group's proclivity for crashing the websites of global institutions.
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