This book analyzes the impact of social media on democracy and politics at the sub-national level in developed and developing countries. Over the last decade or so, social media has transformed politics. Offering political actors opportunities to organize, mobilize, and connect with constituents, voters, and supporters, social media has become an important tool in global politics as well as a force for democracy. Most of the available research literature focuses on the impact of social media at the national level; this book fills that gap by analyzing the political uses of social media at the sub-national level. The book is divided into two parts. Part One, "Social Media for Democracy" includes chapters that analyze potential contributions of social media tools to the realizing of basic values of democracy, such as public engagement, transparency, accountability, participation and collaboration at the sub-national level. Part Two, "Social Media in Politics" focuses on the use of social media tools by political actors in political processes and activities (online campaigns, protests etc.) at the local, regional and state government levels during election and non-election periods. Combining theoretical and empirical analysis, each chapter provides evaluations of overarching issues, questions, and problems as well as real-world experiences with social media, politics, and democracy in a diverse sample of municipalities. This volume will be of use to graduate students, academicians, and researchers, in several disciplines and fields, such as public administration, political science, ICT, sociology, communication studies and public policy as well as politicians and practitioners.

New forms of digitalization and digital media technologies are positively and negatively disrupting the free flow of information preservation. These new technologies are revolutionizing the way messages are transmitted and breaking the traditional monopolization of information by well-established institutions. Exploring the Relationship Between Media, Libraries, and Archives provides emerging research on new digital trends in information preservation, origination, and sharing. While highlighting the current shift in information sharing from institutional archives to digital platforms, readers will learn how media, librarians, and archivists reinvent their processes to meet the ever-progressing needs of users. This book is an ideal resource for librarians, archivists, information preservers, and media professionals aiming to find a balance among the use of media, new digital technologies, libraries, and archives in preserving and furthering information sharing.

Media and Information Literacy: An Integrated Approach for the 21st Century provides a novel rationale for the integration of media and information literacy and gives direction to contemporary media and information literacy education. The book takes a synthetic approach to these two areas, presenting critical histories of both. The book explores the influence of political forces and educational practice on media literacy and the contemporary media environment, focusing on computing and mobile technology as a platform for existing and non-computational media. The final section considers a new rationale for the adjustment of content and activities into a combined project, building on a range of skills from contemporary media, reconsidering the mission of media literacy, and advocating that media and information literacy be expanded out of the classroom and positioned as a 'public pedagogy'.

This history of public television over the last twenty years shows how powerful political actors and the budget process in the United States have severely restricted the strategic behavior and programming of public TV. This hard-hitting story fills a real void in the literature on the subject and should be required reading for station managers, broadcasters, students and professionals in communications, and public policymakers. The ancillary text with its analysis of organizations theory and models is intended also for undergraduate and graduate students in mass media and communications, public policy, and organizational behavior. This practical analysis of public television funding, organization, and programming opens with an overview of organizations theory and a discussion of two models of organizational behavior. A brief history of public TV policy follows with a description of critical developments under the last four American presidents. The legislative history of the Corporation of Public Broadcasting demonstrates the effects of the budgetary process in TV programming, employment diversity, and services to different audiences. The case study closes with an evaluation of public television in terms of organizational strengths and weaknesses and offers practical suggestions for reform.

The media star has become a powerful, almost unparalleled, cultural sign, even as the star system has undergone radical transformation since the era of the Hollywood studio system. Today's film industry continues to market and promote its products through actors in ways that seek to capture the often elusive quality that a star can embody. Using contemporary stars such as Robert De Niro, Keanu Reeves, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Dennis Hopper, this anthology of essays applies a variety of theoretical tools in its attempt to understand how we interpret stars, and how we can begin to understand their cultural significance.

Likewise, the study explores how the star system has become an increasingly complex phenomenon within society at large, extending its impact beyond the cinema into music, sports, and fashion. Many of the essays collected here consider this shift and examine how personae including the director (Sam Peckinpah), the royalty (Princess Diana) and even the digital star (Lara Croft) have captured the cultural imagination and have come to attain qualities as star-like as those of the silver screen.

Media Power, Media Politics, Second Edition, examines the role and influence of the media in every sphere of American politics. Organized thematically, the book analyzes the relationship between the media and key institutions, political actors, and nongovernmental entities, as well as the role of the new media, media ethics, and foreign policy coverage. Written clearly and concisely by leading scholars in the field, the chapters serve as broad overviews to the issues, while discussion questions and suggestions for further reading encourage deeper inquiry. Updated throughout, the second edition includes expanded coverage of the evolving role of new media, a new chapter on terrorism and the media, and new pedagogical exercises and featured interviews with journalists, bloggers, and media advisers.

