"The Anthropology of News and Journalism is the first book to explore the role of news and journalism in contemporary culture from an anthropological perspective—as a form of cultural meaning-making in its creation, content, and dissemination. Anthropology's global, comparative perspective and eth
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nographic methods provide powerful insights for analyzing case studies from around the world. Essays by leading scholars explore communities of professional and nonprofessional journalists. They describe news-making processes ranging from the local to the global digital environment, as well as how news is disseminated and received in a variety of cultural settings." (Publisher description)
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"The Best Practice Guide gives a general overview of new media in Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, the Palestinian Territories and Syria. It analyses new media experiences acquired in conflict and post conflict areas, presenting best practice examples and recommendations developed by the workshop participants
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on how to use new media as a tool to facilitate peace and dialogue in the region. The Pedagogical Toolkit contains a series of articles by experts on new media. It formed the basis of the training sessions at the “Arab New Media for Peace and Dialogue Workshop” and provides useful, practical insight into the field of new media within the region and in other contexts." (Preface)
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"This pilot study surveyed 2,744 university and high school students in Jordan, Lebanon, and the United Arab Emirates. It asked about their media consumption and production habits, and about their attitudes towards certain media. Among the significant findings, the survey found the participants high
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ly adept at using new media. They spent considerable time consuming new and traditional media, but much less time producing media content. For instance, the vast majority of participants indicated that they had never blogged. In addition, those who did produce media content, through blogging or otherwise, tended to do it in a language other than their native language. Indeed, with the exception of news, the majority of surveyed youth consumed and produced media in English, rather than Arabic. In addition, the participants used media predominantly for entertainment, for connecting with others, and for work or schoolwork, but less often for current affairs, for expressing their opinions, or for political activism." (Summary of findings, page 9)
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"Iraqi journalists operate in one of the deadliest newsgathering environments in the world. This study, based on a survey of 404 Iraqi journalists, examines the variables influencing journalists' perceptions of physical danger in covering news after the fall of Saddam Hussein. Gatekeeping theory pro
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vides a prism to identify and explicate different levels of influence. News organization size, financial support (state, partisan, or private), gender, journalism experience, journalists' perception of their impact on political affairs, journalists' outlook, and size of cities in which journalists operate are significant variables shaping journalists' perception of physical danger." (Abstract)
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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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"La cultura-comunicación, más que promover la integración de países, debe buscar la integración de ciudadanos, trabajando los denominadores comunes definidos en las Declaraciones Universales de los Derechos Humanos, Pueblos Indígenas y Medio Ambiente. Es éste el capítulo más deficitario de
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nuestra cooperación y el que exige mayores esfuerzos. Cultura y comunicación deben servir para promover el diálogo de los ciudadanos de ambas orillas potenciando su encuentro e intercambiando conocimientos, inquietudes, ideas, ambiciones y folklores; en suma, tejiendo complicidades que superen recelos históricos más allá de querellas políticas, a veces de exclusiva propiedad de los gobiernos. Para ello es necesario establecer un plan en la UE que atienda y coordine líneas multilaterales y bilaterales. Una política común en cultura-comunicación exige financiación comunitaria y coordinación de las políticas bilaterales para generar sinergias, ampliando cualitativa y cuantitativamente las propuestas de EUROMED. Ésta sería la primera propuesta, abrir una línea de financiación en cooperación específica desde la UE para Marruecos, Argelia y Túnez en cultura-comunicación partiendo de la consideración de que muchas de estas medidas deben tener una consecuencia en el conjunto de los seis países y la UE. El cambio necesario debe buscar beneficiar a la ciudadanía más que a los Estados y al capital." (Página 54-55)
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"Die Bedeutung von Medien für den Krieg und das Gendering des Militärischen sind zwei seit langem kontrovers diskutierte Themen in den Medien-, Kultur- und Sozialwissenschaften. Weisen etablierte stereotype Bilder von friedfertigen Frauen und kriegerischen Männern in gegenwärtigen medialen Texte
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n Brüche und Widersprüche auf oder werden sie im öffentlichen Diskurs bekräftigt? Wie tragen populäre Medienangebote in verschiedenen kulturellen Kontexten zur Legitimation oder Infragestellung von militärischen Institutionen und Gewaltakteuren bei? Welche Rollen nehmen Journalistinnen im Spannungsfeld von Kriegsberichterstattung, Konfliktbearbeitung und emanzipatorischen Vorstellungen ein? Der Band versammelt Beiträge von WissenschaftlerInnen unterschiedlicher sozial- und geisteswissenschaftlicher Disziplinen, die mediale Repräsentationen, Bilderpolitiken, Narrationen und Artikulationen von Gender in Krieg und Militär in synchroner wie diachroner Perspektive analysieren." (Verlagsbeschreibung)
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"Silence lies between forgetting and remembering. This book explores the ways in which different societies have constructed silences to enable men and women to survive and make sense of the catastrophic consequences of armed conflict. Using a range of disciplinary approaches, it examines the silence
