An 11-year-old Olly Murs superfan said he had the “best day” of his life when the singer personally greeted him during a concert.
Zak and his family waited six hours to secure their spot at the front of the crowds for the Trouble Maker’s show at Cartmel Racecourse in south Cumbria.
The youngster was moved to tears throughout the performance of Murs’ 15 years of hits tour, so much so that the singer paused his set to chat with the schoolboy before dedicating a song to him.
Zak, from Chorley, Lancashire, told BBC Radio Cumbria: “He asked me why I was crying… and I said because you’re my favourite.”
He previously joked to his mum, Catherine, about whether his hero would come and greet him as they secured their spot at the front of the stage.
“I said that’s never going to happen Zak,” Catherine explained.
“But he did. We were just in shock. We genuinely couldn’t believe it, we were gobsmacked.”
Zak said Murs kept on looking at him throughout the show because he was crying.
“He must of thought, ‘Is he ok?’,” Zak said.
“So when he finished his song he asked if he could come down… and then that’s when he started talking to me and that was the best day ever.
“He gave me a hug and took a picture and then he dedicated a song out to me.
“I love his music and how kind he is.”
After the show, the family said Murs gave them an autograph and also offered tickets to his concert at the Llangollen Pavilion in Wales.
“He is a genuine, honest, fantastic idol and role model for children,” Catherine said.
“There’s not many people who would come down and see if children are ok, or anybody in the audience.
“We are just so overwhelmed by the generosity and the kindness from everybody. It goes to show that there is a lot of kindness in this world.”
QUETTA – The 7th Muharram procession ended peacefully in the provincial capital Quetta on Thursday.
The procession took out from Imambargah Kalan Prince Road which was lead by Ashiq Hussain of Balochistan Shia Conference.
The procession included 7 mourning groups and passed through traditional routes such as Prince Road, Art School Road, Archer Road, Liaquat Bazaar and reached Imambargah Nasir-ul-Aza and ended peacefully.
Strict security arrangements were made on routes of the procession in the Quetta.
Pakistan Army, Frontier Corps (FC), Police, Balochistan Constabulary personnel were deployed for security.
A day before the procession, the security forces sealed the shops, markets, plazas and plazas coming along the route in the presence of representatives of the Anjuman-e-Tajran Balochistan.
It’s not looking great for the smartwatch industry as analysts from Counterpoint have recorded a fifth consecutive quarter of decline with 2% year-on-year slip. However, China is experiencing a surge in smartwatch shipments, with a whopping 37% year-on-year growth.
Experts point out two major reasons for the global smartwatch market decline. The first is the waning of Apple smartwatch sales, accompanied by a significant and persistent deceleration in India’s once-booming smartwatch market.
Still, Apple retains the top spot with 20% global share, while recording 9% decline in shipments. Apple is followed by Huawei, which grew 53%, and so did Xiaomi, from 6% last year to 10%, recording the same 53% growth as Huawei. Samsung lost nearly 23% of its market share year-over-year, dropping from 9% to 7% of the global share.
Consumer preferences are seeing notable changes as people are looking for more expensive and feature-rich devices. The $100-$200 segment experienced a 21% growth, while the sub-$100 category saw a 17% decline in shipments.
Looking ahead, Counterpoint believes that the smartwatch market will see a modest uptick in sales by the end of 2025, with around 3% growth.
Survivors of terror attacks and the families of those killed are among those calling on the media to adopt tighter guidelines on reporting the incidents, after some found out their loved ones had died from reporters on their doorstep.
A new reporting code backed by policing and media figures calls on outlets not to approach bereaved families within the first 48 hours after their loss and to instead make their inquiries via the police.
The guidelines, compiled by the Survivors Against Terror group, call on outlets to coordinate requests to victims and survivors and avoid congregating outside a victim’s home. Newsrooms are also asked to reduce their focus on the names, pictures and manifestos of terrorists, depriving them of the attention they crave.
The guidance is being published before the 20th anniversary of the 7 July terror attacks in London on Monday. Among those backing the guidelines is Ella Young, a survivor of the attack that day on a westbound Circle line train near Edgware Road.
“While I was waiting for an ambulance following the attack I was approached by a man offering to help me contact my husband,” she said. “I later found out he was a journalist. He made no effort to contact my husband but instead – in the days and weeks that followed – he pestered me for interviews and information.
