Media, Communication and the Struggle for Democratic Change PDF Download

Author: Katrin Voltmer
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030167488
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 305

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Book Description
This book investigates the role of media and communication in processes of democratization in different political and cultural contexts. Struggles for democratic change are periods of intense contest over the transformation of citizenship and the reconfiguration of political power. These democratization conflicts are played out within an increasingly complex media ecology where traditional modes of communication merge with new digital networks, thus bringing about multiple platforms for journalists and political actors to promote and contest competing definitions of reality. The volume draws on extensive case study research in South Africa, Kenya, Egypt and Serbia to highlight the ambivalent role of the media as force for democratic change, citizen empowerment, and accountability, as well as driver of polarization, radicalization and manipulation.

Author: Robert Hackett
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134159358
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 306

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Book Description
Remaking Media is a unique and timely reading of the contemporary struggle to democratize communication. With a focus on activism directed towards challenging and changing media content, practices and structures, the book explores the burning question: What is the political significance and potential of democratic media activism in the western world today? Taking an innovative approach, Robert Hackett and William Carroll pay attention to an emerging social movement that appears at the cutting edge of cultural and political contention, and ground their work in three scholarly traditions that provide interpretive resources for the study of democratic media activism: political theories of democracy critical media scholarship the sociology of social movements. Remaking Media examines the democratization of the media and the efforts to transform the machinery of representation. Such an examination will prove invaluable not only to media and communication studies students, but also to students of political science.

Author: Robert W. McChesney
Publisher: Seven Stories Press
ISBN: 1609802829
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 148

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Book Description
Our Media, Not Theirs! The Democratic Struggle Against Corporate Media examines how the current media system in the United States undermines democracy, and what we can do to change it. McChesney and Nichols begin by detailing how the media system has come to be dominated by a handful of transnational conglomerates that use their immense political and economic power to saturate the population with commercial messages. Further, the authors provide an analysis of the burgeoning media reform activities in the United States, and outline ways we can structurally change the media system through coalition work and movement-building: the tools we need in order to battle for a better media.

Author: Victor Pickard
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107038332
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 263

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Book Description
Drawing from extensive archival research, the book uncovers the American media system's historical roots and normative foundations. It charts the rise and fall of a forgotten media-reform movement to recover alternatives and paths not taken.

Author: Monroe E. Price
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134544359
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 385

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Book Description
Using examples of media from a range of countries in Latin America, Europe, Asia and Africa including Uruguay, Poland, China, Indonesia, Jordan and Uganda, Media Reform considers the social and cultural implications of a free and independent media.

Author: Aeron Davis
Publisher: SAGE
ISBN: 1529730147
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 205

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Book Description
When we are told so regularly that we live in a ‘post truth’ age and are surrounded by ‘fake news’, it can be tempting to think of politics as primarily mediated. Discussion and analysis of public affairs is preoccupied with the power and reach of platforms or the passion and rage of social media exchanges. As important as these issues may be, a focus on the communicative risks downgrading the political. Media, Democracy and Social Change puts politics back into political communications. It shows how within a digital media ecology, the wider context of neoliberal capitalism remains essential for understanding what political communications is, and can hope to be. Tackling broad themes of structural inequality, technological change, political realignment and social transformation, the book explores political communications as it relates to debates around the state, infrastructures, elites, populism, political parties, activism, the legacies of colonialism, and more. It is both an expert introduction to the field of political communications, and a critical intervention to help re-imagine what a democratic politics might mean in a digital age. It will be essential reading for students, researchers and activists. Aeron Davis, Natalie Fenton, Des Freedman and Gholam Khiabany all work at the Department of Media and Communication at Goldsmiths, University of London, where they teach together on the MA in Political Communications.

Author: Robert D. McChesney
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 1583671064
Category : Current Events
Languages : en
Pages : 368

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Book Description
The symptoms of the crisis of the U.S. media are well-known—a decline in hard news, the growth of info-tainment and advertorials, staff cuts and concentration of ownership, increasing conformity of viewpoint and suppression of genuine debate. McChesney's new book, The Problem of the Media, gets to the roots of this crisis, explains it, and points a way forward for the growing media reform movement. Moving consistently from critique to action, the book explores the political economy of the media, illuminating its major flashpoints and controversies by locating them in the political economy of U.S. capitalism. It deals with issues such as the declining quality of journalism, the question of bias, the weakness of the public broadcasting sector, and the limits and possibilities of antitrust legislation in regulating the media. It points out the ways in which the existing media system has become a threat to democracy, and shows how it could be made to serve the interests of the majority. McChesney's Rich Media, Poor Democracy was hailed as a pioneering analysis of the way in which media had come to serve the interests of corporate profit rather than public enlightenment and debate. Bill Moyers commented, "If Thomas Paine were around, he would have written this book." The Problem of the Media is certain to be a landmark in media studies, a vital resource for media activism, and essential reading for concerned scholars and citizens everywhere.

Author: Katrin Voltmer
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 0745656544
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 283

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Book Description
The last quarter of a century has seen an unprecedented wave of democratization around the globe. In these transitions from authoritarian rule to a more democratic order, the media have played a key role both by facilitating, but frequently also inhibiting, democratic practices to take root. This book provides an accessible and systematic introduction to the media in transitional democracies. It analyses the problems that occur when transforming the media into independent institutions that are able to inform citizens and hold governments to account. The book covers the following topics: normative conceptions of media and democracy; the role of the past in the transition process; the internet as a new space for democratic change; the persistence of political interference in emerging democracies; the interlocking power of media markets and political ownership; the challenges to journalistic professionalism in post-authoritarian contexts; the role of the media in divided societies; The book takes a global view by exploring the interplay of political and media transitions in different pathways of democratization that have taken place in Eastern Europe, Latin America, Africa and Asia. It will be of interest to advanced students and scholars who want a better understanding of the media outside established Western democracies. The book will also be of great value to policymakers and activists who are involved in strengthening the media in transitional democracies.

Author: F. Esser
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137275847
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 383

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Book Description
The first book-long analysis of the 'mediatization of politics', this volume aims to understand the transformations of the relationship between media and politics in recent decades, and explores how growing media autonomy, journalistic framing, media populism and new media technologies affect democratic processes.

Author: Bruce A. Williams
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9781107010314
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 376

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Book Description
The new media environment has challenged the role of professional journalists as the primary source of politically relevant information. After Broadcast News puts this challenge into historical context, arguing that it is the latest of several critical moments, driven by economic, political, cultural, and technological changes, in which the relationship among citizens, political elites, and the media has been contested. Out of these past moments, distinct "media regimes" eventually emerged, each with its own seemingly natural rules and norms, and each the result of political struggle with clear winners and losers. The media regime in place for the latter half of the twentieth century has been dismantled, but a new regime has yet to emerge. Assuring this regime is a democratic one requires serious consideration of what was most beneficial and most problematic about past regimes and what is potentially most beneficial and most problematic about today's new information environment.