This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. Television news is frequently disparaged by thoughtful commentators for its preoccupation with drama and spectacle at the expense of serious, in-depth, engagement with the critical issues it covers. Whilst insisting these charges possess more than a small dose of truth, Rob Stones argues for more emphasis to be placed on strengthening the capacities of audiences. Drawing from major traditions in social thought, and on academic media analysis, Stones provides the conceptual tools for audiences to bring greater sophistication to their interpretations, developing their capacity to think across items and genres. A detailed account of an episode of the Danish political drama, Borgen, reveals the extent to which its viewers already deploy similar concepts and skills in order to follow its storylines. Stones shows how audiences can refine these skills further and demonstrates their value with respect to a wide range of current affairs texts, including: Israeli settlers on the West Bank; the Rwandan genocide; the Egyptian 'revolution'; the Obama administration's immigration reform bill; the bases of Germany's economic success; the conflict between 'red shirts' and 'yellow shirts' in Thailand; China's diplomatic relations with Burma; and scandals of mistreatment within the UK and Swedish healthcare systems. The book shows that everyone's understanding of current affairs can be significantly enhanced by social theory. It will be relevant to students of sociology, politics, media studies and journalism at all levels.

This book is about how TV makers--notably writers, producers, and network programmers--are deeply influenced by public pressures outside their craft. Many scholars assume that the relationship between society and television is one-way, that the traffic of influence moves from the content of a program to the behavior of those who view it, and that if a show is too exploitative or violent or stereotypical, it transforms the minds of those who watch it in some manner. Authors Selnow and Gilbert maintain that the one-way influence is only half-true. Even as television makes its impact on viewers, viewers, society, and society's institutions make their impact on television, often with more noticeable effect.

Some of television's most influential and best known producers and programmers (including Grant Tinker, Norman Lear, Steven Bochco, and Gary David Goldberg) discuss the forces that affect their selection of themes and treatments, why they include or reject material, and how they view their opinion leader roles and their roles as members of the society that is so influenced by their products. Selnow and Gilbert examine many of the obvious as well as less apparent forces that affect content decisions: government regulations, interest groups, and advertisers. They argue that the rapid advancement in telecommunication technologies has as much to do with what we watch as any of the social forces. The authors look not only at the current control of content, but point toward the consortium of influences that will affect the medium as it evolves rapidly throughout the next decade.

Recounts the life and career of Croatian filmmaker Rajko Grlic in the form of a lexicon of film terms tied to anecdotes spanning Grlic's life. "I read a lot this year. Old, new, borrowed, blue. This was the best. The paradox of reading something so avidly that you can't put it down and then I got to the last 20 pages slowing down to a snail's pace and reading so slowly so that it wouldn't be over so quickly."-Mike Downey, European Film Academy From his post-Nazi-era childhood in Yugoslavia to his college years during the 1968 invasion of Prague, the Yugoslav dissolution wars, and his subsequent exile in the United States, these personal stories combine to provide insight into socialist film industries, contextualizing south Slavic film while also highlighting its contacts with Western filmmakers and film industry. From the introduction by Aida Vidan: The one hundred and seventy-seven film terms provide sometimes a direct and at other times a metaphoric path to Grlic's stories and concurrently serve as a self-referential mechanism to comment on a series of film attributes. The entries can be read in any order, allowing for the reader's own "montage" of the book's universe.... Grlic adroitly captures the absurdities and paradoxes in one's life resulting from the sort of tectonic shifts with which East European history abounds.

This book intervenes in discussions of the fate of nationalism and national identity by exploring the relationship between state appropriation of marketing and branding strategies on the one hand, and, on the other, the commercial mobilization of nationalist discourses.

