Narrowmobilization and Tea Party Activism: A Study of Right-Leaning Alternative Media

Past research concerning the theoretical framework of Resistance Performance (RP) has been based on observations of liberal organizations and activists. In the following essay, we engage in a qualitative content analysis of alternative media utilized by conservative “Tea Party” activists to build on the concept of RP. Overall, we discovered that the dominant theme found in much of the content focuses on “purity,” which is considerably different from past RP research that found broad themes of “human rights,” “democracy,” “be the media,” and “principles of unity” embedded within liberal alternative media content. We conclude that the theme of “purity” gives rise to narrowmobilization, which constructs very focused protest communities within right-leaning politics.     

Online Media Relations as an Information Subsidy: Quality of Fortune 500 Companies' Websites and Relationships to Media Salience

This study probes relationships among corporate financial resources, web-based corporate media relations, and media attention to corporations to determine whether online media relations functions as an effective information subsidy in the agenda-building process. It compares the quality of online press rooms of Fortune 500 companies with the number of news articles about those same companies published by five major news outlets in the United States. A causal model was supported predicting that resource-rich companies have better-operating online newsrooms with more diverse informational and interactive components, which in turn generate more news stories about the companies. This result suggests that the effectiveness of corporate Web activities depends on financial and professional resources and contradicts earlier expectations that the dominance of resource-rich organizations in communication would be undermined by the Internet.     

Re-presenting Sport: How Instant Replay and Perceived Violence Impact Enjoyment of Mediated Sports

Several long-standing theories intersect in discussing the impact of community characteristics and of the mass media. The structural pluralism model popularized by Tichenor and his colleagues says that social structure influences how mass media operate in communities because they respond to how power is distributed in the social system, whereas the linear model says that the increasing size of a community's population leads to more social differentiation and diversity and corresponding increases in subcultures with their own beliefs, customs, and behaviors. Recently, there has been a concern about how changes in society have led to a decline in organizational activity and the network of relationships and trust that constitute “social capital.” This article examines the impact of population and diversity (using census data) on individuals’ media use, interpersonal discussion and civic engagement (measured in a national survey), and the relationship among these variables. Analysis of a structural model provides evidence that the “linear hypothesis” can be combined with structural pluralism, with size—measured by population—impacting diversity, which influences the relationships that people have with their community. Concurrently, social categories influence people's communication patterns and community relationships, and communication impacts civic engagement.     

The Appeal of Media Populism: The Media Preferences of Citizens with Populist Attitudes

Although a growing body of literature points to the particular media diet of populist voters, we know too little about what specific media preferences characterize citizens with populist attitudes. This article investigates to what extent citizens with antiestablishment and exclusionist populist attitudes are attracted to attitudinal-congruent media content. We collected survey data using a nationally representative sample (N = 809) and found that citizens’ preferences for media content are in sync with their populist attitudes. Beyond having a tabloidized and entertainment-based media diet, populist voters self-select media content that actively articulates the divide between the “innocent” people and “culprit” others. These findings provide new insights into the appeal of different types of media populism among citizens with populist attitudes on different dimensions.     

Telling Presences: Witnessing,Mass Media,and the Imagined Lives of Strangers

In most traditional accounts, to be a witness is to be physically present at an event and report it to those who are absent. The ontological principle that authorizes testimony is the individual's corporeal presence at the event, a presence often vouchsafed by the suffering of the witnessing body. The logical extension of this is that media audiences are not the witnesses of the events they see, but the recipients of someone else's testimony. I take issue with such an account, claiming that contemporary witnessing has become a general mode of receptivity to electronic media reports about distant others. Replacing the ontological primacy of the witness with the interpretive encounter with “witnessing texts,” I focus on these texts’ world-making properties and the imaginative demands they make of their addressees. Mass media witnessing situates this imaginative engagement with others within an impersonal framework of “indifferent” social relations, creating a ground of civil equivalence between strangers that is morally enabling.     

Factors Supporting and Hindering New Entry in Media Markets: A Study of Media Entrepreneurs

Despite ongoing concern about so-called “big media” erecting barriers to entry, thousands of new media enterprises are formed annually. It raises the question, “What factors support or hinder new entry in media markets?” A study of 30 U.S.-based media entrepreneurs was undertaken to answer the question. For these entrepreneurs, factors that support entry were abundant; and few, if any, barriers exist to entry and to sustained operations. Two sources of support stand out: the effects of technological innovation and so-called “big media,” which, far from erecting barriers, can be a major source of opportunity.     

