Yu Hong
Colonial legacies and peripheral strategies: Social-spatial logic of China’s communications development since 1840
Abstract
This article describes and makes sense of why and how China’s communications was undeveloped from the late Qing Dynasty through the Civil War. The purpose is to bring into sharp focus the imprint of global capitalism and imperialism on China’s domestic social-spatial relations as well as the well-entrenched underdevelopment dynamics in communications. It argues that communications, shaped successively by historical configurations of relationships, domesticated spatially China’s peripheral position in the world capitalist system. This spatiality, expressing internal underdevelopment and external subordination, had never been effectively overhauled and even remained true of socialist modernity after the establishment of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), which then has informed and deformed communications development since the country’s market reform.
Andrew Kennis
Indexing state–corporate propaganda? Evaluating the indexing, propaganda and media dependence models on CNN and CNN en Español’s coverage of Fallujah, Iraq
Abstract
This study applies and evaluates the effectiveness of several critically inclined media performance models that have been termed by Robert Entman as the ‘hegemonic’ models: the propaganda and indexing models. The study proposes a synthesis of both these models, which serves as one of the main foundational theoretical components of the resulting media dependence model, an original and critical model of news analysis. An English-language news source and a Spanish-language news source belonging to the same company (Cable News Network (CNN) and CNN en Español) were analyzed in a sophisticated content analysis of coverage of major events in Fallujah, Iraq, in 2003 and 2004. The study concludes with the finding that ownership remains a powerful variable in news content, even when differing audiences and distinct public opinion leanings are in question.
Ylva Rodny-Gumede
Re-conceptualizing the analysis of media development and trajectories hereof in post-colonial societies
Abstract
Using South Africa as a case study, this article presents a new argument for an adaptation of the Comparative Media Systems Model by Hallin and Mancini. The article proposes that factors of race, class and gender and intersections hereof as well as nation-building be added to the model to better suit the analysis of media development in post-colonial societies. The article looks at media development in societies that have undergone social and political transitions since the late 1980s and early 1990s and highlights differences between transitional societies and young democracies in Eastern Europe and East Asia vis-a-vis transitions in post-colonial societies in the global South.
Saif Shahin
Mediated modernities: (Meta)narratives of modern nationhood in Indian and Pakistani media, 1947–2007
abstract
This article proposes a theoretical framework for understanding modernity as lying at the intersection of two dimensions: (1) the narrative of modernity as interpreted variously in particular nations and (2) the metanarrative of modernity as a universal goal that nations tend to share. It demonstrates that interpretations of modernity vary among nations, and even within nations over time. But modernity in former European colonies is nonetheless an ideological construct that seeks validation from the West. News media, this article shows, constitute a vital mechanism through which both the narratives and the metanarrative of modernity become collective. The media naturalize particular interpretations of modernity while also making ‘becoming modern’ a necessary objective of nationhood in non-Western societies. Empirical evidence comes from the comparative study of India’s Hindustan Times and Pakistan’s Dawn newspapers over a 60-year period (1947–2007) after the two nations gained freedom from British colonialism, using Derrida’s method of deconstruction
Sunny Yoon
Forbidden audience: Media reception and social change in North Korea
Global Media and Communication August 2015 11: 167-184,
Abstract
This study is an attempt to investigate the cultural aspects of North Korea by examining the everyday lives of the people, a topic that has been a blind spot in the body of previous research on North Korea. Although there are ample studies on North Korea due to its significance for world peace, they are limited to military and political aspects. To look into the micro-aspects of the social practice of ordinary people in North Korea, the method of post-modern ethnography is adopted. In-depth interviews and participatory observation of North Korean refugees in a special high school for them were conducted by focusing on their experiences of viewing South Korean media, which is absolutely prohibited in North Korea. Watching South Korean media is a fad among young North Koreans these days, although it is seen as delinquent behaviour by the authorities and the young people have to take the risk of being caught and sent to jail. The viewing patterns of media in people’s daily lives may be one of the few indicators of social change in such closed societies as North Korea. Due to persistent poverty and pervasive corruption, social minorities exist without social care and control. Young people as a social minority are free to create their own resistant culture in the social underside. With little hope for the future, the visual fantasy of South Korean media allows youth to dream of an alternative way of life. Watching South Korean TV is not simply a means of entertainment or escaping from reality, but also a means of signifying social change. This audience study of young North Koreans is meaningful in the sense that a marginal activity like watching TV in a social minority group could signify major social changes in the most stagnant society in the world.