Television is the most powerful system of images in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Nonetheless, TV has attained only little philosophical attention so far, especially compared to other (visual) media such as film. This book looks at TV as what happens on the screen and beyond it; which is mainly the operation of switching images. It therefore proposes a new definition of TV as the first picture that can be switched on, off, and over, which stresses that TV is more tactile than visual. Through the operation of switching, TV figures the world from within and as the course of its figuration. This is grasped here by the term of "ontography". Through the ongoing interlacing and bridging of "TV 1.0" (the image is being switched) and "TV 2.0" (the image is a switch), TV exponentially increases the production and circulation of images. It transforms the world and itself from an analogue state to a digital one and from central perspectivism to pluri-perspective. In terms of time, through switching and the switch, it develops and reworks new temporal orderings, such as instantaneity, synchronicity, flow, and seriality. TV makes its own history. In space, it creates a mediasphere as its habitat and hence new forms of being-in-the-world, of proximity and distance, and scale. Anthropologically, it works on what a subject and an object is, on what makes the human being, and ontographically, how it is possible that there is something at all instead of nothing: through switch-images.

This book explores the aesthetic and ethical ways in which history and daily life are filmically represented and witnessed in Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao-hsien's movies. From the era of the Japanese Occupation to the White Horror and then to the lifting of martial law, the author shows how Hou Hsiao-hsien uses visual media to evoke the rhythms of daily life through the emotional memory of the characters and communities he explores. In particular, the book focuses on the ways in which Hou Hsiao-hsien seeks to reflect the strong dilemmas of identity and the traumatic emotions associated with witnessing history. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, it investigates the concepts of daily life, representation and historical trauma in order to focus on how these films represent history and political trauma through the nature of daily life and personal memories, and the resulting historical responsibility and ethics. This is the first academic monography about Hou Hsiao-hsien's films.

How do we identify the "queer auteur" and their queer imaginings? Is it possible to account for such a figure when the very terms "queer" and "auteur" invoke aesthetic surprises and disorientations, disconcerting ironies and paradoxes, and biographical deceits and ambiguities? In eighteen eloquent chapters, David A. Gerstner traces a history of ideas that spotlight an ever-shifting terrain associated with auteur theory and, in particular, queer-auteur theory. Engaging with the likes of Oscar Wilde, Walter Benjamin, James Baldwin, Jean Louis Baudry, Linda Nochlin, Jane Gallop, Cael Keegan, Luce Irigaray, and other prominent critical thinkers, Gerstner contemplates how the queer auteur in film theory might open us to the work of desire. Queer Imaginings argues for a queer-auteur in which critical theory is reenabled to reconceptualize the auteur in relation to race, gender, sexuality, and desire. Gerstner succinctly defines the contours of a history and the ongoing discussions that situate queer and auteur theories in film studies. Ultimately, Queer Imaginings is a journey in shared pleasures in which writing for and about cinema makes way for unanticipated cinematic friendships.

In this groundbreaking collection, Dr. Jenna Ng brings together academics and award-winning artists and machinima makers to explore the fascinating combination of cinema, animation and games in machinima (the use of computer game engines to produce animated films in cost- and time-efficient ways). Book-ended by a preface by Henry Lowood (curator for history of science and technology collections at Stanford University) and an interview with Isabelle Arvers (machinima artist, trainer, critic, and curator), the collection features wide-ranging discussions addressing machinima not only from diverse theoretical perspectives, but also in its many dimensions as game art, First Nations media art, documentary, and pedagogical tool. Making use of interactive multimedia to enhance the text, each chapter features a QR code which leads to a mobile website cross-referencing with its print text, integrating digital and print content while also taking into account the portability of digital devices in resonance with machinima's mobile digital forms. Exploring the many dimensions of machinima production and reception, Understanding Machinima extends machinima's critical scholarship and debate, underscoring the exciting potential of this emerging media form.