媒介的“下沉”与奠基——媒介化社会的政治经济学批判

在媒介化社会逐渐成为现实的今天,媒介化理论的重要性日益突显。夏瓦将媒介化视为基于媒介制度的社会结构化转型,库尔德利则将媒介化视为媒介成为人类社会"元资本"的实践化进程,但他们的理论或是面临着坠入结构功能主义窠臼的风险,或是面临着"意识形态批判"的指责。在媒介已经下沉为一种经济基础的今天,只有对"媒介化社会"进行政治经济学批判,才能更好地理解媒介化力量对人类社会生活的奠基与形塑。     

Back to the Street: When Media and Opinion Leave Home

To achieve “deliberative democracy,” Gabriel Tarde's formula not only demands the press hold a nation together, but also offers an agenda of issues that serves as a kind of menu for discussions in cafés and salons, which leads, in turn, to more considered opinions, and thus provides the consensual valuations that inform political, economic and aesthetic actions. The elements of the formula consist of press, conversation, opinion, and action. I argue that the long-run effect of the mainstream media—the newspaper, but even more the radio and television— moved politics off the street and into the home, hence the concern over “the narcotizing dysfunction” of the news media. In the era of the Internet, I argue that media—old or new, mass or social—are far from being the whole of the story. It is some combination of these media, plus word of mouth, plus some rather well-known elements of social-movement theory, plus the social psychology of collective behavior that help to explain. But let us not lose sight of the different functions served by the different media. If the mass media—newspapers, radio, and television—may be said to have moved people “inside,” the social media, so called, serve to mobilize, and may bring them “outside,” again.     

Linking Survey and Media Content Data: Opportunities,Considerations, and Pitfalls

In media effects research a fundamental choice is often made between (field) experiments or observational studies that rely on survey data in combination with data about the information environment or media coverage. Such studies linking survey data and media content data are often dubbed “linkage studies.” On the one hand, such designs are the state of the art in our field and on the other hand, they come with a long list of challenges and choices. This article reviews the rationales for linkage studies, outlines different types of linkage studies, reviews the state-of-the-art in this area, discusses which survey and content items to use in an analysis, reviews different types of analyses, outlines considerations for alternative specifications, and provides a step-by-step example.     

Negotiating Postmodern Democracy,Political Activism,and Knowledge Production: Indymedia's Grassroots and e-Savvy Answer to Media Oligopoly

A grassroots-based and technologically sophisticated effort to counteract media oligopoly, online Indymedia (www.indymedia.org) enables activists to appropriate technologies of globalization, thereby promoting democratic access to citizen-produced knowledge. Combined with the efforts of some 150 Independent Media Centers (IMCs) worldwide, the Indymedia movement as a whole illustrates how citizenship is both global and local. This essay uses examples from online Indymedia and my local IMC to address questions of new media and democratic access, corporate media reform, postmodern resistance, and alternative news production. I argue that Indymedia's citizen-generated news production is a powerful response to corporate media consolidation.     

Media Studies and the Mainstreaming of Media History

During the first half of the twentieth century, colonial rule in the Indonesian archipelago was an important marker of international prestige for the Netherlands, which was merely a small power on the European continent, carefully guarding its neutral status against the Great Powers. After World War I, there was growing concern amongst several groups in Dutch society about criticism of the colonial regime in the foreign press. This article considers three organizations that aimed to set up an international information service about the Dutch East Indies in the 1920s. Although private individuals ran these organizations, they had close links with the authorities in The Hague and Batavia, indicating the emergence of a controlled media environment. Moreover, despite the fact that people involved preferred to use neutral terms to describe their activities, they aimed to provide the international public with propaganda supporting the Dutch colonial regime.     

Online Media and Political Participation: The Case of Malaysia

This study is based on a survey of 526 adult Malaysians who were interviewed shortly before the 2008 national election about online media use, levels of political participation, and voting intentions. The goal was to document the role of online media in a society that controls political information in traditional media and, in turn, compels citizens to seek alternative news sources online. As predicted, the findings indicated that online media use was positively associated with higher levels of political participation among Malaysian voters. The use of and exposure to social networking sites, political blogs, political online videos, party websites, and political ads on cell phones showed strong associations with political activism. However, the use of political online media did not predict voters’ likelihood of voting.     

Alone in Berlin? Israeli media and the German resistance to Nazism

The commercially successful Hebrew translation of Alone in Berlin (Fallada, 2010) stirred a conversation regarding the German resistance to Nazism, until then a rarely discussed phenomenon in Israel. The analysis of media items dealing with the book revealed that different memory frameworks shaped the discussion about it. Thus, this study contributes to contemporary discussion about the role of “old” and “new” media in the reconstruction of society’s memory.     