“I was in no fit state to speak to anyone and told him I didn’t want to do any media. But he wouldn’t stop. In the end I had to change my phone number, social media details and emails to get peace. Survivors have been through so much – they shouldn’t have to endure this, too.”
Figen Murray, whose son was killed in the Manchester Arena attack, supported the guidelines. Photograph: James Speakman/PA
Figen Murray, the mother of Martyn Hett, who was killed in the Manchester Arena attack, said her young daughter found out about her brother’s death from a journalist who knocked on their door. “I can never take that back but I can encourage that we learn the lessons of previous attacks to protect others,” she said.
Also among those supporting the new rules is Darryn Frost, who fought a terrorist on London Bridge with a narwhal tusk. Eight people were killed when three terrorists led by Khuram Butt, 27, drove a van into pedestrians and then began stabbing people on 3 June 2017.
The current editors’ code of practice, overseen by the voluntary Independent Press Standards Organisation (Ipso), only states that, in cases involving grief or shock, “enquiries and approaches must be made with sympathy and discretion”. It also states they must not engage in intimidation, harassment or “persistent pursuit”.
Not all publishers are members of Ipso. Some, such as the Financial Times and the Guardian, have their own codes of practice.
Lloyd Embley, a former editor-in-chief of the Mirror titles, said that, while he backed journalistic freedom and public interest journalism, “I also know we can make mistakes – especially in the aftermath of major events like terror attacks”.
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“I think this guidance helps journalists in the heat of the moment think about how we do our jobs while respecting the pain of victims and not falling into the trap of promoting the fear and hatred terrorists seek to spread,” he said.
Neil Basu, a former head of counter-terrorism policing, said the reporting of terrorism was a “key public service”, but could intensify the pain for victims when done badly.
Survivors Against Terror said its recommendations had been tested extensively with regulators, journalists and media lawyers.
Brendan Cox, a co-founder of the group, said: “Media reporting of terror attacks is absolutely in the public interest – what isn’t is intrusion into the lives of victims and survivors. This guidance aims to help journalists strike the balance and we hope media organisations act on it.”
Syntho has been quietly building a name for itself in electronic-music production circles with its service providing courses in mixing, mastering, sound design and arrangement.
Now the UK-based startup, founded by musician Josh Baker, is taking some of those courses to an even bigger platform: Spotify. The ‘bite-sized’ lessons are part of the streaming service’s ‘Courses’ hub in the UK, which launched in March 2024.
Syntho is the second dedicated music-edtech provider for the hub, following PlayVirtuoso (since rebranded as Whatclass), although another of the partners – BBC Maestro – has some music courses alongside other topics.
A curated selection of Syntho courses – described by CEO Hazel Savage as “a highlight reel” of its full archive – can be accessed by Spotify Premium listeners as part of their subscription, for no extra cost.
“Spotify already have 15 million UK subscribers. Literally, a better go-to-market plan could not have landed in my lap!” Savage told Music Ally ahead of the launch. “Being able to put our content in front of that volume of people is incredible.”
Savage joined Syntho as CEO in February this year, but has a long history in music-tech that includes roles at Shazam, Pandora and BandLab before founding AI-metadata startup Musiio in 2018, then selling it to SoundCloud four years later.
She spent nearly three years as SoundCloud’s VP of music intelligence while also angel investing in startups including AudioShake, un:hurd Music, Masterchannel, Flossy and AI|Coustics, before taking the Syntho job.
“This is a company that did $700k in revenue last year, yet a lot of people haven’t heard of them. Anything that puts us more in the public spotlight is exciting,” said Savage.
“We will be able to bring people back from Spotify into the Syntho ecosystem as well. They’re very non-restrictive: the Syntho brand and the clickback to our website will be there. They’re not trying to gatekeep the content, so it works well for us.”
While the terms of the agreement are confidential, Savage said that the Spotify deal does generate revenue for Syntho – it’s not pure promotion – nor does it rely on the startup charging Spotify users to watch the courses.
“We already have 700 videos of paywalled content on Syntho, so I didn’t feel the need to paywall it on another platform. For me it’s a shop window,” she said.
On its site, Syntho charges £69.99 a month for an all-you-can-eat subscription, although the price falls to £43 a month and $33.33 a month for people who pay quarterly or annually respectively.
The courses are presented by working artists and producers, with Baker joined by Liquid Earth, Sweely, Alisha and a growing number of other musicians on its roster.
“The majority of Syntho users on our platform are on web. We must be the only music-tech company who are not mobile-first!” said Savage.
