Published Papers by Adina Marincea
Holocaust. Studii şi cercetări, 2023
Common antisemitic visual representations are rooted in Ancient Christianity and the Middle Ages,... more Common antisemitic visual representations are rooted in Ancient Christianity and the Middle Ages, but we have also witnessed new developments after the Holocaust and the condemnation of fascism. Stereotyping and dehumanization through zoomorphism, demonization, exaggeration of certain physical features anchored in the false presumptions of physiognomy and other visual devices have been weaponized across the centuries for racist and antisemitic agendas. This study undergoes a comparative analysis of two corpuses of antisemitic images from the Romanian press and social media at a distance of one century between them. I analyze the persistency, transformations, and new developments of antisemitic image codes popularized by the Romanian far-right from the start of the 20 th century, through to the rise of fascism and the Second World War, up to the present-day social media. This visual qualitative analysis with critical historical insights is carried out on the following corpuses: a) a contemporary subset of 81 memes, digital stickers, and other visuals from 17 Romanian far-right Telegram channels and groups posted over the course of one year (August 2022-August 2023); and b) 70 archival political cartoons published by 17 far-right ultranationalist newspapers (and one pro-Soviet communist newspaper) between 1911 and 1948. Findings show how persistent certain antisemitic stereotypes have proven across time and different cultural spaces-the hook-nose, zoomorphism, the blood-libel accusations, Judeo-Bolshevism, the satanic representations-and how the visual dimension serves to efficiently implant antisemitic narratives in the collective mind. These (visual) narratives are skillfully recontextualized to fit new (geo-)political realities-the post-Holocaust times, the COVID-19 crisis, the war in Ukraine.
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Holocaust. Studii şi cercetări, 2022
Romania has proved to be no outlier in the ongoing trend of mainstreamization of far-right and ne... more Romania has proved to be no outlier in the ongoing trend of mainstreamization of far-right and neo-fascist politics and discourses, despite the optimistic outlook that many shared not long ago. AUR marked a historical success, being the first "radical return" political formation to gain seats in Parliament after 1989. as a result, a process of accelerated normalization of the far-right discourse is taking place, moving the political spectrum further to the (extreme) right, while also rehabilitating historical figures that played a significant role in the Holocaust. The present paper draws on Discourse Historical Analysis and concepts such as "calculated ambivalence" and "dog-whistle politics" to unpack the coded meanings and whistles entwined in the discursive provocations and reactions of AUR's leader, George Simion. Starting from AUR's press release from January 2022, minimizing the Holocaust, which set in motion the "right-wing populist perpetuum mobile", I analyze the main discursive strategies, both confrontational and submissive, used by Simion in his effort to "dog-whistle" to AUR's ultranationalist supporters, while at the same time denying allegations of antisemitism, Holocaust minimization, and fascist sympathies. For a qualitative measure of the success or failure of these strategies, a complementary critical analysis of the reactions of some of the most prominent antisemitic ultranationalist voices in Romania is carried out. Is Simion a skillful "dog-whistler" or a "traitor"? The study shows that there is a thin and fluid line between the two.
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Southeastern Europe, 2023
The first years of democracy after the fall of national-communism in Romania have seen media enjo... more The first years of democracy after the fall of national-communism in Romania have seen media enjoy some forms of freedom. But old vices made their way into the new political landscape, together with the less familiar ills of capitalism. In what follows, the author proposes a critical overview of the historical developments of Romanian media market before and after 1989 and of the mechanisms brought on by the new system that transferred state control over media to market control. To this end, the article makes a brief account of the pre-1989 media system, going through the media capture by the monarchical and the following communist state. It then looks at the liberalization period after the fall of communism, the privatization of the media and its capture by private interests, especially in the form of "media moguls". The study also looks at the state of public television after '89 and how state control was reshaped to be compatible with capitalist democracy. Getting closer to present day, the article analyses how the financial crisis and the covid-19 crisis made journalists more vulnerable, but also examines some promising alternative journalistic models, brought by digital media.
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Three Decades Later - The Media in South East Europe after, 2021
The Romanian press has been close to political parties ever since the early twentieth century, ev... more The Romanian press has been close to political parties ever since the early twentieth century, even before the communist regime. During nationalcommunism, the only possible opposition through media came from sources outside the country, most notably Radio Vocea Americii and Radio Europa Liberă, two US-based radio stations controlled by the CIA that had a clear anticommunist mission and were active in the region. There were two attempts at clandestine print media outlets in the 1980s, before the fall of the regime, but they were soon suppressed after publishing just a few issues. Some tactics that were used during the national-communist regime to suppress the media – such as destroying newspaper issues or blocking their distribution, as well as infiltrating secret police agents into newsrooms – went on long after the 1989 Revolution. Infiltration of agents has continued to this day. During the Revolution and in the following months, many newspapers from the former regime rebranded themselves overnight as ‘free’. This was also the case of the state television station, which symbolically added the new term to its title, rebranding itself as the ‘Free Romanian Television’. However, many of those sudden changes remained rather superficial, as political control over media remained in place. Many journalists with long careers during the former regime became leaders of the ‘free press’, and former Securitate collaborators became media owners, popular journalists, PSM directors or businesspersons and politicians with direct or indirect ties to the press.
