The demise of the newspaper has long been predicted. Yet newspapers continue to survive globally despite competition from radio, television, and now the Internet, because they serve core social functions in successful cultures. Initial chapters of this book provide an overview of the development of modern newspapers. Subsequent chapters examine particular societies and geographic regions to see what common traits exist among the uses and forms of newspapers and those artifacts that carry the name newspaper but do not meet the commonly accepted definition. The conclusion suggests that newspapers are of such core value to a successful society that a timely and easily accessible news product will succeed despite, or perhaps because of, changes in reading habits and technology.
This book offers fresh research and insights into the complex relationship between the press, war, and society in the 20th century, by examining the role of the newspaper press in the period c.1900– 1960, with a particular focus on the Second World War. During the warfare of the 20th century, the mass media were used to sustain domestic morale and promote combatants’ views to an international audience. Topics covered in this book include British newspaper cartoonists’ coverage of the Russo- Japanese War, the role of the French press in Anglo- French diplomacy in the 1930s, Irish press coverage of Dunkirk and D- Day, government censorship of the press in wartime Portugal, the reporting of American troops in North Africa, and how the Greek press became the focus of British government propaganda in the 1940s. Particular attention is given to the role of the British press in the Second World War: its coverage of evacuation, popular politics, and D- Day; the war as seen through commercial press advertising; the wartime Daily Mirror; and Fleet Street’s role as a ‘national’ press in wartime. This book explores how— and why— newspapers have presented wars to their readers, and the importance of the press as an agent of social and political power in an age of conflict. This book was originally published as a special issue of Media History.
Civil Paths to Peace contains the analyses and findings of the Commonwealth Commission on Respect and Understanding, established in response to the 2005 request of Commonwealth Head of Government for the Commonwealth Secretary-General to 'explore initiatives to promote mutual understanding and respect among all faiths and communities in the Commonwealth.' This report focuses particularly on the issues of terrorism, extremism, conflict and violence, which are much in ascendancy and afflict Commonwealth countries as well as the rest of the world. It argues that cultivating respect and understanding is both important in itself and consequential in reducing violence and terrorism. It further argues that cultivated violence is generated through fomenting disrespect and fostering confrontational misunderstandings. The report looks at the mechanisms through which violence is cultivated through advocacy and recruitment, and the pre-existing inequalities, deprivations and humiliations on which those advocacies draw. These diagnoses also clear the way for methods of countering disaffection and violence. In various chapters the different connections are explored and examined to yield general policy recommendations. Accepting diversity, respecting all human beings, and understanding the richness of perspectives that people have are of great relevance for all Commonwealth countries, and for its 1.8 billion people. They are also importance for the rest of the world. The civil paths to peace are presented here for use both inside the Commonwealth and beyond its boundaries. The Commonwealth has survived and flourished, despite the hostilities associated with past colonial history, through the use of a number of far-sighted guiding principles. The Commission argues that those principles have continuing relevance today for the future of the Commonwealth--and also for the world at large.
Every serious student of journalism should read this book... Denis McQuail has succeeded in producing a work of scholarship that shows what journalists do and what they should do. - Stephen Coleman, University of Leeds "For a half century we have spoken earnestly of journalism′s responsibility to society instead of to business and government. Now this concept is given sophistication unmatched, by the best scholar of media theory of his generation." - Clifford Christians, University of Illinois "The grand old man of communication theory presents an overarching social theory of journalism that goes beyond the usual Anglo-American focus." - Jo Bardoel, University of Amsterdam (ASCoR) and Nijmegen "This book deals with the eternal question of how journalism is linked to society... I cannot think of a better staple food for students of journalism at all levels." - Kaarle Nordenstreng, University of Tampere This is a major new statement on the role of journalism in democracy from one of media and communication′s leading thinkers. Denis McQuail leads the reader through a systematic exploration of how and why journalism and society have become so inextricably entwined and - as importantly - what this relationship should be like. It is a strong re-statement of the fundamental values that journalism aspires to. Written for students, this book: Makes the theory accessible and relevant Teaches the importance of journalism to power and politics Explores the status and future of journalism as a profession Outlines the impact and consequences of the digital Reveals journalism as it is, but also as it should be Takes each chapter further with guided reading list and free online journal articles. This textbook is the perfect answer to the how and why of journalism. It is crucial reading for any student of media studies, communication studies and journalism.
