1,721,389 research outputs found
Beyond the hall of mirrors? Some theoretical reflections on the global contestation of media power
No full textThis chapter asks: can we model theoretically the possibilities for contesting media power around the world? This is, already, a controversial starting-point because it isolates ‘media power’ as a separate dimension of social conflict, and thus goes against the trend of most social and media theory. This move is, however, important if the full comparative significance of much alternative media is to be grasped
Entertaining Democracy
No full textMass Media and Society is an established title, popular with students world-wide for its ability to provide insightful and accessible essays from leading international academics on the most pertinent issues in the media field toda
Mediations of democracy
No full textOver the past 15 years, Mass Media and Society has established itself as a leading international textbook on the media. Written by distinguished academics from around the world, the book provides an invaluable guided tour through three key areas of debate:
theories of media and society
the study of media organisations
debates about culture, ideology and democracy.
The fourth edition has been fully updated and contains 13 new chapters on key topics, ranging from post-feminism to war journalism as entertainment. Above all, it offers a number of alternative views on the changing role of the media in the era of globalisation, new communication technology, the 'war on terror', the advance of women and increasing economic inequality
The paradox of media power
No full textContesting Media Power explores the worldwide growth of alternative media that challenge the power concentration in large media corporations. Media scholars and political scientists analyze alternative media in Australia, Chile, China, Indonesia, Malaysia, Russia, Sweden, South Africa, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Topics include independent media centers, gay online networks and alternative web discussion forums; feminist film, political journalism and social networks; indigenous communication and church-sponsored media. This important book will help shape debates on the media's role in current global struggles
How Media Inform Democracy: Central Debates
No full textIn this timely book, leading researchers consider how media inform democracy in six countries – the United States, the United Kingdom, Belgium, the Netherlands, Norway, and Sweden. Taking as their starting point the idea that citizens need to be briefed adequately with a full and intelligent coverage of public affairs so that they can make responsible, informed choices rather than act out of ignorance and misinformation, contributors use a comparative approach to examine the way in which the shifting media landscape is affecting and informing the democratic process across the globe. In particular, they ask:
•Can a comparative approach provide us with new answers to the question of how media inform democracy?
•Has increased commercialization made media systems more similar and affected equally the character of news and public knowledge throughout the USA and Europe?
•Is soft news and misinformation predominantly related to an American exceptionalism, based on the market domination of its media and marginalized public broadcaster?
This study combines a content analysis of press and television news with representative surveys in six nations. It makes an indispensable contribution to debates about media and democracy, and about changes in media systems. It is especially useful for media theory, comparative media, and political communication courses
Conclusion
No full textIn this timely book, leading researchers consider how media inform democracy in six countries – the United States, the United Kingdom, Belgium, the Netherlands, Norway, and Sweden. Taking as their starting point the idea that citizens need to be briefed adequately with a full and intelligent coverage of public affairs so that they can make responsible, informed choices rather than act out of ignorance and misinformation, contributors use a comparative approach to examine the way in which the shifting media landscape is affecting and informing the democratic process across the globe. In particular, they ask:
•Can a comparative approach provide us with new answers to the question of how media inform democracy?
•Has increased commercialization made media systems more similar and affected equally the character of news and public knowledge throughout the USA and Europe?
•Is soft news and misinformation predominantly related to an American exceptionalism, based on the market domination of its media and marginalized public broadcaster?
This study combines a content analysis of press and television news with representative surveys in six nations. It makes an indispensable contribution to debates about media and democracy, and about changes in media systems. It is especially useful for media theory, comparative media, and political communication courses
Media and cultural theory in the age of market liberalism
No full textContaining new thinking and original surveys, Media & Cultural Theory brings together leading international scholars to address key issues and debates within media and cultural studies.
Through the use of contemporary media and film texts such as Bridget Jones’ Diary and The Lord of the Rings trilogy, and using case studies of the USA and the UK after September 11th, James Curran and David Morley examine central topics including:
•media representations of the new woman in contemporary society
•the creation of self in lifestyle media
•the nature of globalization
•the rise of digital actors and media.
Ideal as a course reader, with each essay covering a different major area or advance in original research, Media & Cultural Theory is global in its reach. Through its engagement with broad questions, it is an invaluable book that can be applied to the studies of media and cultural studies students the English-speaking world over
Contesting Media Power
No full textTo say that “the media are powerful” is a cliché, yet to ask in what media power consists is to open a riddle. Or so it seems. In the chapters that follow, we intensify this paradox by extending it to a global scale but also, through the rich comparative detail that is generated, aim to show that the paradox is more illusory than real.
One way of defining media power, if an unwieldy one, is as a label for the net result of organizing a society’s resources so that the media sector has significant independent bargaining power over and against other key sectors (big business, political elites, cultural elites, and so on). This seems straightforward until one realizes that the media’s bargaining power (for example, over the framing of a particular story) is of a curious sort: Media are unable to bargain over the basic rule of their existence, which is that they depend on “content” generated by others. (Or at least they did: One interpretation of the recent spread of celebrity stories and “reality” coverage in the press and television in the United States and Europe is that rising economic costs of news production have forced media to generate their own “contents” and treat them as if they were “external” reality.)
Here we come to the heart of the apparent paradox about media power, which derives from the fact that such power faces two ways. From one direction (the more common direction of analysis) “media power” is a term we use to point to how other powerful forces use the intermediate mechanism of media (press reports, television coverage, websites, and so on) to wage their battles (big business against labor, old professional and class elites against new cultural elites, and so on). From this direction, media power disappears; it is merely the door through which the contestants for power pass en route to battle. We find this approach, for example, in Manuel Castells’s recent theory of the global “network society,” in which he argues that in a space of accelerated information, people, and finance flows, the media portal is increasingly important for all social action, but the media themselves have no power as such (1997: 312–17). That this direction of analysis often has precedence is only to be expected; in studying the media’s social role, our priority (whether as researchers or as social actors) may well be to analyze competing forces outside the media, whose conflict is waged in part through media coverage
- …
