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- Volume 1, Issue 1, 2005
International Journal of Media & Cultural Politics - Volume 1, Issue 1, 2005
Volume 1, Issue 1, 2005
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Why ‘media’, ‘culture’ and ‘politics’ – and why now?
Authors: Katharine Sarikakis, Karen Ross and Neil BlainMCP’s first edition was being put together for publication in the last week of the American presidential election of 2004, during which (in the world’s ‘greatest democracy’) political sound-bite length had dropped to a reported seven seconds, much of the US electorate was about to base its decision on the ‘fact’ that Iraq had been involved in the destruction of the Twin Towers in 2001, and both US presidential candidates had attracted unparalleled quantities of campaign funds (poured almost entirely into the media battle for supremacy) from the immensely powerful interest groups which bankroll American presidents and many other political representatives, and whose dominance of policy has required to be obscured within media-borne mythic constructions of ‘evil empires’ and ‘global terrorism’.
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Call for submission of Commentaries
More LessThe Commentaries within the International Journal of Media and Cultural Politics will be published to provoke thought and debate about the politics of media and cultural issues within and across nations. We also welcome responses to previously published commentaries and articles in order to engage in a dialogue. This first issue kicks off with a collection of essays by scholars from around the world laying out their thinking about a range of issues related to media and cultural politics. In subsequent issues, pieces will be published in a specific Commentaries section and will pick up on many of these themes, as well as other emerging concerns.
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The architecture of post-industrialism: empire at Ground Zero
More LessAt the end of World War II the United States was poised for empire. But in order to extend its imperial hegemony the United States would need to deepen it by solidifying the empire at home. Indeed, success in the war at home is a precondition for success abroad.
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‘War talk’ engendering terror: race, gender and representation in Canadian print media
More LessDiscourses of war centre on the objectification of the enemy and utilize Manichean oppositions to promote an explanation of events which make ‘common sense’ (Cooke and Woollacott 1993). In the aftermath of the events of September 11, 2001, with the collapse of the World Trade Center towers in New York City, those discourses assumed a heightened Orientalist mantle, coloured by the geographic, religious and cultural nature of the perceived enemy. In this short essay, I examine how the news media, and in particular, print media, covered the events of September 11, 2001.1 My focus is on the Canadian print media - The Gazette, a Montreal English daily, and The Globe and Mail, one of Canada’s two national papers. Both these papers play a pivotal role in shaping the ‘imagined community’ (Anderson 1983) that is Quebec and Canada, but more importantly, both are highly influential in shaping policy towards immigrants and cultural minority groups in the provincial and national landscape (Fleras and Kunz 2001). The analysis that follows is undoubtedly influenced by my standpoint (Durham 1998), as a woman, a Canadian of immigrant origins and as Muslim - a religious affiliation rendered salient because of its shared character with that of the ‘enemy’. In the sections that follow, I pay particular attention to the issue of gender - how it underpins, informs and shapes the discourses of war and how in so doing, it engenders terror such that the latter assumes a specific type of fear with differential repercussions for women and men.
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The death of radical thought: from dispassionate to disinterested professionalism in intellectual labour
By Martyn LeeMuch has been written on the role that the intellectual classes play as ‘workers’ within the reproduction of advanced capitalist systems of production. This article traces some of the salient developments of this group of workers during the twentieth century focusing on their critical, although sometimes problematic, relation to capital. Using the seminal ideas of Aglietta, Lipietz and others associated with the French ‘regulation school’ I propose the idea that intellectual workers function as key agents within the mode of capitalist regulation, most significantly as ‘cultural regulators’. The article goes on to suggest that there has been a significant drift in the status of this group following the demise of ‘Fordism’ and the emergence of new ‘post-Fordist’ economic configurations and their corresponding ‘promotional cultures’ throughout many advanced industrial nations. It is suggested that this shift marks a crucial realignment of notions of professionalism within the occupations and job prospects of the intellectual classes, signalling a move away from a ‘professional radicalism’ in intellectual work towards a far more routinized and bureaucratic mode of labour. The article considers how this shift has impacted upon higher education within the context of the United Kingdom.