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s that have followed violence in twentieth-century Europe, the Middle East and Africa. These essays show that silence is a powerful language of remembrance and commemoration and a cultural practice with its own rules. This broad-ranging book discloses the universality of silence in the ways we think about war through examples ranging from the Spanish Civil War and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to the Armenian Genocide and South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Bringing together scholarship on varied practices in different cultures, this book breaks new ground in the vast literature on memory, and opens up new avenues of reflection and research on the lingering aftermath of war." (Publisher description)
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"The political landscape of individual countries, including their level of internal legitimacy and perceived vulnerability to political extremists, influences the level of media freedom enjoyed in that country at any given moment. In many MENA countries, media freedom is a privilege bestowed by mona
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rchs and dictators, not an immutable right enshrined in law, despite the existence of press freedom clauses in some constitutions. Therefore, Arab broadcast channels can be “unmade” as easily as they were made. The absence of media company consolidation in the region suggests that owners want to broadcast their own choice of content, including news content, which in turn suggests that media in the region are not viewed as a business venture but as a political tool. Television viewers in the MENA region are generally aware of broadcast ownership, particularly of the bigger stations, and expect a political slant to the news. The general expectation is that no one is broadcasting just for the sake of informing the public, so it is assumed that all the owners have agendas. Private television, whether terrestrial or satellite, is much more threatening to ruling elites than private newspapers, which are easier to censor in advance and to physically disrupt. Thus, governments have been very careful to vet owners prior to granting licenses to private television stations." (Executive summary, page 5)
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"Leading researchers from different regions of Europe and the United States address five major interrelated themes: 1) how ideological and normative constructs gave way to empirical systematic comparative work in media research; 2) the role of foreign media groups in post-communist regions and the e
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ffects of ownership in terms of impacts on media freedom; 3) the various dimensions of the relationship between mass media and political systems in a comparative perspective; 4) professionalization of journalism in different political cultures—autonomy of journalists, professional norms and practices, political instrumentalization and the commercialization of the media; 5) the role of state intervention in media systems." (Publisher description)
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"Since the 1990s journalism education programs have expanded exponentially around the world, but media freedom has not. Globally comparative, this edited volume assesses journalism education and the challenging environment in which it is delivered in countries with a partly free or not free status a
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ccording to global press freedom. The countries covered include China, Singapore, Cambodia, Palestine, Oman, Egypt, Kenya, Tanzania, Brazil, Russia, Romania, and Croatia. Contributors demonstrate through careful analysis that wealthy nations are able to set the terms of their journalism education while less affluent countries are more open to the influence of foreign NGOs. Although this book evidences the disconnection between what is taught and what can be practiced, it also illustrates the degree to which journalism education can be an agent of change." (Publisher description)
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"Formal journalism ethics, as laid out in codes of ethics by journalism associations and the like, is part of a wider debate on media ethics that has been triggered in the Middle East due to the advent of global media in the region. This study compares journalism codes from Europe and the Islamic wo
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rld in order to revisit the widespread academic assumption of a deep divide between Western and Oriental philosophies of journalism that has played a role in many debates on political communication in the area. The analysis shows that there is a broad intercultural consensus that standards of truth and objectivity should be central values of journalism. Norms protecting the private sphere are, in fact, more pronounced in countries of the Near and Middle East, North Africa, and in the majority of Muslim states in Asia than is generally the case in Europe, although the weighing of privacy protection against the public's right to information is today a component of most journalistic codes of behavior in Islamic countries. Obvious differences between the West and many Islamic countries are to be found in the status accorded to freedom of expression. Although ideas of freedom have entered formal media ethics in the Middle East and the Islamic world, only a minority of documents limit the interference into freedom to cases where other fundamental rights (e.g., privacy) are touched, whereas the majority would have journalists accept political, national, religious, or cultural boundaries to their work. Despite existing differences between Western and Middle Eastern/Islamic journalism ethics and in contrast to the overall neoconservative (Islamist) trends in societal norms, formal journalism ethics has been a sphere of growing universalization throughout the last decades." (Abstract)
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"This study focuses on the trepidations, concerns and pitfalls audience researchers face when carrying out fieldwork studies in the Arab world. Based on extrapolations and detailed observations from field research projects, combining surveys, focus groups and interviews, this article has outlined fi
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ve main challenges in the process of audience research in the region: (1) recruitment strategies, (2) time issues, (3) group dynamics, (4) gender issues in interviews and (5) the significance of culture. In dealing with regional media audiences, researchers confront challenges ranging from hostile attitudes, suspicions of researchers' motives and even outright distrust to overzealous collaboration. Beyond these political/cultural factors, socio-economic considerations, such as literacy rates, not only affect respondents' self-reports and response rates, but may fundamentally skew the recruitment process. While some of these challenges are rooted in the practice of audience research irrespective of cultural setting, sociocultural and political realities create challenges specific to the region." (Abstract)
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