Scholarship examining media coverage of social problems largely examines coverage of contentious issues. In this study, I contribute to our understanding of journalist practices by examining coverage of an issue over which there is a US consensus: female genital cutting (FGC). With an analysis of newspaper coverage supplemented by interviews and primary documents, I find that, in contrast to ex…
Although the 2003 Iraq invasion was not wholly framed as a ‘humanitarian intervention’, the rhetoric of bringing liberation, democratization and human rights to the Iraqi people was widely advanced by the coalition and supporters as a legitimating reason for war. This article assesses the role played by press photography in legitimizing or challenging this crucial framing during the invasion ac…
Online delivery of content has changed media advertising markets, undermining the business model which has underpinned provision of ‘public media’. Three business models have sustained mass media: direct payment for content, payment for advertising and state subsidy, and the author argues, contrary to others’ claims, that advertising finance has made possible production and provision of high-qu…
While the dimensions of what it means to ‘witness’ are interrogated within recent scholarship on ‘media witnessing’, what it means to ‘bear witness’ is rarely explained. Bearing witness conceptually organizes what journalism does, and names a subject position for audiences other than voyeurism, but what it means requires clarification. I detail the plasticity of bearing witness within the disco…
The article focuses on a frequently used but under-researched protest medium through which transnational movement networks express their collective demands – what are termed here ‘global group petitions’ (GGPs), and activists themselves call ‘sign-on statements’ or ‘joint statements’. GGPs are online petitions typically framed as ‘global’ and linking sometimes hundreds of advocacy groups behind…
Peace journalism has been developing as a field since the 1970s. However, confusion remains about its central theoretical problematics, its core methodologies and its political project. In this article, we aim to contribute to the development of peace journalism in two ways. Theoretically, we develop peace journalism theory to support analyses of ‘cold’ conflicts by incorporating insights drawn…
Although entertaining media content is considered to be highly influential on values and norms shared by the recipients, little is known about the orientation and self-perceptions of entertainment media workers conveying these values and norms. This article offers an overview of existing research on TV entertainment workers and concludes that the common stereotype of a primarily commercial orie…
Decades of research on media coverage of the campaigns of women running for high public office have identified several patterns of gendered reporting that supposedly have discouraged citizens from voting for women candidates, discouraged them from contributing to women’s campaigns and dissuaded women from entering politics. This study examines the ways in which each of the patterns was evident …
War discourse is typically characterized by a confluence of nationalist and sexist discourses, and tends to reduce the multiple identities and affiliations of human beings to a black-and-white contrast of ‘us’ and ‘them’. Yet, as argued in this article, we should be wary of over-emphasizing the homogeneity and monovocality of war discourse. While the onset of conflict certainly narrows the rang…
The expansion of reality programming across television’s changing landscape has been the result of industrial strategies that seek out specific types of real people in order to cast them on particular types of shows. In the US, this practice has resulted in the reconfiguration of ordinary people into durable forms of talent. This paper adopts a generational model in order to contextualize the e…
Gender anchors cultural negotiations over what media franchising is and how its serial production practices and narratives are valued. Cultural tensions between the economic viability and cultural legitimacy of seriality are both smoothed and exacerbated by the gendered discourses of media franchising. These discursive interventions are evidenced through examination of popular and trade talk ab…
This article explores the concept of sonic memory via the investigation of popular music that constitutes a radio playlist. Our case study focuses on the songs aired on Israel’s Memorial Day for the Holocaust and the Heroism during the state’s first decade of local-commercial radio broadcasting (1993–2002). The critical analysis sought to understand what makes certain songs so identifiable with…
This article argues that humour can provide researchers with a unique access point into the professional cultures of media producers. By reconsidering an earlier case study, and reviewing relevant literature, it illustrates how humour can fulfil several functions in media production. Importantly, humour is a central means of performing the ‘emotional labour’ that increasingly precarious media w…
News Corporation is one of the most closely studied international media conglomerates, headed by the world’s most famous media proprietor. Yet, despite its prominence in the academic literature, little attention has been paid to the company’s book publishing operations. This article seeks to rectify this oversight. It investigates some of the more controversial book deals made by HarperCollins,…
This article reports on a study which aimed to assess how much attention journalism training and practice currently pay to the idea of emotional literacy, to explore what need news journalists and current affairs filmmakers see for closer evaluation of the emotional dimensions of their work, and to outline a strategy for enhancing emotional literacy in journalism training. While focused on enco…
According the World Tourism Organization (UNWTO) there are 850 million international passenger arrivals each year; and according to the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR), in 2008 there were 42 million refugees across the globe. The condition of mobility, in all its spatial and temporal variations is a condition of daily life in a globalized world. Even those who are lucky enough not to be f…
This article shows how press selection and presentation of knowledge and expertise relate to processes of sense-making over contemporary political dilemmas. It develops an approach that combines framing analysis with theoretical insights from the literature on narrative and complexity. It demonstrates the value of this approach through quantitative and qualitative analysis of media coverage of …
The educational potential of entertainment television has been acknowledged, with varying degrees of enthusiasm, through research into entertainment-education strategies, intersections of politics and popular media, and the mediated public sphere. This article explores educational possibilities of entertainment programming through a consideration of British television programmes that challenge …
Social movements, like every other aspect of life, have become increasingly reliant on the internet for networking, information sharing and coalition building. This is the case even for disadvantaged groups with few resources and less capacity for utilizing computers and the internet. Aboriginal activists in Townsville have been slow to exert their presence on the web, but are gradually becomin…
This article aims to analyse the strategic choices made by left-wing telenovela writers during the military regime in Brazil, their complex relationships with their employer, Globo Network, and the regime’s various forms of censorship. The arrival of many critical cultural producers in the television industry during the authoritarian period in Brazil (1964—85) and the alleged close links betwee…