Split into four sections, Seeing Fans analyzes the representations of fans in the mass media through a diverse range of perspectives. This collection opens with a preface by noted actor and fan Orlando Jones (Sleepy Hollow), whose recent work on fandom (appearing with Henry Jenkins at Comic Con and speaking at the Fan Studies Network symposium) bridges the worlds of academia and the media industry. Section one focuses on the representations of fans in documentaries and news reports and includes an interview with Roger Nygard, director of Trekkies and Trekkies 2. The second section then examines fictional representations of fans through analyses of television and film, featuring interviews with Emily Perkins of Supernatural, Robert Burnett, director of the film Free Enterprise, and Luminosity, a fan who has been interviewed in the New York Magazine for her exemplary work in fandom. Section three explores cultural perspectives on fan representations, and includes an interview with Laurent Malaquais, director of Bronies: The Extremely Unexpected Adult Fans of My Little Pony. Lastly, the final section looks at global perspectives on the ways fans have been represented and finishes with an interview with Jeanie Finlay, director of the music documentary Sound it Out. The collection then closes with an afterword by fan studies scholar Professor Matt Hills.

Despite the central role of punditry in our contemporary media environment, research has been slow to examine punditry on cable news. Deregulation, the advent of cable television, and the rise of a twenty-four hour news cycle have dramatically transformed the structure and content of news, paving the way for political pundits to come to the forefront. Cable news networks, in particular, have played a critical role in challenging the neutrality of traditional media through the development of opinion programs that made highly politicized and entertaining content central to their primetime coverage. Over the past three decades, these opinionated programs have become increasingly popular as a programming strategy for cable news producers seeking to develop novel programming to target niche audiences. The pundits who pontificate on these programs have come to dominate our national political dialogue, and play a significant role in setting the public agenda and influencing public opinion in the United States. Punditry and pundits lie at the heart of programming and network changes that have evolved over the past thirty years. Primetime Pundits: How Cable News Covers Social Issues explores the ascent of punditry and offers new models for understanding how social issues are covered-not just by pundits, but also in the larger changing media landscape.

The world is witnessing a media revolution similar to the birth of the film industry from the early 20th Century. New forms of media are expanding the human experience from passive viewership to active participants, surrounding and enveloping us in ways film or television never could. New immersive media forms include virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), mixed reality (XR), fulldome, CAVEs, holographic characters, projection mapping, and mixed experimental combinations of old and new, live, and generated media. With the continued expansion beyond the traditional frame, practitioners are crafting these new media to see how they can influence and shape the world. The Handbook of Research on the Global Impacts and Roles of Immersive Media is a collection of innovative research that provides insights on the latest in existing and emerging immersive technologies through descriptions of case studies, new business models, philosophical viewpoints, and scientific findings. While highlighting topics including augmented reality, interactive media, and spatial computing, this book is ideally designed for media technologists, storytellers, artists, journalists, designers, programmers, developers, manufacturers, entertainment executives, content creators, industry professionals, academicians, researchers, and media students.

This is a discussion of the relationships between mass media and society. Topics examined include: talk radio and community; the growth of the corporate newspaper; media violence and audience behaviour; and race, ethnicity and the mass media.

This book illuminates modern political technology, examining important technologies, companies, and people; putting recent innovations into historical context; and describing the possible future uses of technology in electoral politics. Despite a decade of political technology's celebrated triumphs-such as online fundraising of the presidential campaigns of McCain in 2000, Dean in 2003, and Obama in 2008; or the web-enabled, socially networked campaign of Obama 2008-the field of e-politics is still at an unsolidified stage. Margin of Victory: How Technologists Help Politicians Win Elections offers an unprecedented insiders' view of the fast-changing role of political technology that explains how innovations in the use of new media, software tools, data, and analytics hold yet untapped potential. Contributions from leading practitioners in this highly specialized field cover everything from political blogs to targeting mobile devices to utilizing software created specifically to manage campaigns. The book documents how political technology is still in an early stage, despite its enormous advances in recent years, and how the strategies that work today will inevitably be superseded as new technologies arrive and potential voters become less receptive to the previous campaign's tactics.

Reprojecting the City takes a radical new look at the cinematic city through a queer perspective from the global south. Placing centre-stage the intersection of dissident sexuality with capitalism, globalisation and urban development, it shows how recent Latin American films rework our understandings of urban space and disrupt 'Western' imaginations of city life and sexuality in the majority world. Fusing a queer perspective with a range of other critical approaches, Hoff takes current debates beyond the now well-trodden narratives of dependency and subalternity to a new space in which the so-called 'periphery' is relocated back to the centre of things. Latin American cinematic cities, emerge not merely as marginal spaces of prejudice, discrimination, exclusion and violence also ones of hope, empowerment and productive possibility firmly implicated in the global (re)production of sexualities and sexual discourses.

