Aurelia Vasile | University of Bucharest (original) (raw)

Papers by Aurelia Vasile

EMAN 2019 – Economics & Management: How to Cope With Disrupted Times CONFERENCE PROCEEDINGS, 2019

Nowadays, in times that Ralph Keyes (2004) called the post-truth era, there is an obvious trend t... more Nowadays, in times that Ralph Keyes (2004) called the post-truth era, there is an obvious trend towards embellishing or reshaping the truth until it gets diluted into what the author of this dilution desires and is interested in. The term vested interests coined by William Crano (1995) may account for the background motivation that may lead towards this widely resorted to distortion of the truth so that it may fit the aims of the distorter. When referring to vested interests, the Cambridge Academic Content Dictionary specifies the existence of interests in influencing others so that some benefits may be obtained or preserved. According to Crano (1995, pp. 131-158), "if the attitude object is subjectively important and the perceived personal consequences are significant, there will be a greater chance the individual's attitude will be expressed behaviorally". Such aspects of communication may have strong economic impact, and are therefore crucially significant when they manifest in the main stream media in the field, i.e., in the most important economical publications. Economic vested interests may thus have a great impact and bring about the tampering with the truth, mostly on key topics like fiscal policies. Our content analysis of a research corpus of 210 news stories (that got elicited online starting from the keywords "progressive/flat tax") in the two Romanian economic dailies that have the largest circulation, Ziarul Financiar (9200 copies), and Financiarul (8500 copies), in the time span 10th January 2008-28th February 2019 has revealed intriguing facts. We have selected such a time span because Financiarul published its very first issue on the 10th of January 2008. The keywords "progressive/flat tax" were chosen as the economic stake of such a topic that they refer to is quite high and it consequently may then trigger strong vested interests and the temptation to tamper with the truth. The fair distribution of the tax burden (Peter Diamond, Emmanuel Saez, 2011, p.165), and the model of optimal tax theory and practice arouse significant interest, mostly on the part of large businesses that engender high profit rates. We tackled the news story headlines and leads that contain the mentioned keywords, as such story parts comprise the main point of stories. However, the whole orientation of the stories was taken into account for the gist that is relevant with regard to our research aims to reveal some post-truth communication mechanisms involved in economical gearing towards vested interests, in order to better critically understand and be able to strengthen democracy and economic fairness. According to our findings, in Ziarul Financiar, 28 % of the headlines and leads explicitly tackled the issue, whilst in Financiarul, almost 74 % bluntly referred to the progressive and to the flat tax. There were also clear differences in point of the newsworthiness quota ̶ a term or concept that is aimed to be coined here ̶ allotted by the two dailies to the topic of progressive versus flat tax. Moreover, content specifically, organizations and individuals that appeared in the content of these headlines, leads, and whole stories expressed stances that accounted for vested interests.

International Scientific Conference EMAN. Economics & Management: How to Cope With Disrupted Times, 2019

Nowadays, in times that Ralph Keyes (2004) called the post-truth era, there is an obvious trend t... more Nowadays, in times that Ralph Keyes (2004) called the post-truth era, there is an obvious trend towards embellishing or reshaping the truth until it gets diluted into what the author of this dilution desires and is interested in. The term vested interests coined by William Crano (1995) may account for the background motivation that may lead towards this widely resorted to distortion of the truth so that it may fit the aims of the distorter. When referring to vested interests, the Cambridge Academic Content Dictionary specifies the existence of interests in influencing others so that some benefits may be obtained or preserved. According to Crano (1995, pp. 131-158), "if the attitude object is subjectively important and the perceived personal consequences are significant, there will be a greater chance the individual's attitude will be expressed behaviorally". Such aspects of communication may have strong economic impact, and are therefore crucially significant when they manifest in the main stream media in the field, i.e., in the most important economical publications. Economic vested interests may thus have a great impact and bring about the tampering with the truth, mostly on key topics like fiscal policies. Our content analysis of a research corpus of 210 news stories (that got elicited online starting from the keywords "progressive/flat tax") in the two Romanian economic dailies that have the largest circulation, Ziarul Financiar (9200 copies), and Financiarul (8500 copies), in the time span 10th January 2008-28th February 2019 has revealed intriguing facts. We have selected such a time span because Financiarul published its very first issue on the 10th of January 2008. The keywords "progressive/flat tax" were chosen as the economic stake of such a topic that they refer to is quite high and it consequently may then trigger strong vested interests and the temptation to tamper with the truth. The fair distribution of the tax burden (Peter Diamond, Emmanuel Saez, 2011, p.165), and the model of optimal tax theory and practice arouse significant interest, mostly on the part of large businesses that engender high profit rates. We tackled the news story headlines and leads that contain the mentioned keywords, as such story parts comprise the main point of stories. However, the whole orientation of the stories was taken into account for the gist that is relevant with regard to our research aims to reveal some post-truth communication mechanisms involved in economical gearing towards vested interests, in order to better critically understand and be able to strengthen democracy and economic fairness. According to our findings, in Ziarul Financiar, 28 % of the headlines and leads explicitly tackled the issue, whilst in Financiarul, almost 74 % bluntly referred to the progressive and to the flat tax. There were also clear differences in point of the newsworthiness quota ̶ a term or concept that is aimed to be coined here ̶ allotted by the two dailies to the topic of progressive versus flat tax. Moreover, content specifically, organizations and individuals that appeared in the content of these headlines, leads, and whole stories expressed stances that accounted for vested interests.

