Experiencing crisis and conflict - OCP

Dear authors and IAMCR members,

I am Virpi Salojärvi, chair of this panel on ‘Experiencing crisis and conflict’, composed of 9 papers. Five papers of this panel will also be presented face-to-face in Lyon.

I would like to encourage you to take this initial online phase to join the discussion! Read as many papers as you can and provide feedback to the authors, especially those not traveling to the conference site. Feedback should follow the CCC principle: Constructive, Courteous, and Critical.

Authors are encouraged to periodically check in to engage with readers and respondents. Remember that each author is expected to provide feedback to at least one other paper in the panel.

I hope that you enjoy these papers and the IAMCR 2023 conference!

First, I would like to congratulate the researchers for their meticulous work that provide the readers with many meaningful takeaways. The texts is clearly written and easy to follow, but, at the same time, it has a great potential to take the reader to a point to ask (and think more about) media use and the factors and motivations influential on the media consumption.

I could provide a couple of comments that the authors might want to consider, I hope they help.

1/ The abstract mentions May 2021 for the period in which this study conducted. However, in the introductory paragraphs, the authors mention that the research was carried out in February and March 2022, then, in the later paragraphs they mention May 2022. I would recommend a closer proofreading to correct such minor inconsistencies.

2/ The authors might want to elaborate more on the justification for choosing these two countries at earlier stages with a focus on what makes these two countries (i.e. Israel and Germany) unique and/or important to compare and conduct such research? This question is addressed briefly but, as a reader, I would appreciate some more information on this.

3/ Regarding the following sentence in section ‘War coverage: media and users’: “Media coverage of wars and other national and international emergencies can shape the fate of citizens, governments, and entire nations.”

What is the difference between ‘citizens’ and the ‘entire nation’? The authors might want to elaborate more on their approach to the concepts of nation, nationality, and citizenship.

4/ There are some repetitive statements, it would be nice to eliminate these. For example, the discussion on the “use of media” during wars and other emergencies have very similar arguments.

Or, in another example, there is a word-by-word repetition, was follows: “The study suggested that during a protracted war, people might be exhausted by negativity and war trauma during a protracted war.”

5/ The authors might want to avoid questions other than the research questions. There is a question asked at the end of the discussion entitled ‘War coverage: Media and users’: “Why, then, would people look for news about wars affecting other countries?”. Such a question is not really relevant to the main RQs, thus it might confuse the reader.

6/ Regarding an argument within the discussion on the geographic and psychographic proximity: “Germany is located on the same continent as Ukraine and Russia and is closer to them geographically than Israel. As a result, the future of Ukraine is more relevant to Germany’s future than to Israel’s.”

I believe this is a bit of a vague argument, as it reduces the potential results of a conflict for a third party country to a geographical proximity. Thus, this argument tends to ignore the role of international relations and treaties.

Overall, I deeply enjoyed reading this very well designed and carefully conducted research. I also benefited a lot from the theoretical discussion and the discussion of the results. So, again, I would like to thank and congratulate the authors for this intellectually stimulating research.