Celebrity CEOs espousing Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) are receiving increasing media attention. However, researchers have not yet examined how CEOs and journalists co-create meaning about CSR in broadcast talk, an unscripted genre of news making, rife with contestation and cooperation. This paper presents a Conversation Analysis of six interviews featuring Dan Price, a CEO who pledged to “solve income inequality” by restructuring salaries in his company. Findings suggest that CSR anchored a process of double branding in which the CEO promoted himself and journalists reaffirmed their news philosophy. Price’s warm embrace by journalists across the political spectrum demonstrates a collaborative process of “celebrification”. Price created a transferable persona that appealed, through a mixture of political targeting and strategic ambiguity, to diverse audiences. Journalists elevated this persona by serving pseudo-criticism and showing identification. The story thus provided corporate media with the opportunity to reaffirm their commitment to “responsible capitalism”.

Over the past half century, qualitative reception studies have provided powerful in-depth accounts of the interpretive diversity of media audiences. However, despite the growing availability of digital reception traces, the field still lacks systematic tools to examine the distribution of interpretation, a lacuna which hinders theory development. This paper argues that a comparative approach to polysemy, namely – the diversity of interpretations to a media text, could increase the generalizability of reception studies. Drawing on the concept of framing and on the marketplace metaphor, it offers the Marketplace of Interpretation (MoI), a method combining qualitative and quantitative analysis to quantify and compare polysemy without sacrificing its complexity and nuance. The paper walks readers through the method and demonstrates it on a study that compared the polysemy of Facebook comment threads responding to different news stories about the same event. Potential future applications within and across audience analyses are discussed.

The increasing mediatization of war makes battles over public image evermore prominent. Individual citizens, no longer mediated by traditional gatekeepers, engage in public diplomacy and citizen-journalism, communicating directly to the public. TikTok, a visual social media platform, was used extensively by Palestinians and Israelis to mobilize international support during the 2021 round of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. This paper examines appeals that Israeli and Palestinian TikTok users made to international audiences by comparing 318 posts sampled from two rhetorically equivalent hashtags. A content analysis examining the strategies used, found that each side emphasized different themes (e.g., victimization on the Israeli side, personal narratives on the Palestinian side). Although pro-Israeli users were more strategic in their use of the platform’s features, a multi-variate analysis of engagement found that pro-Palestinian activists were more successful in creating engagement. To further understand the complex and subtle meaning structures encoded into the posts, a subsample of 42 highly shared posts was probed qualitatively for its aesthetics and values, using a semiotic analysis. A first study to compare public diplomacy efforts on TikTok across parties, this paper contributes to knowledge about the ways citizens bear witness from warzones, use platform affordance for storytelling, and engage with the international community.

In quantitative content analysis, conventional wisdom holds that reliability, operationalized as agreement, is a necessary precondition for validity. Underlying this view is the assumption that there is a definite, unique way to correctly classify any instance of a measured variable. In this intervention, we argue that there are textual ambiguities that cause disagreement in classification that is not measurement error, but reflects true proper- ties of the classified text. We introduce a notion of valid disagreement, a form of replicable disagreement that must be distinguished from replication failures that threaten reliability. We distinguish three key forms of meaning multiplicity that result in valid disagreement – ambiguity due to under-specification, polysemy due to excessive information, and inter- changeability of classification choices – that are widespread in textual analysis, yet defy treatment within the confines of the existing content-analytic toolbox. Discussing implications, we present strategies for addressing valid disagreement in content analysis.

Although media-audience encounters are always potentially open to different interpretations, little is known about the textual mechanisms that encourage polysemy. Focusing on a story about a CEO who pledged to drastically cut his pay to increase his employees’ salaries, this study compared news reports that covered the same event but were met by different levels of polysemy in their reception. Through a combination of frame and semiotic analysis, the study pinpoints differences in content and style between news stories that were met by interpretive convergence from audiences (low polysemy) and those that were met by interpretive divergence (high polysemy). Based on these differences, a typology of three textual mechanisms is offered to explain the range of polysemy in the news: the attributes and representation of characters, the use of empiricism versus mythology in structuring conflict, and the level of closure versus uncertainty in the story’s conclusion.

Though news representations of protest have been studied extensively, little is known about how media audiences critique such representations. Focusing on TikTok as a space for media criticism, this article examines how users employ the app to respond to representations of protest in mainstream news media. Content collected in the spring of 2021 illuminated two very distinct foci of discussion about news representations of protest: the Black Lives Matter movement and the Capitol riot. Our qualitative content analysis of TikTok videos and their related comments demonstrates how users employed TikTok’s creative affordances to dissect specific news representations, critique the media apparatus, and expand news narratives. These findings shed light on the complex role of TikTok as a platform for media criticism—one that can be used for both democratic and non-democratic ends.