According to the "Global Index of Religiosity and Atheism" (WIN-Gallup International, 2... more According to the "Global Index of Religiosity and Atheism" (WIN-Gallup International, 27 July 2012, retrieved 24 August 2012), which was a global 2012 poll, the reports label 59% of the world's population as "religious" and 36% as not religious, including 13% who are atheists, with a 9% decrease in religious belief from 2005. Thereto, religion is an important issue of inherent influence in the media nowadays. Despite the ongoing secularization process that we are facing these days, humans still feel the need to refer to religion within their attempt to construct one's own outlook on life, and to make some sense out of existence in general (Max Weber, 1920)2. A comparative content analysis on Mediafax.ro and Agerpres.ro, performed for an almost nine-and-a-half-month time span (1st January to 13th October 2015), showed interesting facts on how press agency journalists relate to religion as a media topic, both in terms of quality (key words and key topics) and in terms of quantity. A comparison between the Orthodox religion of the majority of the Romanians, and other denominations, also accounted for intriguing research findings.

Broad Research in Artificial Inteligence Neuroscience, Mar 9, 2023

The way formal organisations (governmental), non-formal (non-governmental) organisations, and inf... more The way formal organisations (governmental), non-formal (non-governmental) organisations, and informal citizen communication deal with social crisis pro-socially, that is, to the benefit of others, accounts for some characteristics that are worth fathoming in order to create the framework for the development of better communication strategies and better and faster prosocial reaction within socially challenging crisis contexts. Crisis communication has been tackled in public relations mostly with regard to governmental and nongovernmental organisations, whilst citizen informal communication has not been a matter of PR scientific focus so far, and neither has a comparison between these ways to communicate been approached for that matter. As speed is key in communication, and mostly within a refugee crisis, a double fold quantitative and qualitative analysis of the communication content and strategies used by key social actors in a hub-country of refugee reception like Romania in the emergency context created by Russia's invasion of Ukraine may provide useful scientific information to generate consequent strategic improvements. This content analysis methodological approach on communication in the social media and on websites of such various outlets (the Facebook pages and groups of the Romanian Red Cross, UNICEF, Romanian Government, the "Uniţi pentru Ucraina" group, the Romanian government, UNICEF and Red Cross websites) from 24th February 2022, the beginning of the conflict in Ukraine, to the moment, allows intriguing conclusions about the effectiveness, timeliness, and constancy in communicating support in times of social crisis within a prosocial approach in Romania to receiving refugees from the conflict areas in Ukraine.

Journal of Media Research, Feb 28, 2017

Communication has to do with influence that has impact on the life of those involved in the commu... more Communication has to do with influence that has impact on the life of those involved in the communication process, mostly when this communication refers to political campaigning. Inspired by the research on stress performed by the endocrinologist Hans Selye (1974), we aimed at investigating the polarity of meaning in the language of electoral campaign, in order to check if this kind of communication gets more polarized in terms of meaning as the campaign is approaching its end towards the polls. The discourse analysis corpus was that of six comparable Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump transcript excerpts from speeches at various stages earlier and later throughout the campaign for the 2016 presidential elections in the U.S.A. The results of our analysis have shown that Donald Trump's campaign discourses were generally significantly more polarized than those of Hilary Clinton's. The most generally polarized discourse was, by far, that of Trump on immigration, and the least generally polarized was Trump's at an event (Al Smith Dinner). The most positively polarized was Hilary Clinton's on immigration, and the least positively charged was Trump's referring to the great leader. The most negatively polarized discourse was Trump's one on immigration, as it reached more than 10 % of negative words, whereas the least negatively polarized was Hilary Clinton's on national service.