The book showcases research on digital entertainment solutions in different sectors. In recent years, digital media have evolved to include bandwidth-rich, smart, and connected platforms accessed via computers, tablets, smart phones, social media, and video game consoles. The high connectivity and vast processing capacity of these platforms have allowed for platform-agnostic, streaming, always-on, entertainment-on-demand consumption of digital content in a way distinct from traditional models of entertainment consumption. Moving beyond the unilateral delivery of content, with fixed positions of the entertainers and the entertained, digital entertainment is now dynamically generated by users and providers, blurring the boundary between producers and consumers of entertainment. With the increasing accessibility of multimodal media that surround audiences with sensory-rich information, digital entertainment is becoming more immersive.

Talking Politics presents the opinions of some of America's leading broadcasters and political commentators on the tension-fraught relationship between politics and the media. In a series of personal, frank, and in-depth interviews, Tom Brokaw, Larry King, Robert MacNeil, Linda Ellerbee, Bernard Shaw, and others talk about the extraordinarily influential, sometimes volatile, relationship between journalists and political figures. Providing a window onto political campaigns and governance, political analysts, journalists, and media figures address issues such as: * When does a tabloid story become news, worthy of the attention of the serious media * Can a talk show really give us a closer look at a candidate or is that closeness an illusion? * When can voters trust candidate images presented on TV-network news, talk shows, or otherwise? In an age when the media has become as much a topic as the politicians it covers. Talking Politics will be fascinating reading for all who follow politics. Talking Politics gives us an inside view of the relationship between journalists and candidates, one that shapes the way most Americans choose their president. In a series of personal and in-depth interviews, some of America's top broadcasters and political commentators talk about the extraordinarily influential relationship between the nation's most powerful journalists and political figures. Tom Brokaw, Larry King, Robert MacNeil, Linda Ellerbee, Bernard Shaw, and other media figures address issues such as: o When does a tabloid story become worthy of the attention of the serious media? o Can a talk show really give us a closer look at a candidate or is that closeness an illusion? o When can voters trust candidate images presented on television-network news, talk shows, or otherwise? Each chapter in Talking Politics features a frank, revealing interview with one of the nation's most influential broadcasters or political commentators. The result is a unique, behind-the-scenes look at the tension-fraught relationship between TV news and political candidates. In an age when the media has become as much a topic as the politicians it covers, Talking Politics will be fascinating reading for all who follow politics.

Handbook of Media Economics provides valuable information on a unique field that has its own theories, evidence, and policies. Understanding the media is important for society, and while new technologies are altering the media, they are also affecting our understanding of their economics. The book spans the large scope of media economics, simultaneously offering in-depth analysis of particular topics, including the economics of why media are important, how media work (including financing sources, institutional settings, and regulation), what determines media content (including media bias), and the effects of new technologies. The book provides a powerful introduction for those interested in starting research in media economics.

Perturbatory narration is a heuristic concept, applicable both quantitatively and qualitatively to a specific type of complex narratives for which narratology has not yet found an appropriate classification. This new term refers to complex narrative strategies that produce intentionally disturbing effects such as surprise, confusion, doubt or disappointment - effects that interrupt or suspend immersion in the aesthetic reception process. The initial task, however, is to indicate what narrative conventions are, in fact, questioned, transgressed, or given new life by perturbatory narration. The key to our modeling lies in its combination of individual procedures of narrative strategies hitherto regarded as unrelated. Their interplay has not yet attracted scholarly attention. The essays in this volume present a wide range of contemporary films from Canada, the USA, Mexico, Argentina, Spain, France and Germany. The perturbatory narration concept enables to typify and systematize moments of disruption in fictional texts, combining narrative processes of deception, paradox and/or empuzzlement and to analyse these perturbing narrative strategies in very different filmic texts.

In the years since World War II, commercial television has become the most powerful force in American culture. It is also the quintessential example of postmodernist culture. This book studies how "The Twilight Zone, The Prisoner, Twin Peaks," and "The X-Files" display many of the central characteristics that critics and theorists have associated with postmodernism, including fragmentation of narratives and characters, multiplicity in style and genre, and the collapse of traditional categorical boundaries of all kinds. The author labels these series strange TV since they challenge the conventions of television programming, thus producing a form of cognitive estrangement that potentially encourages audiences to question received ideas.