Subdisciplines in communication studies have developed competing and self-contained theories of meaning multiplicity. Arguing that this fragmented scholarship falls short of grasping the full scope of the phenomenon, this article offers Decoding Convergence–Divergence (DCD) as an interdisciplinary analytical and conceptual framework. Synthesizing principles from cognitive, cultural, and speaker-centered approaches to meaning multiplicity, this framework was applied in a study that examined news coverage of a CEO’s initiative to address income inequality and its reception by different segments of the American audience. The study’s results provide a novel demonstration of the joint contribution of opposing theories to the understanding of meaning multiplicity. Specifically, it found that textual polysemy, partisan selective perception, and the use of strategic ambiguity coalesced in the interpretive dynamics of this story. Based on these results, the article discusses the contribution of DCD to bridging competing approaches and the potential applications of the framework.

Parody is so pervasive in participatory culture that it is described as a central component of Internet vernacular. Valuable insight has accumulated about parodies as artifacts, however, little is known about their creators. Drawing on the sociology of culture, this article explores YouTube music video parodies as a field of cultural production. Through interviews with 22 YouTubers recruited from a sample of top-ranked parodies, it examines the relationship between practitioner characteristics and their evaluation of parody. Contrary to other studies of participatory culture, the field was predominantly male in its participation and norms. It presented a divide between ‘strategic’ and ‘passionate’ practitioners who used parody to different ends. Nevertheless, interviewees valued similar attributes of parody, often diverging from scholarly definitions of the genre as critical commentary. This dynamic and the genre’s popularity are explained by the hybrid qualities of the field, which encourage diverse uses of parody.

The ubiquity of intertextuality in internet culture has ignited long-standing debates about the cultural significance of parody as a device of commentary and as civic speech. It also raises concerns about the legal implications of unprecedented uses of copyrighted material. This paper examines how YouTube videos, self-labeled by their creators as “parody”, reframe the meaning structures of copyrighted material. Focusing on representations of gender in the music industry, it probes 100 music video parodies through a qualitative textual analysis. The paper offers a typology of five interpretive configurations underscoring the relationships between originals and their renditions. While the majority of parodies did not convey the critical commentary that their label promised, most of them did aspire to transform the meaning of the music videos. The typology, which presents a discrepancy between textual and societal forms of critique, is discussed in relation to its contribution to broader evaluations of media audiences and user-generated-content.

This paper uses the lens of internet-based humor to examine how, amidst massive global flows of content, young Israelis articulate a sense of local-national affinity. We analyzed verbal and visual comic email forwards to trace: (a) the extent to which Israelis share local versus global content and (b) the means through which national affinity is conveyed. Results show that while Israelis’ humorous diet is mainly non-local, a pervasive use of the Hebrew vernacular plays an important role in creating local affinity. Our analysis yielded five discursive frames that mark locality in humor: presumed locality, dramatized locality, ex(im)ported localization, clandestine localization , and conspicuous localization . We conclude by offering a typology that locates these frames along three analytical axes: origin, explicitness and diversity. The combination of these frames and axes suggests a nuanced map of comic global-local interplays and offers a model for future comparative research.

This article explores new forms of ethnic humor as emergent in a salient arena of contemporary culture: our electronic mailboxes. We argue that two processes underpin the manifestations of ethnic humor as it ‘goes online’: the global turn and the turn to genre plurality. We examine the implications of these processes through (1) content analysis of 1000 Israeli humorous ‘forwards’ and (2) a grounded analysis of 130 texts representing ethnic groups with varying degrees of proximity to Israeli culture. Regarding the global turn, we found that non-local ethnicities are ‘imported’ to the local symbolic sphere via new forms of humor. Regarding the turn to genre plurality, results indicate that while old forms of ethnic humor typically include explicit stereotyping, new forms introduce a wider variety of stances towards ethnic stereotypes, ranging from their reproduction in visual language to a polysemic stance, and finally to their neutralization.

When I was reading Razvan Nicolescu’s Social Media in Southeast Italy, people who glanced at the book’s cover always commented: “wow, what a specific topic.” It is indeed, so some context is in order. Social Media in Southeast Italy stems from Why We Post, a collaborative research project on social media use in Brazil, Chile, China, England, India, Italy, Trinidad, and Turkey. The project produced monographs devoted to each location, and two comparative books. My impression from reading this monograph and parts of the comparative book (How the World Changed Social Media) is that this project makes a strong case for regional ethnographies of social media use.