IGI Global eBooks, 2020

The Eurobarometer Standard 90 Autumn 2018 has shown that 97% of Romanians get their information f... more The Eurobarometer Standard 90 Autumn 2018 has shown that 97% of Romanians get their information from the television channels, and around 50% use mainly the online medium. Analyzing the content that is broadcast through the best rated media channels then is a matter of utmost interest for society and for the educational system, as this content strongly influences and re-molds (along with the influence of the official system of education) the members of society throughout a lifetime, with important overall impact.

Essachess : Journal for Communication Studies, 2018

Abstract: Humans have always been prone to adorning the truth and to producing twisted fallacious... more Abstract: Humans have always been prone to adorning the truth and to producing twisted fallacious arguments in order to sketch a truth (i.e., their own truth ) that best suited their interest at a certain time, within certain circumstances. Even more, the communication climate of nowadays has moved from face-to-face communication that offered a limited kit of means to mold the truth towards the emerging technology mediated virtual communication that enhances the dressing up and the re-shaping of truth to make the message more appealing to its target public to such an extent that truth loses its substance and may turn into its opposite. Advertising messaging exhibits some contradictory characteristics that are involved in producing what we call and aim at coining here as the Műnchausen Effect . Our research findings have shown that all of the 100 taglines on bestslogans.com relied on enthymematic argumentation and where erroneous in terms of content, all as non sequitur fallacies ....

Revista Romaneasca pentru Educatie Multidimensionala

n times of pandemic, higher education programmes had to switch quite unexpectedly from educationa... more n times of pandemic, higher education programmes had to switch quite unexpectedly from educational strategies and techniques that applied within a classical kind of college environment, to the online platforms. If all sorts of platforms proved feasible for seminars, in the case of courses and evaluation activities, some difficulties were encountered and, consequently, demanded special concern and conjugated efforts to roll things out through the thick and thin of a period that required a high level of adaptability on the part of higher education leadership and management, as well as on the part of professors and students. A survey addressed to the students and to the professors at the University of Bucharest, College of Journalism and Communication Studies revealed intriguing information regarding our main topic, that of the online student performance evaluation challenges in the journalism and communication higher education in Romania. The response of the majority of the professo...

EMAN 2019 – Economics & Management: How to Cope With Disrupted Times CONFERENCE PROCEEDINGS, 2019

Nowadays, in times that Ralph Keyes (2004) called the post-truth era, there is an obvious trend t... more Nowadays, in times that Ralph Keyes (2004) called the post-truth era, there is an obvious trend towards embellishing or reshaping the truth until it gets diluted into what the author of this dilution desires and is interested in. The term vested interests coined by William Crano (1995) may account for the background motivation that may lead towards this widely resorted to distortion of the truth so that it may fit the aims of the distorter. When referring to vested interests, the Cambridge Academic Content Dictionary specifies the existence of interests in influencing others so that some benefits may be obtained or preserved. According to Crano (1995, pp. 131-158), "if the attitude object is subjectively important and the perceived personal consequences are significant, there will be a greater chance the individual's attitude will be expressed behaviorally". Such aspects of communication may have strong economic impact, and are therefore crucially significant when they manifest in the main stream media in the field, i.e., in the most important economical publications. Economic vested interests may thus have a great impact and bring about the tampering with the truth, mostly on key topics like fiscal policies. Our content analysis of a research corpus of 210 news stories (that got elicited online starting from the keywords "progressive/flat tax") in the two Romanian economic dailies that have the largest circulation, Ziarul Financiar (9200 copies), and Financiarul (8500 copies), in the time span 10th January 2008-28th February 2019 has revealed intriguing facts. We have selected such a time span because Financiarul published its very first issue on the 10th of January 2008. The keywords "progressive/flat tax" were chosen as the economic stake of such a topic that they refer to is quite high and it consequently may then trigger strong vested interests and the temptation to tamper with the truth. The fair distribution of the tax burden (Peter Diamond, Emmanuel Saez, 2011, p.165), and the model of optimal tax theory and practice arouse significant interest, mostly on the part of large businesses that engender high profit rates. We tackled the news story headlines and leads that contain the mentioned keywords, as such story parts comprise the main point of stories. However, the whole orientation of the stories was taken into account for the gist that is relevant with regard to our research aims to reveal some post-truth communication mechanisms involved in economical gearing towards vested interests, in order to better critically understand and be able to strengthen democracy and economic fairness. According to our findings, in Ziarul Financiar, 28 % of the headlines and leads explicitly tackled the issue, whilst in Financiarul, almost 74 % bluntly referred to the progressive and to the flat tax. There were also clear differences in point of the newsworthiness quota ̶ a term or concept that is aimed to be coined here ̶ allotted by the two dailies to the topic of progressive versus flat tax. Moreover, content specifically, organizations and individuals that appeared in the content of these headlines, leads, and whole stories expressed stances that accounted for vested interests.

