Media Policies Revisited

Evangelia Psychogiopoulou brings together distinguished scholars across a range of academic disciplines to investigate the media's freedom and independence, and the media policy processes, institutional spaces, regulatory practices and instruments that can support the development of free and independent media in Europe.

Interdisciplinary essays on the relationship between practice and theory in new media. Arguing that "first encounters" have already applied traditional theoretical and conceptual frameworks to digital media, the contributors to this book call for "second encounters," or a revisiting. Digital media are not only objects of analysis but also instruments for the development of innovative perspectives on both media and culture. Drawing on insights from literary theory, semiotics, philosophy, aesthetics, ethics, media studies, sociology, and education, the contributors construct new positions from which to observe digital media in fresh and meaningful ways. Throughout they explore to what extent interpretation of and experimentation with digital media can inform theory. It also asks how our understanding of digital media can contribute to our understanding of social and cultural change. The book is organized in four sections: Education and Interdisciplinarity, Design and Aesthetics, Rhetoric and Interpretation, and Social Theory and Ethics. The topics include the effects on reading of the multimodal and multisensory aspects of the digital environment, the impact of practice on the medium of theory, how digital media are dissolving the boundaries between leisure and work, and the impact of cyberspace on established ethical principles.

Conventional wisdom views globalization as a process that heralds the diminishing role or even 'death' of the state and the rise of transnational media and transnational consumption. Global Media and National Policies questions those assumptions and shows not only that the nation-state never left but that it is still a force to be reckoned with. With contributions that look at global developments and developments in specific parts of the world, it demonstrates how nation-states have adapted to globalization and how they still retain key policy instruments to achieve many of their policy objectives. This book argues that the phenomenon of media globalization has been overstated, and that national governments remain key players in shaping the media environment, with media corporations responding to the legal and policy frameworks they deal with at a national level.

Leading scholars investigate media policies in Europe, inquiring into the regulatory practices, policy tools and institutional features of media policy-making in 14 countries. The book offers a fresh assessment of the ways European media policies are formulated and identifies the factors that exert an influence throughout the process.

Relevant to both scientists and policy makers, this authoritative text provides alcohol policy from different perspectives, covering both science/research/treatment and prevention practice and links these areas.

This volume provides new approaches to the concept of media logics – developed by Altheide and Snow – by drawing on theoretical and empirical perspectives from international scientists working in the field of communications, media, political science, and sociology. In an increasingly digitized and globalized world, powerful media structures and technologies influence our daily lives in many respects. It is not only mass media but ‘poly media channels’ that become more and more contextualized in everyday lives. Therefore, it is necessary to revisit the theory of media logics, which focuses on the strong intercorrelation of media technologies, media institutions and media power. Media Logic(s) Revisited attends to this by critically reflecting on the idea of media logic, a much needed input in light of current developments and strong cultural embedding of media in various social contexts.

Addresses a critical analysis of major media policies in the European Union and Council of Europe at the period of profound changes affecting both media environments and use, as well as the logic of media policy-making and reconfiguration of traditional regulatory models. The analytical problem-related approach seems to better reflect a media policy process as an interrelated part of European integration, formation of European citizenship, and exercise of communication rights within the European communicative space. The question of normative expectations is to be compared in this case with media policy rationales, mechanisms of implementation (transposing rules from EU to national levels), and outcomes.

This book analyses the relationship between the media and politics in new democracies in Europe and other parts of the world. It does so from both theoretical and empirical angles. How is power being mediated in new democracies? Can media function independently in the unstable and polarised political environment experienced after the fall of autocracy? Do major shifts in economic and ownership structures help or hinder the quality of the media? How much can new media laws alter old journalistic habits and political cultures? And how do new technologies impact the media and democracy? The book examines these questions, drawing on a vast set of data assembled by a large international project. Media and Politics in New Democracies focuses chiefly on new democracies in Central and Eastern Europe, but chapters analysing new democracies in Latin America, Africa, and Southeast Asia are also included. These new democracies represent a variety of what sociologists call 'glocalism': homogenisation and heterogenisation coexist, revealing hybrid models and multiple modernities. It is local culture that assigns meaning to global and regional influences. 'Ideal' liberal models and best practices are being promoted and aspired to, but these models and practices are often being adopted in opaque ways generating results opposite to those intended. The book finds many new democracies to be fragile if not deficient, and tries to show what is really going on in these countries, how they compare to each other, and what they can learn from each other.

First published in 1988, Herman and Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent remains the go-to book for those interested in understanding why the mainstream media act as vehicles for power-elite propaganda. The analytical heart of Manufacturing Consent lies in what it calls ‘The Propaganda Model.’ According to this model, there are five filters which all newsworthy stories have to pass through before reaching the public sphere. However, a lot has changed in the subsequent thirty-something years. Consequently, a key question that needs to be addressed is whether Manufacturing Consent is still fit for purpose. The conceit underpinning Understanding Media Propaganda in the 21st Century: Manufacturing Consent Revisited and Revised is that the election of Trump in 2016 constitutes the proverbial ‘year zero’ for fourth estate journalism. As a result of the ‘journalistic’ cultural revolution that ensued, it argues that the Propaganda Model needs to be overhauled if it is to retain its epistemological bona fides. To this end, this book is a radical—in the true critical sense of the word—intervention into the propaganda/fake news debate. For students (in the broadest sense of the term) of media studies, journalism, communication studies and sociology, it provides both a compelling critique of Herman and Chomsky’s Propaganda Model, while at the same time proffering a new explanatory model to understand why MSM output typically replicates the ‘stenographer for power’ playbook.