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Reflections on religion, media and the marketing of America’s wars
Authors: Les Switzer and Michael RyanThe international Christian community was celebrating World Communion Day on Sunday October 7, 2001, when the United States started bombing Afghanistan. The religious significance of this political event was not lost on many Americans – on the day when Christians throughout the world take communion in a symbolic act of unity and peace. Three years later, Americans are fighting two traditional wars and one non-traditional war. Clearly, the non-traditional war, the war against terrorism, is going badly - in part because the traditional wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have helped create conditions favourable to terrorism. Terrorists have skilfully created and exploited images in which Americans appear to engage in state-sanctioned terror.
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Media, power and performativity
By Lena JayyusiThe contemporary moment is one of profound risk, and profound import. We have come to live in a unipolar world, where one remaining superpower has the capacity to wield enormous wealth and military force simultaneously, and to penetrate the material and symbolic spaces of the greater part of the globe, without as yet effective challenge. The hallmark of the contemporary global order, under the flagship of the American imperium, is the conjuncture of these elements with the will to intervene and the claim to right, all waved under the banner of freedom and human prosperity, yet actually embedded in a matrix of capitalist accumulation and an insatiable search for profit by corporate conglomerates. There is perhaps a new/old imperial story here. Yet, within the present landscape, the power to mediate knowledge and meaning, to shape imaginaries and provide authoritative frames for affect and opinion, especially within the centres and the sites of influence of capitalist global flows, becomes critical. The peril of the moment resides precisely in the nature of the confluence between the cultural and the political: between mediated cultural production now itself corporatized and globally disseminated, and militarized politics, both articulations of different forms of power, now effectively interlocking through the deployment of the self-same technological advances, and converging to press specific clusters of corporate and state interests.
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When global media don’t ‘play ball’: the exportation of coercion
More LessThe face of journalism has changed massively as a result of the 2001 attacks in the United States and that nation’s self-styled ‘war on terrorism’. Those changes have been chronicled in recent collections,1 and more will surely follow, but I would like to use this journal debut to describe a ‘post 9/11’ phenomenon simultaneously too veiled and too hegemonic to have received much notice from academy or industry commentators. While American and British ruling elites2 are exercising unprecedented control over international representations of their policies, analysis of the systematic ‘new spin’ is sparse. The new propaganda and coercion are clearly integral to US foreign policy, but the extent to which they are coordinated and sanctioned is often unclear; less ambiguous is how brutally effective they have become.
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Manufacturing consent: mediated sporting spectacle and the cultural politics of the ‘War on Terror’
Authors: Mark Falcous and Michael SilkWithin the voluminous range of popular and academic commentaries interrogating the cultural politics of ‘post 9/11 America’, observations on the role of the US corporate media in echoing, and indeed amplifying, political doctrines following the non-stateterror attacks of September 11, 2001 are prominent. In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, key themes of media discourse included public mobilization through jingoistic icons and ‘war’ rhetoric; the vilification of culprits; omissions of reference to alternative culpable agents; exceptional support for President Bush and the political administration; neglect or manipulation of history to eliminate information that might undermine support for the ‘War on Terror’; the uncritical acceptance of ‘official’ interpretations; and, strategies of censorship and intimidation of media dissenters (Boyd-Barrett 2003). Crucially, the partisan role of the media in expressing outrage and preparing the public for retribution was veiled in the rhetoric of impartiality. For Boyd-Barrett (2003) the media role was one of ‘foreclosing doubt’ concerning understandings and explanations of events. These constructions within agenda-establishing corporate media were, and continue to be, significant in the framing of responses to the horrific terror acts.
