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This study examines the use of implicature and explicature in ten G20 2023 summit press releases. On a textual level, the study revealed that press releases are more explicit in purposefully advancing a particular viewpoint on a subject than implicit ones, which would require underlying contexts to give meaning to the words used. On the functional level, this study revealed that the intended communicative events of press releases are either informing about upcoming meetings or providing records of conducted meetings. Press releases that intend to provide information about upcoming meetings are named press release agenda and press releases that intend to provide records of held meetings are named press release minutes. This study also revealed that the use of implicature was the outcome of cultural, ideological, and power-related factors. The high-context culture of Indian delegates led to the use of the indirect approach to communication to avoid imposition. The equal power among G20 member states led the delegates to use hedges in presenting their views. The indirect promotion of ideologies and initiatives led to the use of negative politeness strategies. This study revealed that implicature was carried out using weak hedges that imply certainty, ability hedges that imply inability, and negative politeness strategies that imply doubt. Explicature, on the other hand, was carried through “what is said.” This study suggests that press release writers should pay more attention to the creation of meaning as implied meanings lead to interpretations that are culture- and ideology-based, especially in the political context.

Managers exercise considerable discretion over how they announce an accounting restatement in a press release. Some firms issue a press release that discloses the restatement in the headline (high prominence). Others provide a press release with a headline on a different subject (for example, earnings news) but describe the restatement in the body of the release (medium prominence). The remaining firms discuss the restatement at the end of the press release in a footnote to operating results (low prominence). Mean three-day returns differ considerably across these three categories of prominence (−8.3, −4.0, and −1.5 percent, respectively). We find that disclosure prominence is significantly negatively associated with returns in a model that controls for the seriousness of the GAAP violation, restatement magnitude, other restatement characteristics, and potential endogeneity. Similarly, we find the likelihood of class action lawsuits is significantly reduced with less prominent disclosure.

This study examines the unintended effects of a pre-Reg FD practice that gave a broad group of sophisticated market participants 15-minute earlier access to all corporate press releases than the general public. We find that roughly one-eighth of the price discovery to earnings announcements issued during regular trading hours was due to privileged access to information in earnings press releases, with the 15-minute priority dissemination contributing to just over 50 percent of price discovery from all privileged access. In addition, we find that transient institutions benefited from priority dissemination, especially when the earnings contained good news. Finally, consistent with economic theory, we find that intraday bid-ask spreads decreased post-Reg FD for firms that had sufficient market liquidity to allow trading opportunities during the 15-minute window. Our study has implications for current discussions on whether preferential information distribution by firms and information intermediaries creates an uneven playing field among investors.

Earnings press releases provide managers a forum to present their firm's quarterly financial information and perhaps influence perceptions of the firm's stakeholders. We explore the use of managerial emphasis as a disclosure tool and contribute to the debate over pro forma earnings. We examine (1) the determinants of emphasis placed on pro forma and GAAP earnings within quarterly earnings press releases, (2) whether there has been a shift away from emphasizing pro forma earnings toward GAAP earnings, and (3) whether stock market reactions to earnings news were influenced by emphasis placed on metrics within the press release. We find that firms emphasize metrics that are more value-relevant and portray more favorable firm performance. We also find that the extent of a firm's media coverage affects managers' emphasis decisions. Further, our results indicate a highly significant shift toward GAAP emphasis and away from pro forma emphasis in 2002 relative to 2001. Finally, our stock market tests suggest that greater emphasis on an earnings metric results in a stronger market reaction to the surprise in that metric. Overall, these findings are consistent with managers using emphasis in the earnings press release as a disclosure tool and this emphasis influencing at least one important stakeholder group-investors.

The COVID-19 pandemic has challenged nearly every aspect of life and superseded issues at the core of populist radical right (PRR) parties' ideology, dispossessing them of one of their main narratives. This also challenged the Alternative for Germany (AfD), a relatively young but strong PRR party in opposition. We explore how the party has adjusted its policy supply to this unprecedented situation and how this has affected its popularity among German voters, building our analysis on press releases issued by the AfD between January 2020 and March 2021, vote intention data and recent election results. Initially, the party's reaction was inconsistent, but from autumn 2020 the AfD focused on fuelling discontent with the government's lockdown measures, acting as a supporter of the anti-coronavirus demonstrations. It framed its response as elite critique. So far, its siding with the lockdown protesters, however, has not had any positive effect on support for the party.