“If you’re sitting down to do Ableton or music production, you’re going to be at a desktop or a laptop, and probably multi-screening with two monitors. We do have iOS and Android apps, but we massively skew towards web. Spotify massively skews towards mobile, so it’s a complementary platform for that reason too.”
Savage thinks Syntho is part of a tech trend that isn’t being talked about much in public yet: of investors starting to move away from investments in AI startups in favour of “things that cannot be replicated by AI, which they see as a safer bet in retaining value”.
This may sound counterintuitive at a time of fears in all sorts of industries that AI is coming for people’s jobs. But as Savage points out, AI is also commoditising itself to some degree. When she started Musiio, building proprietary AI models was hard work. Now, with open-source and off-the-shelf models “there is not so much core IP around AI that’s investable”.
“Investors are putting a thesis around ‘how do we shore up our investments so that they’re profitable in the long run?’ I see this in other music verticals too. What are the hyper-specific, hyper-personalised, cannot-be-replicated [by AI] elements of our industry?” she explained.
“You can fake some things with a chatbot, but the minute people figure it out or it falls over, it’s worth less than nothing. You could type into ChatGPT ‘How do I use Ableton?’ and it will churn out a lot of text. But is it accurate? Will it really help you?”
“Or you can learn from someone like Josh Baker who’s doing a million streams a month on Spotify. That experienced, authoritative voice is what’s valuable… VCs are starting to spend their money in stuff that’s very specifically not AI, and not replicable. And investors are always two years ahead of where everyone else is…”
That’s not to say that Syntho is a not-AI company. Savage said that it’s looking for sensible ways to use AI technologies in its business: for example dubbing its courses into other languages. And as AI finds its way into more electronic musicians’ workflows, Syntho may well provide some courses about that.
Savage has followed the recent news of GenAI music firm Suno’s acquisition of browser-based DAW WavTool with interest – “So they made creation as easy as possible, and now they’re going to make it harder again?” – but thinks there’s a question that isn’t being asked loudly enough about Suno, Udio and their peers.
“The court cases are so huge, the raises of 100-mil plus are so big, we’ve never actually addressed the real question with Suno and Udio: is there any actual traction? Who is using those platforms,” she said. “Would anyone pay for this, and if so, are they actually going to use it?”
However, Savage’s priority is building more traction for Syntho, and plotting a careful course for its expansion both geographically and in terms of the content it offers.
“As CEO I’m looking at what does this ecosystem look like in 12-24 months. Is it a white-labelled Syntho? What does it look like if we want to roll out D’n’B (drum’n’bass) and techno? I’m looking at all of this,” she said. Over-expansion will be avoided: for example rushing to move beyond electronic music at too breakneck a pace.
“I’ve seen a lot of other music-tech platforms. If you try to do too much too quickly, what you are and what you do becomes confusing. You can throw in 20 features and suddenly people are like: ‘I don’t know what any of this is’,” she said.
“You see so many platforms do this and that. Now they’re a distributor. Now they do mastering. Now they’re also a label. Jesus, what IS the product?!” continued Savage.
“As much as I’d love to grow Syntho at lightning speed and become the biggest platform and branch out into all the genres, I want to do it in a way where we never lose the core of who we are, and who our community is. How do I grow this without losing what was good about it in the first place?”
Syntho is not actively raising funding right now, although Savage is “always open to conversations”. Her experience with Musiio, which raised $2m over its lifetime, taught her that there is a value in only raising money when you need it – and not raising more than you need to.
“There are some companies out there who’ve raised so much money, an exit is almost impossible. Recorded music is a $29.6bn market globally. It’s small compared to pharma or finance, and in an industry this size your chances of a billion-dollar exit are slim,” she said.
“Companies who’ve raised $10m or $20m need an exit of $100m to make anything they do worthwhile, and. the number of exits out there at that scale is very small. You either do it the Musiio way, and raise a little bit and sell at a good price, or you go full Kobalt and you’re a $1.2bn exit. There’s very little happening in that space in between.”
“Don’t get me wrong: I’m a big believer in this industry. I’ve personally invested in nine companies, all in music-tech. But you can really screw yourself over if you raise too heavily. You price yourself out of the market.”
Pakistan’s national netball team and their mentors pose with the national flag after winning the Asian Youth Girls Netball Championship 2025 final (Plate Division Cup) by defeating Maldives at the Jeonju Hwasan Gymnasium, Jeonju, South Korea, on July 4, 2025. — Reporter
JEONJU: Pakistan defeated Maldives 60-35 on Friday to win the Asian Youth Girls Netball Championship 2025 (Plate Division Cup) in an exciting final held in Jeonju, South Korea.