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The hand that sets the table... The political economy and self-reflexive project of intellectual property law in relation to traditional knowledge
More LessThe article critically examines the political economy of intellectual property (IP), and the encounter within TRIPS between traditional knowledge holders and a Western-led international IP law regime that is turning ever more global. Patents, copyright and trade marks are protected by intellectual property rights. The international regime which governs these is based on Western thinking around ownership and has most recently culminated in the Agreement on Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS). TRIPS is an attempt to harmonize and enforce intellectual property on a global scale. But this globalizing IP regime has difficulty accommodating the more localized interests of developing countries and indigenous communities who find themselves rich in traditional knowledge (TK). For a number of reasons, TK is not easily accommodated by Western IP law categories. Therefore, TK often remains unprotected by law, and this can lead to uneven commercial and cultural exploitation of agricultural, medicinal and biodiversity-related knowledge, as well as of expressions of folklore in music, dance, song, designs, stories, artwork and handicraft. The article calls for a renewed focus on moral philosophy in addressing the power relations and the negotiations between different IP interests. A brief history of Western IP law is included to illuminate these interests, and global IP law is challenged to develop novel self-reflexive identities to reflect heterogeneity and difference. At the same time, the interests of traditional knowledge holders are discussed, and an attempt is made to group these into categories including articulations for remuneration, recognition, and return of traditional knowledge. The article suggests that these various articulations themselves use, directly or indirectly, traditional Western categories of intellectual ownership and protection. The article further argues that in circumstances in which the international IP law regime is associated with an over-homogenized legal self-identity, and with legal-legislative imperialist practices, a global regime should build cultural bridges and incorporate legal hybridities and heterogeneous identities.
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Media, expression and a new politics: eight theses
By Ian AngusThe study of communication begins with the separation between philosophy and rhetoric, that is, between the content of a message and its persuasive effect. Prior to the separation between a truth-content and a persuasive effect, an expression is an event that both establishes a truth and provokes an effect. In such a condition there is no concept of a medium of communication but only a meaningful and effective world constructed through events. The separation between philosophy and rhetoric divides truth from politics and sets up a long history of their conflict. The convergence of philosophy and rhetoric in the twentieth century signifies the event whereby this separation is being re-encountered and shifted. Understanding this event is the first step toward encountering the coming event of the media world.
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The Internet as public sphere or culture industry? From pessimism to hope and back
More LessThe vision of communication systems supporting public sphere(s) of discursive contestation has in recent times been embraced by many critical theorists as the ideal democratic role for the media. However, there has also been much pessimism about the realization of this vision. This pessimism extends from ‘big brother’ fears to hyperrealist scenarios - from the development of a global surveillance society to the implosion of reality in an electronically generated and sustained system of pure fabrication.
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Rethinking television: Alexander Kluge’s cultural magazine programmes
By Tara Forrestas a prominent member of the New German Cinema) has been actively involved in the production of a number of experimental programmes for German television. Constructed, in a similar vein to his films, out of a highly diverse collection of materials (including photographs, drawings, diagrams, clips from movies, and documentary footage) Kluge’s 10 vor 11 (10 to 11), News and Stories, Mitternachtsmagazin (Midnight Magazine), and Primetime Spätausgabe (Prime Time Late Edition) are - in both their form and content - certainly unlike anything else on German television.
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Diversity, localism and the public interest: the politics of assessing media performance
By Kevin HowleyDuring the summer of 2003, the Federal Communication Commission conducted a biennial review of media ownership regulations. This review process, mandated by the US Congress under the terms of the 1996 Telecommunication Act, assesses the efficacy of current regulations limiting television and radio ownership, as well as cross-ownership of newspapers and broadcast stations, in serving the public interest. These questions rest on the ability of policy-makers to assess two distinct, but related aspects of media performance: diversity and localism.
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The cultural politics of minority language media
By Mike CormackMinority language media are increasingly being recognized as an important area of study. This article looks at what might be made in favour of such media - arguments that would be convincing not just for people committed to minority languages, but also to the broader population of speakers of other languages. Three arguments are developed. The first is from economics, the second is based on human rights, and the third concerns cultural ecology. Within these, and in their cumulative power, lies a convincing demonstration not just of the necessity of media in minority languages, but also concerning their importance to speakers of other, more populated languages. The situation of Gaelic in Scotland is described as an example of how these arguments might apply in the case of a specific threatened language, and finally the position of minority languages within the postmodern and globalizing world is considered. It is shown that, rather than being part of any outmoded world-views, minority languages fit very comfortably into the new global situation.