International Scientific Conference EMAN. Economics & Management: How to Cope With Disrupted Times, 2019

Nowadays, in times that Ralph Keyes (2004) called the post-truth era, there is an obvious trend t... more Nowadays, in times that Ralph Keyes (2004) called the post-truth era, there is an obvious trend towards embellishing or reshaping the truth until it gets diluted into what the author of this dilution desires and is interested in. The term vested interests coined by William Crano (1995) may account for the background motivation that may lead towards this widely resorted to distortion of the truth so that it may fit the aims of the distorter. When referring to vested interests, the Cambridge Academic Content Dictionary specifies the existence of interests in influencing others so that some benefits may be obtained or preserved. According to Crano (1995, pp. 131-158), "if the attitude object is subjectively important and the perceived personal consequences are significant, there will be a greater chance the individual's attitude will be expressed behaviorally". Such aspects of communication may have strong economic impact, and are therefore crucially significant when they manifest in the main stream media in the field, i.e., in the most important economical publications. Economic vested interests may thus have a great impact and bring about the tampering with the truth, mostly on key topics like fiscal policies. Our content analysis of a research corpus of 210 news stories (that got elicited online starting from the keywords "progressive/flat tax") in the two Romanian economic dailies that have the largest circulation, Ziarul Financiar (9200 copies), and Financiarul (8500 copies), in the time span 10th January 2008-28th February 2019 has revealed intriguing facts. We have selected such a time span because Financiarul published its very first issue on the 10th of January 2008. The keywords "progressive/flat tax" were chosen as the economic stake of such a topic that they refer to is quite high and it consequently may then trigger strong vested interests and the temptation to tamper with the truth. The fair distribution of the tax burden (Peter Diamond, Emmanuel Saez, 2011, p.165), and the model of optimal tax theory and practice arouse significant interest, mostly on the part of large businesses that engender high profit rates. We tackled the news story headlines and leads that contain the mentioned keywords, as such story parts comprise the main point of stories. However, the whole orientation of the stories was taken into account for the gist that is relevant with regard to our research aims to reveal some post-truth communication mechanisms involved in economical gearing towards vested interests, in order to better critically understand and be able to strengthen democracy and economic fairness. According to our findings, in Ziarul Financiar, 28 % of the headlines and leads explicitly tackled the issue, whilst in Financiarul, almost 74 % bluntly referred to the progressive and to the flat tax. There were also clear differences in point of the newsworthiness quota ̶ a term or concept that is aimed to be coined here ̶ allotted by the two dailies to the topic of progressive versus flat tax. Moreover, content specifically, organizations and individuals that appeared in the content of these headlines, leads, and whole stories expressed stances that accounted for vested interests.

According to the "Global Index of Religiosity and Atheism" (WIN-Gallup International, 2... more According to the "Global Index of Religiosity and Atheism" (WIN-Gallup International, 27 July 2012, retrieved 24 August 2012), which was a global 2012 poll, the reports label 59% of the world's population as "religious" and 36% as not religious, including 13% who are atheists, with a 9% decrease in religious belief from 2005. Thereto, religion is an important issue of inherent influence in the media nowadays. Despite the ongoing secularization process that we are facing these days, humans still feel the need to refer to religion within their attempt to construct one's own outlook on life, and to make some sense out of existence in general (Max Weber, 1920)2. A comparative content analysis on Mediafax.ro and Agerpres.ro, performed for an almost nine-and-a-half-month time span (1st January to 13th October 2015), showed interesting facts on how press agency journalists relate to religion as a media topic, both in terms of quality (key words and key topics) and in terms of quantity. A comparison between the Orthodox religion of the majority of the Romanians, and other denominations, also accounted for intriguing research findings.