Despite their challenges to the conventions of commercial television, however, these series pose no real threat to the capitalist order. In fact, the very characteristics that identify these series as postmodern are also central characteristics of capitalism itself, especially in its late consumerist phase. An examination of these series within the context of postmodernism thus confirms Fredric Jameson's thesis that postmodernism is a reflection of the cultural logic of late capitalism. At the same time, these series do point toward the potential of television as a genuinely innovative medium that promises to produce genuinely new forms of cultural expression in the future.

This book maps emergent global practices and discourses of mediated, spiritualized social change. Bringing together scholarly perspectives from around the world and across disciplines, the authors explore how 'spiritualities' express themselves through and with media - from television to Internet, from fashion to art murals - as socially transforming voices and practices. The very fluidity of the meaning of spirituality is part of its appeal: it can service as easily as a reference to a perceived common essence of humanness as it can work to legitimate market-based practices. While the involvement of spiritual life with social transformation is certainly not peculiar to contemporary societies, what has changed is the upsurge of media in these matters. In the specific case of religion, globalization has unleashed a cascade of unexpected and unpredictable implications, many of which are consequences of the media. The authors here show ways in which media and spiritualities are engaged around the world in efforts to restructure paradigms, institutions, beliefs and practices to affect social change. >

A unique work of history that examines the story of a pivotal figure in American life, the U.S. war reporter, with contributions from some of the most influential journalists of our time.

Whether dodging sniper fire, accompanying strategic bombing raids over enemy territory, challenging the Pentagon's version of events, or crossing the frontlines to interview figures at the heart of the conflict, war correspondents have served as the eyes and ears of the nation, conveying the facts, the brutality and the drama of warfare, and shaping public opinion in the process.

Now for the first time, in Reporting America at War, the nation's most respected reporters share their stories to create a fascinating oral history. Contributors include:

• Christiane Amanpour
• Peter Arnett
• Malcolm Browne
• Walter Cronkite
• Gloria Emerson
• Frank Gibney
• David Halberstam
• Chris Hedges
• Ward Just
• Andy Rooney
• Morley Safer

In addition to telling their personal stories, the correspondents examine issues such as censorship, propaganda, ethics, the power of the press, and the future of war reporting, especially after September 11th.

The Media Convergence Handbook sheds new light on the complexity of media convergence and the related business challenges. Approaching the topic from a managerial, technological as well as end-consumer perspective, it acts as a reference book and educational resource in the field. Media convergence at business level may imply transforming business models and using multiplatform content production and distribution tools. However, it is shown that the implementation of convergence strategies can only succeed when expectations and aspirations of every actor involved are taken into account. Media consumers, content producers and managers face different challenges in the process of media convergence. Volume II of the Media Convergence Handbook tackles these challenges by discussing media business models, production, and users' experience and perspectives from a technological convergence viewpoint.

This book explores the literary and cultural history behind certain Christmas and Halloween traditions, and examines the way that they have moved into broadcasting. It demonstrates how these horror traditions have become more domestic and personal, and how they provide a necessary seasonal pause for reflection on our fears.

Market Mediations offers a fresh way to look at consumption practices, design and branding issues through analysis based on the French and European intellectual tradition. To account for this vast system of objects and brands, the book draws on the generative trajectory of meaning stemming from the structural semiotics of Greimas obedience.

During the Gulf war, news of the conflict was virtually harnessed by the American-led alliance. Yet, when U.S. soldiers moved on Somalia without resistance, their landing was lent a surreal quality by hordes of journalists filming their every maneuver. In this age of instant communication, wars are often defined by their coverage, as with Vietnam; yet the symbiosis between warriors and journalists has a long history.

War and the Media provides a sweeping overview of how the media has covered international conflicts in this century. Devoting each of the book's twelve chapters to a particular conflict, from the world wars to Vietnam, the Falklands, the Gulf War, and the Balkans, Miles Hudson and John Stanier here trace the evolution of the often contentious and always dramatic role of the media in twentieth-century military campaigns.