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Transindustrialism and synergy: structural supports for decreasing diversity in commercial culture
More LessIn the United States, neo-conservatives began legalizing transindustrial media conglomerates under the Reagan Administration in the 1980s. Subsequent Administrations have ‘stayed the course’ by further deregulating broadcasting/cable services, retreating from any enforcement of anti-trust law, and defunding governmental services (Streeter 1996; Tillinghast 2000). By withdrawing governmental entities from the oligopolized markets for network television, television and cable programmes, cable channels, cable system ownership, and satellite services, neo-conservatives claim that they ‘let the market decide’ how those industries ought to be organized. With this appeal to Adam Smith’s market model, they gloss over the fact that, at the national level, these were oligopolistic markets whose very existence depended on federal laws and regulations.
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Women: as ‘invisible’ as ever in Nigeria’s news media
More LessThe gender inequality in Nigerian society is reflected in men’srepresentations of women in the news media. Research evidence continues to show that women as journalists are still largely ‘invisible’ in the Nigerian press because the overwhelming majority of people who report the news are men. Monitoring of the Nigerian press1 shows that very few of the bylines in the news pages belong to women. Thus, the power to define the media agenda in Nigeria is still mainly a male privilege.
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The market place of ideas? Global implications of market-driven US media
More LessWell-known examples of how media owners manipulated coverage of the war during the first six months include Cumulus Media’s edict that its radio stations broadcast only pro-war stories; the firing of Peter Arnett by NBC because of one of his broadcasts from Iraq; and MSNBC’s cancelling of the Phil Donahue Show because the network believed the show would be a conduit for the liberal anti-war agenda. Lesser-known examples of ownership interference in war-related coverage have occurred throughout the United States at smaller media outlets, where reporters have been fired, demoted, or otherwise reprimanded for participating in anti-war activities on their own time (FAIR 2003).
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Informationalism and media labour
By David SholleThe central idea of ‘informationalism’ is that we are entering into a totally new epoch, which will fundamentally change the very nature of human existence. The impetus for this new epoch is the ‘bit’, the element that forges the continually evolving digital revolution which will change every human individual and social relation. This revolution is viewed as a fundamentally progressive force which will overturn the dominant forms of social organization that currently exist. Elements of this view can be seen in a diversity of sources from Gilder (2000) and Kelly (1995) to Castells (2000) and Levinson (1999). Pushed to its extreme, this position envisions that the information revolution will democratize all parts of society, create infinite diversity and satisfaction of needs, demolish oppressive political institutions, and bring about an economic revolution in which everyone everywhere will have unlimited access to information and thus the ability to produce their own products (since knowledge replaces the means of production as the centre of capitalist relations). The notion that we now live in an ‘information society’ suggests that there has been a fundamental shift in the nature of capitalism. At its extreme this view claims that capitalism is fading and being replaced by ‘informationalism’.
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Pinhead politics? Fox News versus the Canadian regulators
More LessTypically, the New York Times isn’t strong on presenting Canadian news to its readers - unlike the Canadian counterpart, The Globe and Mail, which features a daily diet of American news - politics and entertainment. In the last year the New York Times’s Canadian-focused articles included topics such as antismoking legislation in Nunavut, potential terrorist ties to Canada, acrimonious debates over border safety, the travails of ageing boomers and seniors crossing the border to avail themselves of cheaper Canadian pharmaceuticals, legalized gay marriages, hockey, sordid politics (a patronage scandal in the Liberal party), softwood lumber disputes under NAFTA, the decriminalization of marijuana, and the synergy between Prime Minister Martin and rock star Bono.
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Volumes & issues
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Volume 19 (2023)
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Volume 18 (2022)
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Volume 17 (2021)
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Volume 16 (2020)
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Volume 15 (2019)
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Volume 14 (2018)
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Volume 13 (2017)
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Volume 12 (2016)
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Volume 11 (2015)
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Volume 10 (2014)
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Volume 9 (2013)
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Volume 8 (2012)
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Volume 7 (2011)
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Volume 6 (2010 - 2011)
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Volume 5 (2009)
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Volume 4 (2008)
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Volume 3 (2007)
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Volume 2 (2006 - 2007)
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Volume 1 (2005)