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The need and estimated utility for a structured analysis of the Roşia Montană gold exploitation p... more The need and estimated utility for a structured analysis of the Roşia Montană gold exploitation project have been palpable in the Romanian public sphere during the last 15 years and there is a vast amount of conflicting information and opinions on the benefits and risks involved. This article provides a comprehensive decision analysis of the Roşia Montană project. Over 100 documents from the past years have been gathered regarding the Roşia Montană mining project, which cover the main official, formal and less formal documents covering the case and produced by a wide range of stakeholders. These were then analyzed while designing a multi-criteria tree including the relevant perspectives under which the most commonly discussed four alternatives were analyzed. The result of this can be translated into a valuable recommendation for the mining company and for the political decision-makers. If these stakeholders want the continuation of the project and its acceptance by civil society, the key challenge is to increase the transparency of the process and improve the credibility and legal aspects; if these aspects cannot be met, the decision-makers need to pay attention to the alternatives available for a sustainable development in the area.
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Revista Română de Comunicare şi Relaţii Publice, 2012
The paper proposes a new empirical approach in the study of Europeanized public spheres, by apply... more The paper proposes a new empirical approach in the study of Europeanized public spheres, by applying political claims analysis and frames analysis to readers’ comments about the Fiscal Compact and comparing them to claims in the media articles. The research draws a broad picture of how Romanian citizens interpreted the actions and decisions of political actors, what positions they chose to adopt in regard to the issue and why. Results show that readers’ attitudes regarding the fiscal treaty are influenced by their political party affinities or oppositions and that the extent of Europeanization of a newspaper determines the degree of Europeanized claim-making in readers’ comments. The paper questions citizens’ participation in the public sphere, characterized by mediated interactions and high degrees of contestation. The EU Fiscal Compact has generated an issue-specific agonistic public sphere which, to a certain extent, involves online news media consumers, who do not resume at replicating the political debate between European leaders, but also add their own interpretations to it. Besides monitoring and discussing political decisions, readers of Adevãrul and Evenimentul Zilei also address claims to the political class, asking for information and for citizens’ participation in the decision-making regarding the treaty. However, the overall level of Europeanization of readers’ debate is quite low.
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in Corbu, N., Negrea, E., Tudorie, G. (eds.), Globalization and Changing Patterns in the Public Sphere. Bucharest: comunicare.ro., 2010
The last Eurobarometer survey (August 2010) draws the attention of the European Commission on the... more The last Eurobarometer survey (August 2010) draws the attention of the European Commission on the need to communicate with EU citizens. Amid the economic crisis, people’s confidence has decreased, while euro-skepticism has increased. Among other things, this shows that, in spite of the efforts undertaken by the Commission to improve efforts towards public communication, we still cannot speak of a European identity and, even less, of a European public sphere. Successive changes have been made during the 60 years of EU Communication, in attempt to bring Europe closer to Europeans and win their support for the Commission’s policies. It is the purpose of this paper to identify and briefly present these milestones in the evolution of what today “EU Communication” and analyse them in the context of a famous debate that has shaped the study of communication since its inception, that between Walter Lippmann and John Dewey. We will then present the results of a research on the coverage of EU policies in the online media from Romania against this theoretical background.
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Romanian Journal of Communication and Public Relations, 2012
This special issue of the Romanian Journal of Communication and Public Relations isdedicated to s... more This special issue of the Romanian Journal of Communication and Public Relations isdedicated to scholarly contributions of PhD students who tackle topics of interest in currentresearch in communication and media studies. This issue seeks to explore different views onthe most debated topics and concepts in the European and world-wide academic researchcommunity. Whether we refer to the increasingly popular instruments of new media and so-cial media and their role in offline activism, to media framing or to EU communication, thefields of communication and media studies lend themselves well to academic inquiry, as thecontributions in this volume show.
