Global streaming media, European green consumption, perception of China before & after COVID-19 and online memes on corruption

Our spring 2023 issue features an eclectic collection of works with topics of high significance to audiences of the world. Our first original article is a very interesting comparative study of two streaming media giants of the world: Netflix of the U.S. and Tencent Video of China. Through a political economic perspective, Wenjia Tang and Mingou Wei show how both giants use audience data to prosper and the subscription-based Netflix and advertising-supported Tencent Video finally converge in developing their mixed funded business models. These strategies are essential for them to maintain market share while expanding their international markets with increasing competition from other streaming service providers.

Our second article is a 27-country comparison of European consumers based on the secondary survey data from Eurobarometer. Using multilevel regression analysis, Hong Vu, Jeff Conlin, Nhung Nguyen and Annalise Baines demonstrate both individual and country level factors as well as interaction between individual and country level factors explain European consumers’ support of plastic waste policy of their government and their individual green consumption practices. Diversity of environmental news consumption of traditional media and social media predict the support of government policy and green consumption practice, but not other online environment news consumption.

Shuo Tang and Lars Willnat’s article compares American people’s opinion of China before and during the COVID-19 pandemic with two national surveys in 2019 and 2021. They found partisan media exposure such as Fox News negatively influences the perception on China while social media use, especially TikTok, positively predicts favorable view on China. Before the pandemic, the US-China trade war already set an all-time low relationship between the two countries. The COVID-19 pandemic and the different approaches between U.S. and China in handling the pandemic further exacerbate the tension between the two countries with more anti-Chinese sentiments in the U.S.

In ‘We are only to Appear to be Fighting Corruption … We can’t even Bite’: Online Memetic Anti-corruption Discourse in the Ghanaian Media,” Michael Ofori and Felicity Dogbatse address the severe corruption problem in Ghana through a visual rhetoric analysis of five online memes on corruption collected from the Facebook page of the well-known Tilapia De Cartoonist of TV3. They examine the rhetoric these memes employ to ridicule and humorize the current campaigns against corruption in Ghana and suggest remediations for governmental corruption.

Afonso de Albuquerque, Raquel Recuero, Marcelo Alves dos Santos Junior’s review essay on online communication studies in Brazil offers a comprehensive review of the origin and development of online communication research there which is both influenced by the U.S. and Europe but also inherited a strong critical tradition. The authors explained the higher education context in which communication research is conducted and how political communication research thrive in the proliferation research of the online context. A network analysis of the thesis and dissertations and Political Communication research conference proceedings in Brazil shows how prevalent the different topic keywords are mentioned and how they are related to one another in these research articles.

Beginning 2023, we expanded our translation of articles to include not only articles from the non-Anglo Global South but also Global North outside the Anglosphere. The section is now renamed “Featured Translated Research Outside the Anglosphere.” This issue we feature scholars from two German-speaking countries – Valerie Hase from Germany, Daniela Mahl and Mike S. Schäfer from Switzerland. They share their insights on the increasing use of computational methods and the more technical approach from other disciplines in studying journalism. But such use did not result in theoretical interdisciplinarity in these research studies. The article was translated with permission from the German communication journal Medien & Kommunikationswissenschaft.

Enjoy the articles!