Pakistan has won seven straight games in the Plate Division Cup, including the final match at the Jeonju Hwasan Gymnasium.
Pakistan showed excellent form right away, taking a commanding 17–5 lead in the first quarter. The national team continued to dominate the next quarters, increasing their lead to 45-23 at the end of the third quarter and 34-17 at halftime.
The members of the Pakistan team (white) and the Maldives team (red) can be seen in action during the Asian Youth Girls Netball Championship 2025 final (Plate Division Cup) at the Jeonju Hwasan Gymnasium, Jeonju, South Korea, on July 4, 2025. — Reporter
The fact that the Maldives were never able to take the lead during the game was evidence of Pakistan’s steady play.
Key players for Pakistan, including Leya Raza Shah, Alisha Naveed, Sumayya Kouser, Haleema, Jasmine Farooq, Sumayya, Alina, Amani, Parisa and Farah Rasheed, delivered outstanding performances, contributing significantly to the team’s decisive victory.
The Chairman of the Pakistan Netball Federation, Mudassir Arian, along with President Sameen Malik and Secretary General Muhammad Riaz, extended their congratulations to the Pakistan team.
The Asian Youth Netball Championship 2025, organised under the auspices of the Asian Netball Federation, ran from June 27 to July 4.
Pop star Katy Perry and actor Orlando Bloom have officially confirmed they have split, US media outlets say, six years after getting engaged.
The couple have been romantically linked since 2016 and have a four-year-old daughter.
A joint statement said “representatives have confirmed that Orlando and Katy have been shifting their relationship over the past many months to focus on co-parenting,” according to outlets including People magazine and USA Today.
“They will continue to be seen together as a family, as their shared priority is – and always will be – raising their daughter with love, stability and mutual respect.”
The statement was being released due to the “abundance of recent interest and conversation” surrounding their relationship, it added.
The pop star, 40, and the 48-year-old actor split in 2017 but got back together shortly afterwards. They got engaged on Valentine’s Day in 2019.
A year later Perry revealed she was pregnant in the music video for her single Never Worn White.
Their daughter Daisy Dove was born later that year, with Unicef announcing the news on its Instagram account. Both Perry and Bloom are goodwill ambassadors for the United Nations agency that helps children.
US singer Perry, who was previously married to Russell Brand, shot to fame in 2008 with the single I Kissed A Girl, which reached number one in the UK.
Her hits since then have included Roar, California Gurls, Firework and Never Really Over.
Bloom was previously married to Australian model Miranda Kerr, and they have a son, 14-year-old Flynn.
The British actor has starred in Pirates Of The Caribbean, The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit.
To gain an initial representative understanding of how media debate analyses have been used and are useful for bioethics, as well as which methodological approaches were used to different ends, we conducted a rapid scoping review of the literature. This review offers a systematic and resource-efficient overview of studies analysing health-related media debates [26], highlighting the different methodologies applied in the field. It provides a broad perspective of the study landscape, helping to illustrate our methodological and theoretical considerations. As such, the rapid scoping review serves as a foundation for identifying methodological requirements and challenges and to develop perspectives for methodologically founded investigations of media debates in bioethics. Given the conceptual focus of this paper, an in-depth examination of individual studies that other review methodologies provide is beyond this paper’s scope. Instead, the rapid scoping review efficiently captures the research objectives and the methodological approaches necessary to underline our conceptual arguments in this paper.
Methodology
We systematically searched relevant articles in PubMed, Web of Science (Core Collection), and Scopus (see Table 1 for search algorithms and Fig. 1 for the article selection process). We included English-language articles that used an established methodology (e.g., qualitative or quantitative content analysis, thematic analysis) to analyse the content of traditional mass media or social media on a health topic (broadly defined, including One Health, public health, health research, and medical education) with a reference to bioethics (regarding topic, affiliation of authors, scope of journal etc.). Following our above-introduced definition of media debates, we excluded analyses of fictional content (e.g., assessment of child TV programs), social media analyses focusing on private conversations (e.g., closed Facebook groups) and studies that analysed the content of advertisements. Non-English-language studies were also not included.
