"Images and visual artefacts shape international events and our understanding of them. Photographs, film and television influence how we view and approach phenomena as diverse as war, diplomacy, financial crises and election campaigns. Other visual fields, from art and cartoons to maps, monuments an
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d videogames, frame how politics is perceived and enacted. Drones, satellites and surveillance cameras watch us around the clock and deliver images that are then put to political use. Add to this that new technologies now allow for a rapid distribution of still and moving images around the world. Digital media platforms, such as Twitter, YouTube, Facebook and Instagram, play an important role across the political spectrum, from terrorist recruitment drives to social justice campaigns. This book offers the first comprehensive engagement with visual global politics. Written by leading experts in numerous scholarly disciplines and presented in accessible and engaging language, Visual Global Politics is a one-stop source for students, scholars and practitioners interested in understanding the crucial and persistent role of images in today’s world." (Publisher description)
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"This book highlights the importance of the news media as watchdogs, agenda setters and gatekeepers for the quality of democratic deliberation in the public sphere. At the same time, it theorizes that the capacity of journalists and media systems to fulfill these roles depends on the broader context
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determined by the profession, the market and the state. Media systems' performance often falls far short of the ideals, as succesive case studies from different world regions demonstrate. Finally, the book asks what policy interventions work effectively to close the gap between the democratic promise and perfomance of the news media as an institution. The final chapter, "Policy recommendations", concludes (page 406): "Interventions include reforms directed at strengthening the journalistic profession, notably institutional capacity building, through bodies such as press councils, press freedom advocacy NGOs, and organizations concerned with journalistic training and accreditation. Other important reforms seek to overcome market failures, including developing a regulatory framework for media systems to ensure pluralism of ownership and diversity of contents. Finally, policies also address the role of the state, including deregulation to shift state-run broadcasting to public service broadcasting, overseen by independent broadcasting regulatory bodies, and the protection of constitutional principles of freedom of the press, speech, and expression." (commbox)
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"In environments where poor infrastructure, minimal access to technology, and small-scale economies impede the creation or sustainability of mainstream independent media, and in countries where repressive governments limit the ability of professional journalists to operate freely, citizen journalist
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s are filling the gaps. Yet citizen journalists often have no formal journalism training nor - perhaps more critically - any training in the essential roles independent media play in ensuring accountable and transparent government. This report investigates how the U.S. government, international institutions, and private foundations are trying to teach this new cohort of semi-journalists to be media literate." (Executive summary)
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"Media literacy training is a tool the development sector can use to educate citizens and other stakeholders to better understand the role of information in a democracy and pressure governments to be accountable and to root out corruption. A media literate citizenry is essential to building and sust
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aining democracy." (Executive summary)
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"Reporting War explores the social responsibilities of the journalist during times of military conflict. News media treatments of international crises, especially the one underway in Iraq, are increasingly becoming the subject of public controversy, and discussion is urgently needed. Each of this bo
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ok's contributors challenges familiar assumptions about war reporting from a distinctive perspective. An array of pressing issues associated with conflicts over recent years are identified and critiqued, always with an eye to what they can tell us about improving journalism today. Special attention is devoted to recent changes in journalistic forms and practices, and the ways in which they are shaping the visual culture of war, and issues discussed, amongst many, include: "the influence of censorship and propaganda, 'us' and 'them' news narratives, access to sources, '24/7 rolling news' and the 'CNN effect', military jargon (such as 'friendly fire' and 'collateral damage'), 'embedded' and 'unilateral' reporters, tensions between objectivity and patriotism." (Publisher description)
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"From outbreaks of the flesh eating viruses Ebola and Strep A, to death camps in Bosnia and massacres in Rwanda, the media seem to careen from one trauma to another, in a breathless tour of poverty, disease and death. First we're horrified, but each time they turn up the pitch, show us one image mor
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e hideous than the next, it gets harder and harder to feel. Meet compassion fatigue--a modern syndrome, Susan Moeller argues, that results from formulaic media coverage, sensationalized language and overly Americanized metaphors. In her impassioned new book, Compassion Fatigue, Moeller warns that the American media threatens our ability to understand the world around us. Why do the media cover the world in the way that they do? Are they simply following the marketplace demand for tabloid-style international news? Or are they creating an audience that as seen too much--or too little--to care? Through a series of case studies of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse--disease, famine, death and war--Moeller investigates how newspapers, newsmagazines and television have covered international crises over the last two decades, identifying the ruts into which the media have fallen and revealing why. Throughout, we hear from industry insiders who tell of the chilling effect of the mega- media mergers, the tyranny of the bottom-line hunt for profits, and the decline of the American attention span as they struggle to both tell and sell a story. But Moeller is insistent that the media need not, and should not, be run like any other business. The media have a special responsibility to the public, and when they abdicate this responsibility and the public lapses into a compassion fatigue stupor, we become a public at great danger to ourselves." (Publisher description)
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