Participatory media fandom : A case study of anime fansubbing

Edition

Vol. 33 no. 8, November 2011,pp. 1131-1147

ISBN/ISSN

01634437

Collation

-

Series Title

Media Culture & Society

Call Number

-

Women and news : A long and winding road

Feminist news researchers have long argued that in the macho culture of most newsrooms, journalists’ daily decisions about what is newsworthy remain firmly based on masculine news values. As such, issues and topics traditionally seen to be particularly relevant to women tend to be pushed to the margins of the news where the implicit assumption is that they are less important than those which in…

Journalism, advocacy and the social construction of consensus

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…

Images of liberation? Visual framing, humanitarianism and British press photo…

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…

Content online and the end of public media? The UK, a canary in the coal mine?

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…

Bearing witness, journalism and moral responsibility

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…

‘Act now and sign our joint statement!’ What role do online global group …

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…

News media encoding of racial reconciliation : Developing a peace journalism …

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…

Orientations of entertainment media workers : entertainment media workers –…

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…

Media coverage of women in politics : The curious case of Sarah Palin

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 …

Nationalism, gender and the multivocality of war discourse in television news

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…

Durable participants : A generational approach to reality TV’s ‘ordinaryâ…

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…

Devaluing and revaluing seriality : The gendered discourses of media franchising

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…

Tuned to the nation’s mood : Popular music as a mnemonic cultural object

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…

Not seeing the joke : the overlooked role of humour in researching television…

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…

‘You’re all a bunch of pinkos’ : Rupert Murdoch and the politics of Har…

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,…

The management of emotion in British journalism

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…

The media as ‘home-making’ tools : life story of a Filipino migrant in Milan

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…

A system in chaos? Knowledge and sense-making on immigration policy in public…

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 …

Entertaining ideas : social issues in entertainment television

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 …