Table 1 Search algorithms (search was performed in November 2023)
Fig. 1
Flow chart illustrating the systematic publication selection process. Studies in languages other than English were excluded from this review
From the included publications, we collected the following data from titles, abstracts, and other publication meta-data: (1) research field of the periodical; (2) first author’s field of affiliation; (3) topic of the paper; (4) unit of analysis (e.g. social media posts, newspaper articles); (5) methodology to analyse media content (qualitative, quantitative, mixed methods, Machine Learning-based); (6) presence of data triangulation; and (7) the contribution to bioethics. No full-text analysis was conducted.
Interdisciplinary landscape
To assess the interdisciplinary landscape of the 191 included publications, we extracted information on topics, methodologies, and academic fields. Topics were identified by applying Philipp Mayring’s methodology of a summarizing content analysis, which includes a step-wise paraphrasing and abstraction of content [27]. The most frequent topics were public health-related, including infectious diseases (24.6% of articles, Fig. 2A), mental health (13.1%) as well as nutrition, obesity and diet (6.8%). Other frequent topics addressed technological innovation in healthcare, including new technologies & therapies (9.9%), reproductive health (7.9%), and genomics (6.8%). Further, topics addressing the health system, including stakeholder perspectives (9.4%), health research & research ethics (8.9%), as well as health policy & health care systems (8.4%) were addressed. Various other health topics were addressed, too. Figure 2B shows that most analyses were conducted based on debates in news media (61.3%). Figure 2C indicates the variety of academic fields represented in health-relevant media debate analyses. Medicine was the most-represented field, followed by the social sciences and bioethics. Moreover, 15.2% of the articles were published in interdisciplinary journals. Our rapid scoping review further shows that the number of relevant publications has steadily increased since 2008 (Fig. 2D).
Fig. 2
Characteristics of media debate analysis publications about health. (A) Topics covered. (B) Arena of debate. (C) Academic fields represented. (D) Publications per year
Contribution to bioethical inquiries
Based on the considerations on the threefold significance of public media debate analyses for bioethics and initial findings from the rapid scoping review, we defined four categories of how media debate analyses have contributed to bioethical inquiries so far (Fig. 3). They show the different content-related potentials of the investigation of media debates in bioethics as well as their methodological range. While we conceptualized the first three categories as mutually exclusive, the fourth category (ethical evaluation of media debate) was sometimes coded in addition to one of the other categories. In the following, we will describe these categories by giving illustrative examples and emphasizing characteristics as identified through the rapid scoping review.
Fig. 3
Categorization of media debate analyses regarding their contribution to bioethical inquiries
Description of empirical context
Around one in three included publications (n = 61, 31.9%) did not engage explicitly in any ethical rationale or discussion but provided descriptive information on the content of media debates. Methodologically, qualitative and quantitative approaches were similarly represented. Additionally, four articles in this category used Machine Learning-based text categorization methodologies. For example, Indra and colleagues analysed social media posts about obesity, physical activity, and diets in the context of healthy lifestyles [28]. They performed sentiment analysis and topic modelling on these posts to identify the tone of the debate and the topics covered as determined by word frequencies, combinations, and relative proximities.
As argued above, even though they are descriptive, such investigations may still be of relevance for bioethical inquiries: They can provide an empirical basis for further bioethical analyses, even if no such analysis is provided in the publication itself. A pertinent example is a quantitative content analysis by Zimmermann and colleagues about the content, evaluations, and stakeholder influence in newspaper coverage of predictive genetic testing in Switzerland and the United Kingdom [29]. Contrasting their findings with other studies in the field of science communication, they showed how the debate fostered a more active public engagement with the topic than previous science communication topics and how the debate was much less salient in German-speaking Switzerland as compared to the United Kingdom.
Description of ethical aspects
As a second category, we identified 52 publications (27.2%) which explicitly described ethical aspects of health topics while not engaging in any more in-depth investigation and evaluation of ethical aspects. For example, Zimmermann and colleagues analysed what ethical issues pertinent in scholarly debates about predictive genetic testing were reported on in British newspapers. They quantified what ethical issues were particularly salient in newspaper reporting, identified what ethical issues were underrepresented, and discussed what ethical issues the public should be more explicitly informed about and why [30]. This allowed a detailed description of how ethical aspects within a specific context were represented in a pertinent media debate. In this way, this example illustrates the above-outlined significance of media debate analysis through a reflection of morality.