Among the abundance of material available about death and dying, there is a very limited amount that deals directly with the needs of a school community when one of its members dies. In addition, a great need exists for schools to develop an organized plan for responding to the death of a student or staff member. A Student Dies, ASchool Mourns aims to fill this gap. The book not only examines and explains the grief reactions of students and school staff members and the factors that affect these reactions, it also provides a systematic guide for developing a death-related crisis response plan. This timely book is designed to be a systematic guide that incorporates a thorough analysis of grief in school, including normal and abnormal grief reactions, factors affecting these grief responses, and the differences in death beliefs and responses of students at different ages and developmental stages. It also acts as a map or step-by-step guide for establishing a death-related response plan. The liberal use of flow charts, time tables, and action plans, turns the often daunting task of creating a response plan into a relatively painless activity, stating what must be done, who should do it, and when. Extensive coverage is given to two issues in particular: youth suicide and violence/murder in the school. A Student Dies, ASchool Mourns will be a vital resource for school counselors, social workers, rehab psychologists, school administrators, teachers, clergy and anyone with an interest in death as it pertains to the school community. It will also be of use as a textbook for courses in death and dying, educational psychology, education, and educational administration.

From the arrival of the penny papers in the 1830s to the coming of radio news around 1930, the American newspaper celebrated its Golden Age and years of greatest influence on society. Born in response to a thirst for news in large eastern cities such as New York, Boston, and Philadelphia, the mood of the modern metropolitan papers eventually spread throughout the nation. Douglas tells the story of the great innovators of the American press--men like Bennett, Greeley, Bryant, Dana, Pulitzer, Hearst, and Scripps. He details the development of the bond between newspapers and the citizens of a democratic republic and how the newspapers molded themselves into a distinctly American character to become an intimate part of daily life.

Technological developments in papermaking, typesetting, and printing, as well as the growth of advertising, gradually made possible huge metropolitan dailies with circulations in the hundreds of thousands. Soon journalism became a way of life for a host of publishers, editors, and reporters, including the early presence of a significant number of women. Eventually, feature sections arose, including comics, sports, puzzles, cartoons, advice columns, and sections for women and children. The hometown daily gave way to larger and impersonal newspaper chains in the early twentieth century. This comprehensive and lively account tells the story of how newspapers have influenced public opinion and how public demand has in turn affected the presentation of the news.

This book provides detailed insights into how space and popular culture intersect across a broad spectrum of examples, including cinema, music, art, arcade games, cartoons, comics, and advertisements. This is a pertinent topic since the use of space themes differs in different cultural contexts, and these themes can be used to explore various aspects of the human condition and provide a context for social commentary on politically sensitive issues. With the use of space imagery evolving over the past sixty years of the space age, this is a topic ripe for in-depth exploration. The book also discusses the contrasting visions of space from the late 19th and early 20th centuries and the reality of today, and analyzes space vehicles and habitats in popular depictions of space from an engineering perspective, exploring how many of those ideas have actually been implemented in practice, and why or why not (a case of life imitating art and vice versa). As such, it covers a wide array of relevant and timely topics examining intersections between space and popular culture, and offering accounts of space and its effect on culture, language, and storytelling from the southern regions of the world.

The Handbook of Gender, Sex and Media offers original insights into the complex set of relations which exist between gender, sex, sexualities and the media, and in doing so, showcases new research at the forefront of media and communication practice and theory. * Brings together a collection of new, cutting-edge research exploring a number of different facets of the broad relationship between gender and media * Moves beyond associating gender with man/woman and instead considers the relationship between the construction of gender norms, biological sex and the mediation of sex and sexuality * Offers genuinely new insights into the complicated and complex set of relations which exist between gender, sex, sexualities and the media * Essay topics range from the continuing sexism of TV advertising to ways in which the internet is facilitating the (re)invention of our sexual selves.