The history of HVJ, Vatican Radio, is discussed in this work along with its role in propagating church policies in all areas. Central to the discussion is the interrelation between leadership and social change as well as the necessity of creating a propaganda machine to maintain the existing system or to create a new order. Vatican Radio has served as one of the major media instruments of the Pope and the Roman Catholic Church since its beginning in 1931. Scholars in either media or religion will be interested in this ground-breaking work.

This collection, arranged and edited by Beverly G. Hawk, examines media coverage of Africa by American television, newspapers, and magazines. Scholars and journalists of diverse experience engage in debate concerning U.S. media coverage of current events in Africa. As each African crisis appears in the headlines, scholars take the media to task for sensational and simplistic reporting. Journalists, in response, explain the constraints of censorship, reader interest, and media economics. Hawk's book demonstrates that academia and the press can inform each other to present a fuller and more sensitive picture of Africa today.

This volume will be of interest to scholars and practitioners in African studies, African politics, journalism, and international relations.

This book provides a historical review of the transformation of China’s image around the world since the 1978 Reform and Opening Up. Based on a synthetic model that the author constructs for evaluating national images, together with a historical review and quantitative analysis, it discusses the issues and challenges confronting China’s image around the world since the Opening Up.  To help rectify the situation that most of the research on China’s reform efforts focuses on hard power (esp. economic power), this book, which mainly focuses on China’s soft power, reviews and assesses its global image from the three perspectives of politics, economy and culture. In the process, it sheds valuable new light on the presentation of China’s image and the world’s perceptions of China.

This essay collection examines ethical concerns related to the traditional areas of political communication, including campaigns, media, discourse, and advertising, as well as new technologies, including the Internet. In total, the collection provides one of the few volumes to examine political ethics from an academic perspective rather than from a moralistic or rule orientation. Bruce Gronbeck provides an assessment of presidential campaigns, arguing that ethical judgments of citizens are based on candidates' actions and motives, character, and competence. Ronald Lee explores the ethics of campaign discourse, and he charts the relationship between presidential candidates' projection of civic virtue and the political arrangements that dictate the course of the campaign itself. Steven Goldzwig and Patricia Sullivan examine what happens to discourse when the divide between the haves and have-nots translates into a local community disconnected from virtual politics. The nature, types, and impact of the growing use of hate speech in contemporary politics is explored by Rita Whillock, while Robert Denton investigates television as an instrument of governing and its impact on the nature of democracy. Gary Woodward looks at the ethics of political journalism, and Lynda Lee Kaid analyzes the ethical issues raised by political advertising in all forms. Clifford Jones looks at the impact of campaign finance rules on campaign communication strategy; Gary Selnow explores the ethics of politics on the Internet; and Robert Denton concludes by examining the relationship between constitutional authority and public morality. An important text for students as well as scholars investigating contemporary American politics.

This fascinating volume offers an overview of the most influential and notorious media scandals, from newspaper publisher John Peter Zenger's groundbreaking 1735 trial for printing and publishing false, scandalous, malicious and seditious statements to Dr. Phil McGraW's 2008 thwarted attempt to force his television cameras inside Britney Spears' hospital room, from the attempts to ban literature by the likes of D.H. Lawrence, James Joyce, Henry Miller, and Allen Ginsberg to the excesses of gossip mongers like Walter Winchell, Hedda Hopper, Geraldo Rivera, and Matt Drudge. It delves into the tabloid press and walks through the minefields of political opinion shapers, the shouters, the muckrakers and whistleblowers.

America's obsession with scandal-and the media's boundless capacity to report and sometimes even create it-did not start with O.J. Simpson, Rush Limbaugh, or Britney Spears. It was ingrained in the fabric of our nation even before Paul Revere made his famous ride. Indeed, our media's cherished right to free expression was hard-won and is now protected by the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, but it comes with responsibilities and is fraught with peril. The tension between the two forces of free expression and permissible subject matter has, throughout American history, caused media scandals-public outcries, legal proceedings, denunciations, violence and, in the case of Salman Rushdie's 1988 novel "IThe Satanic Verses" deaths. The early battles by the print media-newspapers, magazines, books-over censorship, book banning, book burning, obscenity, blasphemy and libel set the groundwork for even greater battles as the media expanded into radio, television and the Internet. This fascinating volume offers an overview of the most influential and notorious media scandals, from newspaper publisher John Peter Zenger's groundbreaking 1735 trial for printing and publishing false, scandalous, malicious and seditious statements to Dr. Phil McGraW's 2008 thwarted attempt to force his television cameras inside Britney Spears' hospital room, from the attempts to ban literature by the likes of D.H. Lawrence, James Joyce, Henry Miller, and Allen Ginsberg to the excesses of gossip mongers like Walter Winchell, Hedda Hopper, Geraldo Rivera, and Matt Drudge. It delves into the tabloid press and walks through the minefields of political opinion shapers, the shouters, the muckrakers and whistleblowers.

