Results

Publications

Articles published in peer-reviewed international journals

  • Vincze, Hanna Orsolya. Religious references in Romanian and Hungarian News and Comments on the Refugee Crisis. Journal for the Study of Religions and Ideologies, 17(51), 2018. 85–99.
    ABSTRACT: Public discussions of the recent rise in the number of refugees and asylum seekers, commonly referred to as “the refugee crisis” employ recurrent references to religion. This paper investigates the salience of religion in Romanian and Hungarian online news and comments. It aims to contribute to better understanding the role religion plays in the public understanding of the refugee crisis, and also to the wider issue of the role of religion in public discussions. It also aims to identify the specific local discourses that the local audiences revert to when making sense of and commenting on foreign news. The analysis combines corpus linguistic and discourse analytical approaches to a constructed week sample of Romanian and Hungarian news and their comments. The main referential strategies identified with regard to religion are generic religion, religion as difference, visible religion and religious threats. Similarities of the two news cultures point to continuities that transcend national boundaries, and are connected to wider trends in the role of religion in the public understanding of the refugee crisis. References to religion are also shown to intersect with local political discourses. In the wider context of the European public sphere, and the debates over its secular nature or desecularization, the results suggest that the mediatization and politization of religion in the context of the refugee crisis needs to be understood as a “secular return” rather than desecularization.
  • Vincze, Hanna Orsolya, Hírközösségek és véleménybuborékok [News Communities and Echo Chambers]. Me.Dok XIV, issue 2, 2019, 5–18.
    ABSTRACT. The study of the circulation and reception of online news has been defi ned by the concepts of echo chambers and filter bubbles for several years now. According to the new technological determinism, our online information consumption is recorded and regulated by algorithms and computational propaganda, also relying on our psychological characteristics, encloses us into the echo chambers of our own fears, fragmenting and polarizing societies. Recently, however, several studies have questioned this narrative, pointing to the diversity of online news diets, the active nature of online news communities, and the forms of network solidarity these make possible. The paper looks into this literature to identify the factors that might promise to counterbalance the formation of echo chambers and fi lter bubbles in the network society. Acknowledgement: This work was supported by a grant of Ministry of Research and Innovation, CNCS – UEFISCDI, project number PN-III-P1-1.1-TE-2016-0731, within PNCDI III.
  • Vincze, Hanna Orsolya, Radu Meza, Delia Cristina Balas, Frame Variation in the News Coverage of the Refugee Crisis: the Romanian Perspective. East European Politics, Societies and Cultures [Forthcoming]
    ABSTRACT. The 2015 refugee crisis has held the attention of Romanian news media as well, as one of the most challenging issues for the European Union in the last decade, even though Romania is not situated on the main routes on which refugees arrive. Our research focuses on the variation of issue specific news frames in time, according to media type, and by the countries covered, also addressing the locally salient issue of religion. Articles from the websites of the top ranked six Romanian news outlets were analyzed, including three quality papers and three tabloids (N=6183), from April 1, 2015 to September 30, 2017. Using a computer-assisted, clusters-based frame analysis, we identify six primary, mutually exclusive and six secondary, non-exclusive frames: European crisis, context / victimization, relocation / distribution, international conflict, and social problem, national costs, religious issues, US immigration policy, humanitarian / international. The variations in their salience follow the general European tendency towards securitization. At the same time, the emphasis of the issue as a European crisis indicates a tendency characteristic of Central and Eastern European media coverage.  Co-occurrence patterns of frames and specific countries also indicate that the salience of some globally recurrent frames varies by countries covered.

Selected conference presentations

  • Balaban, Delia, Radu Meza and Hanna Orsolya Vincze. Mediated Public Diplomacy and the EU Migration Politics. A Frame-based Analysis of the Romaian News. Poster presented at the 69th Annual Conference of the International Communication Association, Communication Without Boundaries. Washington, 24–28 May, 2019. Download the poster

  • Mogoș, Andreea, Hanna Orsolya Vincze, Radu Meza. Half a Truth is Often a Great Lie. How the Political and Economic Elites and the Public Shape the Messages in the Romanian Media System. Paper presented at the annual conference of the International Association for Media and Communication Research, Communication, Technology and Human Dignity. Madrid, 7–11 July, 2019.

  • Mogoș, Andreea, Radu Meza, Hanna Orsolya Vincze.  Online News Media Constructions of Societal Concerns. Media Representations of Risks and Moral Panic in Romania and Hungary. Paper presented at the conference of the European Sociological Association, Europe and Beyond: Boundaries, Barriers and Belonging. Manchester, 20–23 August 2019.

  • Balas, Delia Cristina, Mihnea Stoica, Hanna Orsolya Vincze. The Populist Dimension of Mediated Discourses About Corruption in Romania. Paper presented at the interim conference of ECREAțs Political Communication Section, Transforming Communication – Old and New Borders.  Poznan, Poland, 12–13 September, 2019.

Research reports

Research reports in Romanian.