Context for Collaboration

Abstract

This article considers the use of filtering software (“censor-ware”) and the World Wide Web. It argues that the United States government, religious groups, and corporations should not deter freedom of speech and access to information in libraries. The article describes how governments and religious groups try to prevent Web sites from reaching Internet users, and explains how corporations sell and use filters for their own benefit. It also introduces organizations that rate Web sites as an alternative to electric filters, and presents people and groups that oppose filtering. In conclusion, it supports the idea that librarians and information professionals can educate Internet users without the interference of external entities and censorship.     

Siegel,David S. and Siegel,Susan. (2007). Radio and the Jews: The untold story of how radio influenced America's image of Jews, 1920s–1950s

Bolivia is one of the most successful examples of alternative media used for helping to create a “critical citizen movement” to dynamize the “social contract.” Through recovering historical Bolivian tradition based on radio experiences with communication for social change, this study works to describe the last legal and political changes referring to the community communication, its future lines of work, and the role of the alternative media networks on their change or their consolidation, based on the “reticular profit” concept, the study of their increased number of partners, and analysis of legal documents.     

Fake News

Much has been written about the alleged “crisis” of journalism, with narratives of cultural pessimism centred on the decline of legacy news media, and print media in particular. Whilst factually accurate in parts, such narratives offer an incomplete picture not just of how journalism is declining, but also evolving as it transitions in the digital age. This paper is funded by a major Australian Research Council-study of “Journalism beyond the crisis”, a project which seeks to evaluate the emerging assemblage of journalistic forms, practices, and uses in a transnationally comparative study across four different countries. The present study is a first step in investigating how journalists perceive their roles at a time in which the legitimacy of factual accounts of current events is increasingly put into question. To do so, it draws on in-depth interviews with senior journalists based in London and Sydney, providing topical insights into how these practitioners understand their role in an era of “fake news”. The findings indicate that journalists are particularly concerned about a decrease of public trust in the media, and urge colleagues to adapt more rigorous fact-checking techniques – particularly at times when the role of journalism as a “watchdog” over society appears to be most crucial.     

Reevaluating “The End of Mass Communication?”

It is hard to imagine a more challenging arena for communication research than that presented by new media and their impact on our society. We have witnessed the fastest evolution in communication technology in human history and, along with it, the evolution of communication conceptions and theories used to assess its impact. More than a decade has passed since Chaffee and Metzger first published their intriguing article “The End of Mass Communication?” and suggested that the new media will change the notions of mass communication and, as a result, the theories used in communication research. Today, we know more about new media and its effect on communication, society, and communication theories. The present article, therefore, sets out to reassess Chaffee and Metzger's claim by describing the development of several core theories of communication research, namely the agenda-setting theory and the notions of media audiences and the Digital Divide, in light of the new media. Our review shows that the role played by communication technologies in social, cultural, political, and economic processes is as central and influential in the new media era as it was in traditional media environment and that, although theories may change to accommodate the changes of the new media environment, researchers are still dealing with the “old” issues of power and resistance, and structure and ownership.     

From Pink Slips to Pink Slime: Transforming Media Labor in a Digital Age

This paper examines some of the labor processes involved inthe expansion of digital journalism to comment on the nature and implications of transformations in journalistic work in a digital age. Specifically, I survey four practices that stand out as putting pressure on traditional journalism production: outsourcing, unpaid labor, metrics and measurement, and automation. Although these practices are unevenly incorporated into mainstream news production (and in some cases are still marginal), they demonstrate viable options for media corporations seeking to streamline production. Drawing on labor process theory, I emphasize that media corporations use strategies of efficiency and rationalization to lower labor costs. Unpaid labor, robot reporters, algorithms, and outsourcing demonstrate that changes in the media production process are not the inevitable results of technology but, as the long history of journalism and technological change demonstrates, strategies for lowering labor costs.     

LITERACY PROBLEMS WITHIN SKILL SOLUTIONS

This discussion of education and media questions the assumptions made about types of literacy and their reproduction in journalism practice classes. The first part concerns the idea of “skills” in communication. Are “skills” classrooms becoming “de-skilled” themselves, as important critical questions are decided from above and removed from the active classroom? Secondly, is there a way of re-conceiving literacy that can respond to this problem, a literacy that goes beyond communication “skills” into developing critical reflective practitioners? Examples from a classroom ethnographic study are included.