Media

The detrimental environmental impact of the media

By Richard Maxwell and Toby Miller
We’ve seen Earth Day pictures of our planet that highlight its symmetry, its chaos, and its beauty. We’ve learnt about the pollution and environmental decay that threaten us all. Media coverage of the environment over the last five decades has shown how natural beauty and human and animal health have been affected by mining and manufacturing, and the increasing danger of climate change. In this context, the media have generally been regarded as sources of information.

Oxford Bibliographies in Cinema and Media Studies

Developed cooperatively with scholars and librarians worldwide, Oxford Bibliographies offers students and researchers authoritative guides to the key literature in a wide variety of fields. Watch as Editor in Chief of Oxford Bibliographies in Cinema and Media Studies, Krin Gabbard, a professor at Stony Brook University, discusses his role in the project and how Oxford Bibliographies is revolutionizing the way students do research online.

How to make a transmedia documentary: three takeaways

By Patricia Aufderheide
What happens to documentary when media goes interactive? It’s not always a welcome question. Documentarians aren’t necessarily thrilled at the idea of someone poking at their precious work on a smartphone, rather than settling into a seat at a theater or on a couch. But they’re going to have to get used to it. Media users want to do more than just watch these days.

‘The Unholy Mrs Knight’ and the BBC

By Callum Brown
In 1955 Margaret Knight became the most hated woman in Britain. She was vilified and demonised in virtually every British newspaper, and thousands of letters attacking her were sent by ordinary Britons to the BBC, to the papers and to her personally. Parents wrote fearing for the safety of their children, bishops and priests criticised her impudence, whilst well-known authors like Dorothy L Sayers castigated her ignorance. Hounded by journalists and pursued by photographers, the smiling image of Mrs Knight in her ‘Sunday-best hat’ and coat appeared in most newspapers. She was the nation’s number one ‘folk devil’ of 1955.

Why is there a ban on advertising activity in and around the Olympic Games?

By Phillip Johnson
This summer the Olympics is coming to town. It will be a sporting spectacular – the best sportsmen and women on Earth competing for the ultimate sporting accolade. Yet the Olympics is no longer simply a festival of sport. National governments and brand owners alike have long wanted to be associated with excellence and sporting excellence in particular. The Olympic Games represents the pinnacle of that excellence and so makes it the most desirable sporting “property” in the World.

Dangerous ignorance: The hysteria of Kony 2012

By Adam Branch
From Kampala, the Kony 2012 hysteria was easy to miss. I’m not on Facebook or Twitter. I don’t watch YouTube and the Ugandan papers didn’t pick up the story for several days. But what I could not avoid were the hundreds of emails from friends, colleagues, and students in the US about the video by Invisible Children and the massive online response to it.

From Murdoch to Trollope: a familiar intrigue

By John Bowen
The Murdoch ‘phone-hacking’ affair, being investigated today by a House of Commons select committee, seems the most contemporary of stories, chock-full of hacked mobile phones, high-tech surveillance equipment and secret video-recordings. But although the technology might have changed, it is a world that would have been only too familiar to nineteenth-century author Anthony Trollope. He was as fascinated as we are by what lies behind the public face of politics: the personal passions, rivalries and love affairs, the ins and outs of office, the spectacular rises and equally rapid falls.

Refuting Sunstein

Ideological Segregation in Various Media Channels

Democracy is most effective when citizens have accurate beliefs (Downs 1957; Becker 1958). To form such beliefs, individuals must encounter information that will sometimes contradict their preexisting views. Guaranteeing exposure to information from diverse viewpoints has been a central goal of media policy in the United States and around the world (Gentzkow and Shapiro 2008). New technologies such as the Internet could either increase or decrease the likelihood that consumers are exposed to diverse news and opinion.

Factoids & impressions from breast cancer awareness ads

By Gayle Sulik
One might assume that anything involving breast cancer awareness would be based on the best available evidence. Unfortunately, this assumption would be wrong. I’ve evaluated hundreds of campaigns, advertisements, websites, educational brochures, and other sundry materials related to breast cancer awareness only to find information that is inaccurate, incomplete, irrelevant, or out of context. We could spend the whole year analyzing them. For now, consider a print advertisement for mammograms by CENTRA Mammography Services.

A fetching snowclone: Stop trying to make X happen

By Mark Peters
A few weeks ago, I spotted this tweet by Braden Graeber: “Dear white guys, stop trying to make camouflage cargo shorts happen.”
Minutes later—in a moment of true synchronicity—I saw a white dude in camouflage cargo pants. Whoa.
As a fashion-challenged, oft-confused doofus, I appreciated the heads-up to two facts: 1) those shorts are an atrocity, and 2) this phrase is a snowclone that’s invaluable in mocking anything fake or contrived that annoys or pains us.

What makes an image an icon?

Image, branding, and logos are obsessions of our age. Iconic images dominate the media. In his new book, Christ to Coke, art historian Professor Martin Kemp examines eleven mega-famous examples of icons, including the American flag, the image of Christ’s face, the double helix of DNA, and the heart.

Political Analysis and social media: A case study for journals

By R. Michael Alvarez

After my co-editor, Jonathan N. Katz, and I took over editorship of Political Analysis in January 2010, one of our primary goals was to extend the readership and intellectual reach of our journal. We wished to grow our readership internationally, and to also deepen our reach outside of political science, into other social sciences.

The English riots and tough sentencing

By Christine Piper
The riots which occurred in London and several other major cities early in August have provoked a debate, still on-going, around a range of crucial sentencing issues. Two developments have most interested me. First has been the tension between the government and the judiciary and, second, the apparent mark-up because the offending took place in the context of a riot.

Ethiopia and the BBC: The politics of development assistance

By Peter Gill
In the course of 17 minutes, Newsnight managed to review six years’ worth of all that had gone wrong in Ethiopia, from post-election violence in 2005, to the intensified anti-insurgency operations in Somali Region after 2007, to more recent opposition complaints that their supporters were being deprived of international development assistance. To emphasise the British aid connection, the film concluded: ‘The purpose of development aid is to help Ethiopia on to its feet, to establish democracy, justice and the rule of law. The evidence we’ve gathered suggests it is failing.’

A Facebook roundtable of the Left

Who said academics don’t know how to use social media? Corey Robin, author of The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin, has certainly proved them wrong. After reading this article by Glenn Greenwald, Robin turned to Facebook.

The gods are on Twitter

By Mark Peters

I’ve been seeing gods everywhere lately. Not gods like Thor, Ganesha, and God. My cinnamon rolls have been deity-free, if not gluten-free. It’s lexical gods I can’t seem to escape. Everywhere I look someone is thanking, cursing, or begging some specific group of supreme beings. For example, I’ve recently spotted the following religious invocations: • […]