Broad Research in Artificial Inteligence Neuroscience, Mar 9, 2023

The way formal organisations (governmental), non-formal (non-governmental) organisations, and inf... more The way formal organisations (governmental), non-formal (non-governmental) organisations, and informal citizen communication deal with social crisis pro-socially, that is, to the benefit of others, accounts for some characteristics that are worth fathoming in order to create the framework for the development of better communication strategies and better and faster prosocial reaction within socially challenging crisis contexts. Crisis communication has been tackled in public relations mostly with regard to governmental and nongovernmental organisations, whilst citizen informal communication has not been a matter of PR scientific focus so far, and neither has a comparison between these ways to communicate been approached for that matter. As speed is key in communication, and mostly within a refugee crisis, a double fold quantitative and qualitative analysis of the communication content and strategies used by key social actors in a hub-country of refugee reception like Romania in the emergency context created by Russia's invasion of Ukraine may provide useful scientific information to generate consequent strategic improvements. This content analysis methodological approach on communication in the social media and on websites of such various outlets (the Facebook pages and groups of the Romanian Red Cross, UNICEF, Romanian Government, the "Uniţi pentru Ucraina" group, the Romanian government, UNICEF and Red Cross websites) from 24th February 2022, the beginning of the conflict in Ukraine, to the moment, allows intriguing conclusions about the effectiveness, timeliness, and constancy in communicating support in times of social crisis within a prosocial approach in Romania to receiving refugees from the conflict areas in Ukraine.

Journal of Media Research, Feb 28, 2017

Communication has to do with influence that has impact on the life of those involved in the commu... more Communication has to do with influence that has impact on the life of those involved in the communication process, mostly when this communication refers to political campaigning. Inspired by the research on stress performed by the endocrinologist Hans Selye (1974), we aimed at investigating the polarity of meaning in the language of electoral campaign, in order to check if this kind of communication gets more polarized in terms of meaning as the campaign is approaching its end towards the polls. The discourse analysis corpus was that of six comparable Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump transcript excerpts from speeches at various stages earlier and later throughout the campaign for the 2016 presidential elections in the U.S.A. The results of our analysis have shown that Donald Trump's campaign discourses were generally significantly more polarized than those of Hilary Clinton's. The most generally polarized discourse was, by far, that of Trump on immigration, and the least generally polarized was Trump's at an event (Al Smith Dinner). The most positively polarized was Hilary Clinton's on immigration, and the least positively charged was Trump's referring to the great leader. The most negatively polarized discourse was Trump's one on immigration, as it reached more than 10 % of negative words, whereas the least negatively polarized was Hilary Clinton's on national service.

IGI Global eBooks, 2020

The Eurobarometer Standard 90 Autumn 2018 has shown that 97% of Romanians get their information f... more The Eurobarometer Standard 90 Autumn 2018 has shown that 97% of Romanians get their information from the television channels, and around 50% use mainly the online medium. Analyzing the content that is broadcast through the best rated media channels then is a matter of utmost interest for society and for the educational system, as this content strongly influences and re-molds (along with the influence of the official system of education) the members of society throughout a lifetime, with important overall impact.

Essachess : Journal for Communication Studies, 2018

Abstract: Humans have always been prone to adorning the truth and to producing twisted fallacious... more Abstract: Humans have always been prone to adorning the truth and to producing twisted fallacious arguments in order to sketch a truth (i.e., their own truth ) that best suited their interest at a certain time, within certain circumstances. Even more, the communication climate of nowadays has moved from face-to-face communication that offered a limited kit of means to mold the truth towards the emerging technology mediated virtual communication that enhances the dressing up and the re-shaping of truth to make the message more appealing to its target public to such an extent that truth loses its substance and may turn into its opposite. Advertising messaging exhibits some contradictory characteristics that are involved in producing what we call and aim at coining here as the Műnchausen Effect . Our research findings have shown that all of the 100 taglines on bestslogans.com relied on enthymematic argumentation and where erroneous in terms of content, all as non sequitur fallacies ....

Revista Romaneasca pentru Educatie Multidimensionala

n times of pandemic, higher education programmes had to switch quite unexpectedly from educationa... more n times of pandemic, higher education programmes had to switch quite unexpectedly from educational strategies and techniques that applied within a classical kind of college environment, to the online platforms. If all sorts of platforms proved feasible for seminars, in the case of courses and evaluation activities, some difficulties were encountered and, consequently, demanded special concern and conjugated efforts to roll things out through the thick and thin of a period that required a high level of adaptability on the part of higher education leadership and management, as well as on the part of professors and students. A survey addressed to the students and to the professors at the University of Bucharest, College of Journalism and Communication Studies revealed intriguing information regarding our main topic, that of the online student performance evaluation challenges in the journalism and communication higher education in Romania. The response of the majority of the professo...