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Revista Română de Comunicare şi Relaţii Publice, Jan 1, 2011
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Reports by Adina Marincea
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Populism and Social Media. A comparative analysis of populists' shared content and networks on Facebook, 2021
Populist politicians and political parties often prefer social media, especially Facebook, for th... more Populist politicians and political parties often prefer social media, especially Facebook, for their communication with the public. Populists, as well as radical left and right leaders and parties, especially those on the margins of the mainstream political system and with less access to traditional media, have seen in platforms like Facebook a gateway to direct communication with their audiences, in the wake of elections as well as in non-electoral periods. Despite this, comparative or in some cases, country-specific populist communication on social media remains rather under-studied. To fill this empirical gap, the study explores contemporary populist politicians' use of various media sources in their Facebook communication strategy, as well as the legacy and alternative media networks that disseminate and amplify their messages. The analysis is carried out at two levels: a) a classification of the media sources that are shared by 17 official Facebook pages of main populist leaders/parties in eight national contexts in Europe, by means of content analysis; b) a network analysis of the social media networks around the 17 populist actors, that share their posts. Facebook was selected for the study because it remains the leading social media platform in all eight countries. The unit of analysis is the URL in each post shared by the 17 populists during three different time-intervals: before and after the European Parliament elections in 2019 (April – June 2019), during regular reporting (July 2019–February 2020), and at the beginning of the COVID-19 crisis (MarchApril 2020). This inquiry aims to uncover the types of media and connections between different (social) media sources in propagating populists and the role that traditional versus alternative sources play in this process in different national contexts. The study results contradict some of the assumptions or expectations connected to populist communication and media strategy. For one, we found no prevailing preference for ‘alternative’ media sources that commonly disseminate hyper-partisan news or hoaxes and disinformation. Populists are more prone to creating and disseminating their own political content or even drawing on the legitimacy of legacy media. However, their choice of media sources reflects their political orientation and ideology, which serves to create an echo-chamber that can reinforce political beliefs. Left-wing media is scarce among most populists in our study, while centre-right and even far-right sources are dominant. This reflects not only the predominance of right-wing populism in Europe, but also how some populist leaders’social media pages can be seen as places of radicalisation, most commonly towards the far right. This tendency is reinforced by populists’ networks that distribute and amplify their messages. The main disseminators in their networks are their party and party colleagues, as well as different political fan groups that support them or oppose their political rivals.
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In 2017, Romania registers high risks on all 5 indicators of market plurality (in part due to cha... more In 2017, Romania registers high risks on all 5 indicators of market plurality (in part due to changes in measurement, but also degrading market conditions) and on PSM, with particularly serious concerns regarding political independence, which is similar to the trends observed in the previous edition of the MPM for the country. Regarding the market plurality area, the media viability indicator poses the highest risk (83%) underlining the fundamental problems of the media market, which are exacerbated by the global challenges to ‘old’ media business funding models, leaving it even more vulnerable to inside and outside factors. Pressures from the ownership and the commercial side, i.e. the organisation to be profitable, as well as political ones take a toll on media companies. Given the country context presented in the introduction, the change of funding for the PSM in Romania at the beginning of 2017 (the public funding is now coming straight from the state budget and the licence fee was repealed) as well as the continuous systemic problems of the PSM dating back more than a decade (specifically the arbitrary nature of dismissals and of parliamentary oversight), its independence was assesed as posing the highest risk from all indicators in this report.
Available at: http://cmpf.eui.eu/media-pluralism-monitor/
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Less Hate More Speech Project
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The current report, supported by the University of Stockholm in collaboration with Median Resear... more The current report, supported by the University of Stockholm in collaboration with Median Research Centre, Bucharest, represents a first attempt to systematize the main arguments issued by the main stakeholders on the Rosia Montana gold mining project (RMGC, the Romanian officials, the civil society, the local community, experts and citizens). We believe that the most appropriate method of analysis and evaluation of the available data and for establishing which option is the most suitable for a sustainable development of the Roșia Montană area, is a multi-criteria decision-making model . In the following we will see how this scientific method can serve the Romanian decision makers in the process of weighing the data for reaching a definitive and objective conclusion.
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Papers by Adina Marincea
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Southeastern Europe, Jul 28, 2023
The first years of democracy after the fall of national-communism in Romania have seen media enjo... more The first years of democracy after the fall of national-communism in Romania have seen media enjoy some forms of freedom. But old vices made their way into the new political landscape, together with the less familiar ills of capitalism. In what follows, the author proposes a critical overview of the historical developments of Romanian media market before and after 1989 and of the mechanisms brought on by the new system that transferred state control over media to market control. To this end, the article makes a brief account of the pre-1989 media system, going through the media capture by the monarchical and the following communist state. It then looks at the liberalization period after the fall of communism, the privatization of the media and its capture by private interests, especially in the form of “media moguls”. The study also looks at the state of public television after ’89 and how state control was reshaped to be compatible with capitalist democracy. Getting closer to present day, the article analyses how the financial crisis and the covid-19 crisis made journalists more vulnerable, but also examines some promising alternative journalistic models, brought by digital media.
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Populist politicians and political parties often prefer social media, especially Facebook, for th... more Populist politicians and political parties often prefer social media, especially Facebook, for their communication with the public. Populists, as well as radical left and right leaders and parties, especially those on the margins of the mainstream political system and with less access to traditional media, have seen in platforms like Facebook a gateway to direct communication with their audiences, in the wake of elections as well as in non-electoral periods. Despite this, comparative or in some cases, country-specific populist communication on social media remains rather under-studied. To fill this empirical gap, the study explores contemporary populist politicians’ use of various media sources in their Facebook communication strategy, as well as the legacy and alternative media networks that disseminate and amplify their messages. The analysis is carried out at two levels: a) a classification of the media sources that are shared by 17 official Facebook pages of main populist leader...
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Politické vedy
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Published Papers by Adina Marincea
Reports by Adina Marincea
Available at: http://cmpf.eui.eu/media-pluralism-monitor/
Papers by Adina Marincea
Available at: http://cmpf.eui.eu/media-pluralism-monitor/