Further, such descriptions of ethical aspects covered in media debates touch upon the societal relevance of media debate analyses. For example, Chandler and colleagues qualitatively analysed online comments in response to news articles reporting on a Canadian patient who had been in a vegetative state for several years and was reported to communicate via fMRI neuroimaging [31]. The findings illustrated important moral deliberations in the online comments, including the quality of life of this patient, the question of withdrawing life support and options of the patient consenting to this, and the accuracy of diagnosing brain death. In concluding that “[t]hese public perspectives are relevant to the obligations of clinicians, lawyers, and public policymakers to patients, families, and the public” [31], the authors refer to the practical and ethical significance of their analysis.
Methodologically, publications in this category mostly followed traditional methodologies of media content analyses, including quantitative content analysis (n = 21, 40.4%) and qualitative content analysis (n = 16, 30.8%, see Fig. 3).
Identification and evaluation of moral problems
More than a quarter of the reviewed publications (n = 51, 26.7%) identified and evaluated moral problems regarding health-related topics in addition to describing the content of media debates. Such publications employed more qualitative (24/51, 47.1%) than quantitative procedures (12/51, 23.5%). Some 12 publications in this category (23.5%) analysed other data sources in addition to media content. This seems plausible since qualitative approaches and data triangulation offer more possibilities to examine a topic in-depth, and, in this course, to identify and evaluate ethical problems. For example, Rosenberg and colleagues analysed qualitative semi-structured interviews in addition to expert comments in Finnish media to demonstrate the social impact of the orphan drug Nusinersen [32]. By combining these two analyses, they outlined competing attitudes and values and showed that these may be classified differently depending on the situation.
As an example of a qualitative content analysis, Ross Arguedas investigated the media coverage of orthorexia nervosa [33]. Applying inductive thematic analysis, the author identified different framings of orthorexia but also a heterogeneous assignment of responsibility depending on the explanation of the causes of the eating disorder. Further, exemplifying a quantitative content analysis, Zimmermann and colleagues investigated solidarity and personal responsibility as important normative reference points in newspaper coverage in Germany and German-speaking Switzerland [34]. Using quantitative content analysis, they identified different contexts and areas of application of these two concepts. Finding that the limits of solidarity were only rarely mentioned in newspaper coverage about COVID-19, they called for a more distinct consideration of these limits to sustain solidarity as a resource in further crises.
Ethical evaluation of media debates
Finally, around one in three included publications (n = 59, 30.9%) discussed and evaluated the media debate itself from a normative perspective. For example, they identified blind spots, shortcomings, and tendencies in the media debate by focusing on how the media and the debate were embedded in a broader social and societal context. Such publications thus identified moral problems that arise or are reinforced because of the media debate.
For example, Aspler and colleagues conducted a content analysis of 286 articles from Canadian newspapers to investigate how the fetal alcohol spectrum disorder is presented in the media debate [35]. Starting from inductive coding, they identified six major themes. In discussing these findings, they focused especially on exaggeration and misinterpretation in the debate and highlighted the risks of harmful stereotypical beliefs about indigenous people, confusion about health choices during pregnancy, and the unhelpful fueling of debates about sensitive issues surrounding women’s choices.
Some 32 of the 59 publications in this category (59.2%) were additionally assigned to other categories. For example, the above-mentioned study by Aspler and colleagues also aims to identify and evaluate moral problems [35]. This is not surprising since a certain thematic focus is usually necessary for a substantial ethical evaluation of the media debate.
In terms of methodology, the investigations in this category are diverse. Quantitative and qualitative approaches are equally spread. For example, Bosch and Wasserman chose a quantitative approach to analyse the tabloid media coverage of COVID-19 in South Africa [36]. Starting from the proposition that tabloid newspapers are often criticized for their sensation- and entertainment-orientated journalism, they investigated 1050 online news stories in the tabloid Daily Sun and found that the majority of the coverage was topic-oriented and neutral. Thus, using a quantitative approach to the evaluation of media debate, they show how the societal and practical significance of media debates can be addressed in media debate analyses.
The study of Patterson and colleagues applied both qualitative and quantitative content analysis to investigate how media coverage in the UK represented ‘binge’ drinking [37]. They found a “disproportionate focus on women’s ‘binge’ drinking” and discussed the potential effects of reinforcing harmful gender stereotypes. Furthermore, they formulated concrete suggestions on how media framing could be improved by a more comprehensive media engagement of public health advocates. Hence, this investigation is a very significant example illustrating how the societal and practical significance of media debates can be addressed in a field with different methodological approaches and different concrete research questions.
