The Disputed Freedoms of a Disrupted Press


Book Description

The Disputed Freedoms of a Disrupted Press explores the origins, connections, and contradictions evident amongst divergent understandings of press freedom around the world. Drawing on examples from various countries and cultures, this book distinguishes the universal right of free expression from the more complex and innately conditional liberties claimed by news media. It examines journalists’ common goals and norms in light of polarized and disordered information channels, reckonings with identity and privilege, diminished public trust, and altered revenue streams. The author discusses emerging forms of accurate, contextualized news production and argues that journalistic autonomy can be sustained only through demonstrated accountability for providing factual information about public affairs according to self-regulated professional standards. The book concludes by proposing a principle-based framework for enhancing the case for press protections and opposing disinformation while minimizing harm. Adopting this approach would require many publishers and editors to consider paradigm shifts and structural changes. This is a timely contribution to the body of literature on press freedom and will be a valued resource for advanced students and researchers seeking a contemporary understanding of journalistic practice and the evolving foundations of media law.




Reviving Rural News


Book Description

Based on extensive research into weekly rural publishers and rural readers, Reviving Rural News demonstrates that a new financial approach to community journalism is urgently needed and viable. This book provides historical context for the state of local news, examines the influence of journalistic identity and boundaries that have prevented change, and offers practical guidance on how to adapt the financial strategies of weekly newspapers to the habits of modern readers. Findings are grounded in robust data collection, including surveys, focus groups, and a year-long oral history study of a small weekly newspaper group in the United States. A new model known as Press Club is presented as a template via which memberships, events, and newsletters can better engage community journalism with its audiences and create a more sustainable path for the future. Reviving Rural News will be of interest to advanced students and researchers of local, community, and rural journalism as well as practitioners looking to bring about real-world change in journalism organizations.




Journalism from Print to Platform


Book Description

Through a synthesis of philosophical anthropology and media theory, this book examines the human relationship with technology, progressing from analogue to digital, to give a new perspective on journalism in the digital age. Journalism from Print to Platform takes a fresh look at the relationship between journalism as a craft shaped by its tools and considers anew the tools themselves. This book demonstrates that, with the emergence of digitality, what analogue print culture made possible and seemingly “natural” has now become unworkable. Digital logic constitutes a wholly different category of technology with a framework that makes fidelity in one-to-one exchange of analogue-to-digital in communication problematic. In short, the technology-based forms and practices that journalism developed as a fourth estate/public sphere enabler are, like us, irreducibly analog. Whilst we have mostly assumed that these would either adapt to or carry over with the shift to digitality, this book challenges that assumption and considers the important consequences of that realisation for the practice of journalism today. This challenging study is an insightful resource for students and scholars in journalism, media and technology studies.




Discursive Disruption, Populist Communication and Democracy


Book Description

In Discursive Disruption, Populist Communication and Democracy, Elena Block explores the links between declining democratic discourses, populist communication, and reflects on the communicative and moral dimensions of populism. Block proposes the concept of discursive disruption to help to identify, analyze and understand the disruptive power of populist speech, turning to the communicative styles of Venezuela’s late President Hugo Chávez and the US’s President Donald J. Trump to illustrate and support this new conceptual and analytical tool. While the mainstream political class and media traditionally sought to manage the processes of political communication, the book contends that they have now been displaced and their role has been undermined. Middle ground politics and journalism have been substituted by the adversarial rhetorical styles of populists, multiplied through multi-fragmented channels, texts and voices. With this book, Block continues her introspection in the conceptual, communicative and mediatic dimensions of populism by adding a perspective that draws on democratic and discursive theories. Discursive Disruption, Populist Communication and Democracy is ideally designed for scholars and professional communicators in political science and communication studies eager to understand the connection between weakening discourses of modern democracy and the pervasiness of confrontational styles of populist communication in contemporary political exchanges.




Freedom in the World 2004


Book Description

Freedom in the World contains both comparative ratings and written narratives and is now the standard reference work for measuring the progress and decline in political rights and civil liberties on a global basis.




What God Allows


Book Description

"One typical parish, one pivotal year. A religious educator weighs her feminist views against her duties as a teacher of Catholic doctrine. An orthodox layman launches an attack on what he sees as a wave of moral anarchy. A young priest chooses between his vow of celibacy and his burning need for intimacy. These are some of the people we come to know in What God Allows, journalist Ivor Shapiro's chronicle of a year in the life of St. Paul's Church in Kenmore, New York. Among others we encounter: a seventy-year-old divorcee, as devoted to the Mother of God as she is skeptical about the celibate elite that rules her church; a seven-year-old boy, conquering new Nintendo worlds while preparing for his first sacramental confession; a young professional couple, living in the shadow of grief and finding in the church reasons to hope - and to fight." "One parish, one year. Squabbles over authority, quests for inner peace, small victories of faith. In Rome, Pope John Paul II launches a renewed assault on liberal thought and instruction in the church he leads. In Kenmore the much-loved pastor of St. Paul's prepares to end his twelve-year tenure. By year's end, two disillusioned ministry staffers quit the St. Paul's payroll. But beyond the clash of personalities in one parish, the events of this year display the ambiguous power balance that marks today's Catholic Church." "In these pages, the church is neither target nor stereotype. What God Allows weaves real-life human dramas into a highly readable narrative, vividly portraying a seasoned church's cheerful tenacity in a time of trial. The story touches on (without obsessing over) the issues that divide parishioners from one another and, sometimes, from their sacraments: birth control, divorce, and abortion; celibacy and scandal; orthodoxy and freedom of thought. The author paints a gentle but sardonic portrait of ordinary people with foibles both amusing and annoying - people who seek meaning in a puzzling world, and find it through their decision to believe and to belong." "Through their stories, a picture emerges of what it means to be Catholic in North America at the end of the twentieth century, and of what the church of tomorrow - a church largely without priests - might look like. The author seems in no doubt that the church will survive its current trials in some way. He paints a picture of a faith and sensibility that keep generations of Catholics coming back - or at least keep them (long after they quit showing up at Sunday Mass) Catholics for life. What God Allows helps us understand why, as Jimmy Breslin once said, "there's no such thing as a lapsed Catholic.""--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved




Digital Dissidence and Social Media Censorship in Africa


Book Description

This book reflects on the rapid rise of social media across the African continent and the legal and extra-legal efforts governments have invented to try to contain it. The relentless growth of social media platforms in Africa has provided the means of resistance, self-expression, and national self-fashioning for the continent’s restlessly energetic and contagiously creative youth. This has provided a profound challenge to the African "gatekeeper state", which has often responded with strategies to constrict and constrain the rhetorical luxuriance of the social media and digital sphere. Drawing on cases from across the continent, contributors explore the form and nature of social media and government censorship, often via antisocial media laws, or less overt tactics such as state cybersurveillance, spyware attacks on social media activists, or the artful deployment of the rhetoric of "fake news" as a smokescreen to muzzle critical voices. The book also reflects on the Chinese influence in African governments’ clampdown on social media and the role of Israeli NSO Group Technologies, as well as the tactics and technologies which activists and users are deploying to resist or circumvent social media censorship. Drawing on a range of methodologies and disciplinary approaches, this book will be an important contribution to researchers with an interest in social media activism, digital rebellion, discursive democracy in transitional societies, censorship on the Internet, and Africa more broadly.




Disrupting Journalism Ethics


Book Description

Disrupting Journalism Ethics sets out to disrupt and change how we think about journalism and its ethics. The book contends that long-established ways of thinking, which have come down to us from the history of journalism, need radical conceptual reform, with alternate conceptions of the role of journalism and fresh principles to evaluate practice. Through a series of disruptions, the book undermines the traditional principles of journalistic neutrality and "just the facts" reporting. It proposes an alternate philosophy of journalism as engagement for democracy. The aim is a journalism ethic better suited to an age of digital and global media. As a philosophical pragmatist, Stephen J. A. Ward critiques traditional conceptions of accuracy, neutrality, detachment and patriotism, evaluating their capacity to respond to ethical dilemmas for journalists in the 21st century. The book proposes a holistic mindset for doing journalism ethics, a theory of journalism as advocacy for egalitarian democracy, and a global redefinition of basic journalistic norms. The book concludes by outlining the shape of a future journalism ethics, employing these alternative notions. Disrupting Journalism Ethics is an important intervention into the role of journalism today. It asks: what new role journalists should play in today’s digital media world? And what new mind-set, new aims, and new standards ought jounalists to embrace? The book aims to persuade—and provoke—ethicists, journalists, students, and members of the public to disrupt and invent.




Public Sentinel


Book Description

What are the ideal roles the mass media should play as an institution to strengthen democratic governance and thus bolster human development? Under what conditions do media systems succeed or fail to meet these objectives? And what strategic reforms would close the gap between the democratic promise and performance of media systems? Working within the notion of the democratic public sphere, 'Public Sentinel: News Media and Governance Reform' emphasizes the institutional or collective roles of the news media as watchdogs over the powerful, as agenda setters calling attention to social needs in natural and human-caused disasters and humanitarian crises, and as gatekeepers incorporating a diverse and balanced range of political perspectives and social actors. Each is vital to making democratic governance work in an effective, transparent, inclusive, and accountable manner. The capacity of media systems and thus individual reporters embedded within those institutions to fulfill these roles is constrained by the broader context of the journalistic profession, the market, and ultimately the state. Successive chapters apply these arguments to countries and regions worldwide. This study brought together a wide range of international experts under the auspices of the Communication for Governance and Accountability Program (CommGAP) at the World Bank and the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard University. The book is designed for policy makers and media professionals working within the international development community, national governments, and grassroots organizations, and for journalists, democratic activists, and scholars engaged in understanding mass communications, democratic governance, and development.




Destiny Disrupted


Book Description

"In Destiny Disrupted, Ansary tells the rich story of world history as it looks from that other perspective. With the evolution of the Muslim community at the center, his story moves from the lifetime of Mohammed through a succession of far-flung empires, to the struggles and ideological movements that have wracked the Muslim world in recent centuries, to the tangle of modern conflicts that culminated in the events of 9/11. He introduces the key people, events, ideas, legends, religious disputes, and turning points of world history from that other perspective, recounting not only what happened but how those events were interpreted and understood in that framework. He clarifies why these two great civilizations grew up oblivious to each other, what happened when they intersected, and how the Islamic world was affected by its slow recognition that Europe - a place it long perceived as primitive - had somehow hijacked destiny."--BOOK JACKET.




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