Comparing Media Systems Beyond the Western World offers a broad exploration of the conceptual foundations for comparative analysis of media and politics globally. It takes as its point of departure ...the widely used framework of Hallin and Mancini's Comparing Media Systems, exploring how the concepts and methods of their analysis do and do not prove useful when applied beyond the original focus of their 'most similar systems' design and the West European and North American cases it encompassed. It is intended both to use a wider range of cases to interrogate and clarify the conceptual framework of Comparing Media Systems and to propose new models, concepts and approaches that will be useful for dealing with non-Western media systems and with processes of political transition. Comparing Media Systems Beyond the Western World covers, among other cases, Brazil, China, Israel, Lebanon, Lithuania, Poland, Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Africa and Thailand.
Media Localism Ali, Christopher
02/2017, Volume:
117
eBook
We live in a boosterish era that exhorts us to play local and buy local. But what does it mean to support local media? How should we define local media in the first place? Christopher Ali delves into ...our ideas about localism and their far-reaching repercussions for the discourse of federal media policy and regulation. His critique focuses on the new interest in localism among regulators in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada. As he shows, the many different and often contradictory meanings of localism complicate efforts to study local voices. At the same time, market factors and regulators' unwillingness to critically examine local media blunt challenges to the status quo. Ali argues that reconciling the places where we live with the spaces we inhabit will point regulators toward effective policies that strengthens local media. That new approach will again elevate local media to its rightful place as a vital part of the public good.
Building on a survey of media institutions in eighteen West European and North American democracies, Hallin and Mancini identify the principal dimensions of variation in media systems and the ...political variables which have shaped their evolution. They go on to identify three major models of media system development (the Polarized Pluralist, Democratic Corporatist and Liberal models) to explain why the media have played a different role in politics in each of these systems, and to explore the forces of change that are currently transforming them. It provides a key theoretical statement about the relation between media and political systems, a key statement about the methodology of comparative analysis in political communication and a clear overview of the variety of media institutions that have developed in the West, understood within their political and historical context.
The Media Welfare State: Nordic Media in the Digital Era comprehensively addresses the central dynamics of the digitalization of the media industry in the Nordic countries—Sweden, Norway, Denmark, ...Finland, and Iceland—and the ways media organizations there are transforming to address the new digital environment. Taking a comparative approach, the authors provide an overview of media institutions, content, use, and policy throughout the region, focusing on the impact of information and communication technology/internet and digitalization on the Nordic media sector. Illustrating the shifting media landscape the authors draw on a wide range of cases, including developments in the press, television, the public service media institutions, and telecommunication.
"Since the mid-2000s, public opinion and debate in China have become increasingly common and consequential, despite the ongoing censorship of speech and regulation of civil society. How did this ...happen? This book shows how the Chinese state drew on law, the media, and the Internet to further an authoritarian project of modernization, but in so doing, inadvertently created a nationwide public sphere in China--one the state must now endeavor to control. The author examines the influence this unruly sphere has had on Chinese politics and the ways that the state has responded. Using interviews, newspaper articles, online texts, official documents, and national surveys, the author shows that the development of the public sphere in China has provided an unprecedented forum for citizens to influence the public agenda, demand accountability from the government, and organize around the concepts of law and rights. The author demonstrates how citizens came to understand themselves as legal subjects, how legal and media professionals began to collaborate in unexpected ways, and how existing conditions of political and economic fragmentation created unintended opportunities for political critique, particularly with the rise of the Internet. The emergence of this public sphere--and its uncertain future--is a pressing issue with important implications for the political prospects of the Chinese people. Investigating how individuals learn to use public discourse to influence politics, this book offers new possibilities for thinking about the transformation of state-society relations."--.
Countries emerging from violent conflict face difficult challenges about what the role of media should be in political transitions, particularly when attempting to build a new state and balance a ...difficult legacy. Media, Conflict, and the State in Africa discusses how ideas, institutions and interests have shaped media systems in some of Africa's most complex state and nation-building projects. This timely book comes at a turbulent moment in global politics as waves of populist protests gain traction, and concerns continue to grow about fake news, social media echo chambers, and the increasing role of both traditional and new media in waging wars or influencing elections. Focusing on comparative cases from a historical perspective and the choices and ideas that informed the approaches of some of Africa's leaders, including guerrilla commanders Yoweri Museveni of Uganda and Meles Zenawi of Ethiopia, Nicole Stremlau offers a unique political insight into the development of contemporary media systems in Africa.
Access to a broad range of different political views and cultural expressions is often regarded as a self-evident value in both theoretical and political debates on media and democracy. Pluralism is ...commonly accepted as a guiding principle of media policy in addressing media concentration, the role of public service media, or more recently such questions as how to respond to search engines, social networking sites, and citizen media. However, opinions on the meaning and nature of media pluralism as a concept vary widely, and definitions of it can easily be adjusted to suit different political purposes. Rethinking Media Pluralism contends that the notions of media pluralism and diversity have been reduced to empty catchphrases or conflated with consumer choice and market competition. In this narrow logic, key questions about social and political values, democracy, and citizenship are left unexamined. In this provocative new book, Kari Karppinen argues that media pluralism needs to be rescued from its depoliticized uses and reimagined more broadly as a normative value that refers to the distribution of communicative power in the public sphere. Instead of something that could simply be measured through the number of media outlets available, media pluralism should be understood in terms of its ability to challenge inequalities and create a more democratic public sphere.
Democracy requires a free press. However, most people rarely reflect on the requisite infrastructures and policies that maintain a healthy press system. Today, as we look to journalism to protect us ...against misinformation and authoritarianism, the press is in a structural crisis. Journalism's institutional support is collapsing, leaving entire regions and issues uncovered at a time when we desperately need reliable information and robust reporting. The crisis is disproportionately harming specific groups and regions, especially communities of color, rural areas, and lower socio-economic neighborhoods. This article addresses key policy issues that are central to the future of journalism, including those connected to media ownership, broadband policy, and the rise of new digital monopolies such as Facebook. It concludes with a call for designing a new public media system in the United States.
The analysis of media systems has become a cornerstone in the field of comparative communication research. Ten years after its publication, we revisit the landmark study in the field, Hallin and ...Mancini's “Comparing Media Systems”, and operationalize its framework for standardized measurement. The study at hand is, to the best of our knowledge, the first to comprehensively validate the original dimensions and models using aggregated data from the same sample of Western countries. Three out of four dimensions of media systems show relatively high levels of internal consistency, but “role of the state” should be disaggregated into 3 subdimensions. A cluster analysis reveals 4 empirical types of media systems that differentiate and extend the original typology.
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