[...]all press releases in all academic journals should be made publicly available online, alongside the academic journal article they relate to, so that everyone can see whether the press release contained misrepresentations or exaggerations.

To disseminate research, scholars once relied on university media services or journal press releases, but today any academic can turn to Twitter to share their published work with a broader audience. The possibility that scholars can push their research out, rather than hope that it is pulled in, holds the potential for scholars to draw wide attention to their research. In this manuscript, we examine whether there are systematic differences in the types of scholars who most benefit from this push model. Specifically, we investigate the extent to which there are gender differences in the dissemination of research via Twitter. We carry out our analyses by tracking tweet patterns for articles published in six journals across two fields (political science and communication), and we pair this Twitter data with demographic and educational data about the authors of the published articles, as well as article citation rates. We find considerable evidence that, overall, article citations are positively correlated with tweets about the article, and we find little evidence to suggest that author gender affects the transmission of research in this new media.

Politics and political conflict often occur in the written and spoken word. Scholars have long recognized this, but the massive costs of analyzing even moderately sized collections of texts have hindered their use in political science research. Here lies the promise of automated text analysis: it substantially reduces the costs of analyzing large collections of text. We provide a guide to this exciting new area of research and show how, in many instances, the methods have already obtained part of their promise. But there are pitfalls to using automated methods—they are no substitute for careful thought and close reading and require extensive and problem-specific validation. We survey a wide range of new methods, provide guidance on how to validate the output of the models, and clarify misconceptions and errors in the literature. To conclude, we argue that for automated text methods to become a standard tool for political scientists, methodologists must contribute new methods and new methods of validation.

Objective To identify the source (press releases or news) of distortions, exaggerations, or changes to the main conclusions drawn from research that could potentially influence a reader’s health related behaviour. Design Retrospective quantitative content analysis. Setting Journal articles, press releases, and related news, with accompanying simulations. Sample Press releases (n=462) on biomedical and health related science issued by 20 leading UK universities in 2011, alongside their associated peer reviewed research papers and news stories (n=668). Main outcome measures Advice to readers to change behaviour, causal statements drawn from correlational research, and inference to humans from animal research that went beyond those in the associated peer reviewed papers. Results 40% (95% confidence interval 33% to 46%) of the press releases contained exaggerated advice, 33% (26% to 40%) contained exaggerated causal claims, and 36% (28% to 46%) contained exaggerated inference to humans from animal research. When press releases contained such exaggeration, 58% (95% confidence interval 48% to 68%), 81% (70% to 93%), and 86% (77% to 95%) of news stories, respectively, contained similar exaggeration, compared with exaggeration rates of 17% (10% to 24%), 18% (9% to 27%), and 10% (0% to 19%) in news when the press releases were not exaggerated. Odds ratios for each category of analysis were 6.5 (95% confidence interval 3.5 to 12), 20 (7.6 to 51), and 56 (15 to 211). At the same time, there was little evidence that exaggeration in press releases increased the uptake of news. Conclusions Exaggeration in news is strongly associated with exaggeration in press releases. Improving the accuracy of academic press releases could represent a key opportunity for reducing misleading health related news.

Social media sites have created a reverberating \"echoverse\" for brand communication, forming complex feedback loops (\"echoes\") between the \"universe\" of corporate communications, news media, and user-generated social media. To understand these feedback loops, the authors process longitudinal, unstructured data using computational linguistics techniques and analyze them using econometric methods. By assembling one of the most comprehensive data sets in the brand communications literature with corporate communications, news stories, social media, and business outcomes, the authors document the echoverse (i.e., feedback loops between all of these sources). Furthermore, the echoverse has changed as online word of mouth has become prevalent. Over time, online word of mouth has fallen into a negativity spiral, with negative messages leading to greater volume, and firms are adjusting their communications strategies in response. The nature of brand communications has been transformed by online technology as corporate communications move increasingly from one to many (e.g., advertising) to one to one (e.g., Twitter) while consumer word of mouth moves from one to one (e.g., conversations) to one to many (e.g., social media). The results indicate that companies benefit from using social media (e.g., Twitter) for personalized customer responses, although there is still a role for traditional brand communications (e.g., press releases, advertising). The evolving echoverse requires managers to rethink brand communication strategies, with online communications becoming increasingly central.