This book is the first edited volume focusing on handwritten newspapers as an alternative medium from a wide interdisciplinary and international perspective. Our primary focus is on handwritten newspapers as a social practice. The case studies contextualize the source materials in relation to political, cultural, literary, and economic history. The analysis reveals both continuity and change across the different forms and functions of the textual materials. In the 16th century, handwritten newspapers evolved as a news medium reporting history in the making. It was both a rather expensive public commodity and a gift exchanged in social relationships. Both functions appealed to public elites and their news consumption for about 300 years. From the late 18th century onwards, changing notions of publicness as well as the social needs of private or even secluded groups re-defined the medium. Handwritten newspapers turned more and more into an internal or even clandestine medium of communication. As such, it has served as a means to create social cohesion, political debate, and religious education for nonelite groups until the 20th century. Despite these changes, continuities can be observed both in the material layout of handwritten newspapers and the practices of distribution.
The newspaper has a history; but it has, likewise, a natural history. The press, as it exists, is not, as our moralists sometimes seem to assume, the willful product of any little group of living men. On the contrary, it is the outcome of an historic process in which many individuals participated without foreseeing what the ultimate product of their labors was to be. The newspaper, like the modern city, is not wholly a rational product. No one sought to make it just what it is. In spite of all the efforts of individual men and generations of men to control it and to make it something after their own heart, it has continued to grow and change in its own incalculable ways.The type of newspaper that exists is the type that has survived under the conditions of modern life. The men who may be said to have made the modern newspaper—James Gordon Bennett, Charles A. Dana, Joseph Pulitzer, and William Randolph Hearst—are the men who discovered the kind of paper that men and women would read and had the courage to publish it. The natural history of the press is a history of a surviving species. It is one of the most characteristic fruits of enlightenment, due to the extension of the opportunities of education to the masses of the population. The modern newspaper is a product of city life; it is no longer merely an organ of propaganda and opinion, but a form of popular literature. The journal of opinion was largely a business man's newspaper. The so-called independent press added to its public the so-called artisan class. The yellow press was created mainly to capture immigrants, and women. It was this increase of circulation that made the newspaper—formerly a subsidized organ of the parties an independent business enterprise, an envelope and carrier for advertising.
Daily newspapers are closing across America. Washington bureaus are shuttering; whole areas of the federal government are now operating with no press coverage. International bureaus are going, going, gone. Journalism, the counterbalance to corporate and political power, the lifeblood of American democracy, is not just threatened. It is in meltdown. In The Death and Life of American Journalism, Robert W. McChesney, an academic, and John Nichols, a journalist, who together founded the nation's leading media reform network, Free Press, investigate the crisis. They propose a bold strategy for saving journalism and saving democracy, one that looks back to how the Founding Fathers ensured free press protection with the First Amendment and provided subsidies to the burgeoning print press of the young nation.
This book shows how disinformation spread by partisan organizations and media platforms undermines institutional legitimacy on which authoritative information depends.
Despite recent corporate scandals, the United States is among the world’s least corrupt nations. But in the nineteenth century, the degree of fraud and corruption in America approached that of today’s most corrupt developing nations, as municipal governments and robber barons alike found new ways to steal from taxpayers and swindle investors. In Corruption and Reform, contributors explore this shadowy period of United States history in search of better methods to fight corruption worldwide today. Contributors to this volume address the measurement and consequences of fraud and corruption and the forces that ultimately led to their decline within the United States. They show that various approaches to reducing corruption have met with success, such as deregulation, particularly “free banking,” in the 1830s. In the 1930s, corruption was kept in check when new federal bureaucracies replaced local administrations in doling out relief. Another deterrent to corruption was the independent press, which kept a watchful eye over government and business. These and other facets of American history analyzed in this volume make it indispensable as background for anyone interested in corruption today.
A "compelling indictment of the news media's role in covering up errors and deceptions" (The New York Times Book Review) due to the underlying economics of publishing—from famed scholars Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky. With a new introduction. In this pathbreaking work, Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky show that, contrary to the usual image of the news media as cantankerous, obstinate, and ubiquitous in their search for truth and defense of justice, in their actual practice they defend the economic, social, and political agendas of the privileged groups that dominate domestic society, the state, and the global order. Based on a series of case studies—including the media’s dichotomous treatment of “worthy” versus “unworthy” victims, “legitimizing” and “meaningless” Third World elections, and devastating critiques of media coverage of the U.S. wars against Indochina—Herman and Chomsky draw on decades of criticism and research to propose a Propaganda Model to explain the media’s behavior and performance. Their new introduction updates the Propaganda Model and the earlier case studies, and it discusses several other applications. These include the manner in which the media covered the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement and subsequent Mexican financial meltdown of 1994-1995, the media’s handling of the protests against the World Trade Organization, World Bank, and International Monetary Fund in 1999 and 2000, and the media’s treatment of the chemical industry and its regulation. What emerges from this work is a powerful assessment of how propagandistic the U.S. mass media are, how they systematically fail to live up to their self-image as providers of the kind of information that people need to make sense of the world, and how we can understand their function in a radically new way.