"Media Scandals" examines this fascinating, troubled and sometimes inspiring subject from two different perspectives. First, through its recurrent themes, which reach across all media: politics; censorship; race and religion; sex and morals. The second half of the volume then examines each industry in more detail: book publishing; newspapers and magazines; radio and television, and the Internet. Augmenting this invaluable resource is a detailed timeline to help students put the wide-ranging scandals into historical perspective, and a thorough bibliography to encourage further research.

With this unique collection of primary source documents from colonial newspapers, students will be able to debate the issues of colonial America. Pro and con opinion pieces, letters, essays and news reports that were printed in colonial newspapers will help the reader to understand the differing viewpoints of colonial Americans on the key issues from 1690 to the signing of the Declaration of Independence in 1776. Nearly 300 documents, organized chronologically by event, will help readers step back in time to debate the issues faced by 18th-century Americans. The work covers 31 events from abolition, religion, and women's rights to the Stamp Act crisis and the Boston Tea Party. For every major event or issue of the colonial period, newspapers printed the opinions of the day, in many cases attempting to influence public opinion. Issues such as medical discoveries, education, and censorship are covered in this collection along with important events such as the French and Indian War, the trial of John Peter Zenger, and the Boston Massacre. Each chapter introduces the event or issue and includes news articles, letters, essays, even poetry representing both sides of the argument as they affected Americans. Each document is preceded by an explanatory introduction. This is the only collection of primary source documents from colonial newspapers on the events of the era and will be a valuable tool for research and classroom discussion.

This open access handbook presents a multidisciplinary and multifaceted perspective on how the 'digital' is simultaneously changing Russia and the research methods scholars use to study Russia. It provides a critical update on how Russian society, politics, economy, and culture are reconfigured in the context of ubiquitous connectivity and accounts for the political and societal responses to digitalization. In addition, it answers practical and methodological questions in handling Russian data and a wide array of digital methods. The volume makes a timely intervention in our understanding of the changing field of Russian Studies and is an essential guide for scholars, advanced undergraduate and graduate students studying Russia today.

This book analyzes various digital transformation processes in journalism and news media. By investigating how these processes stimulate innovation, the authors identify new business and communication models, as well as digital strategies for a new environment of global information flows. The book will help journalists and practitioners working in news media to identify best practices and discover new types of information flows in a rapidly changing news media landscape.

Focusing on international social justice drama in its current local, national, and international manifestation, this interdisciplinary approach explores the relationship of contemporary dramatic forms to human rights issues. Over examines the artistic styles, goals, and thematic interests of dramatists and film directors of works of social commitment. He also considers the conditions and economics of wide audience appeal that prevent Hollywood and many independent filmmakers from effectively addressing these politically explosive issues. In contrast, differing cultures and economic concerns result in third world filmmakers and playwrights producing more comprehensive expositions of social issues. Considering a selected group of film and stage movements the author concludes with an optimistic prediction for political drama in the new century. This informed discussion will appeal to film, theatre, and cultural studies scholars.

The presence and ubiquity of the internet continues to transform the way in which we identify ourselves and others both online and offline. The development of virtual communities permits users to create an online identity to interact with and influence one another in ways that vary greatly from face-to-face interaction. Identity and Leadership in Virtual Communities: Establishing Credibility and Influence explores the notion of establishing an identity online, managing it like a brand, and using it with particular members of a community. Bringing together a range of voices exemplifying how participants in online communities influence one another, this book serves as an essential reference for academicians, researchers, students, and professionals, including bloggers, software designers, and entrepreneurs seeking to build and manage their engagement online.

The 20th century might be accurately described as the television century. Perhaps no technological invention in recent history has so vastly affected the American public. James Roman, author of Love, Light, and a Dream: Television's Past, Present, and Future (Greenwood, 1996), traces the evolution of American television programming from its beginnings as an experimental "spinoff" of radio broadcasting to its current role as an omnipresent and, some would say, omnipotent force of media and culture. Roman provides thematic chapters on all of television's major genres, including: Westerns Medical dramas Soap operas Sitcoms Children's programs Sports broadcasting Miniseries Docudramas And Reality television An involving mixture of scholarship and nostalgia, this volume offers an intelligent examination of the many ways that American society has shaped--and been shaped by--television.

Media pervade and saturate the world around us. From the proliferation of social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter to television, radio, newspapers, films, games and email, media is inescapable. This book, using some of Deleuze's key concepts as its starting point, offers a new systematic analysis of how media functions in our lives, and how we function through our media. While Harper and Savat take Deleuze as the starting point, they extend and define his concepts, pointing out advances made by theorists such as Marx, Mumfors, McLuhan and Williams in the attempt to answer the most Deleuzean of questions, 'what is it that media do?'