Imaginative geographies of distant suffering: two cases of the Syrian Civil War on television

The paper builds upon distant suffering studies and the ‘analytics of mediation’. It observes how television performances of suffering expose spectators to dispositions to feel, think and act towards each instance of suffering. It analyses the news coverage of civilians’ suffering in the Syrian Civil War that was presented by Czech public television broadcaster. The interpretation of imaginative geographies expands the analysis because of the need for more spatially sensitive approaches to distant suffering. Imaginative geographies coproduce diverse spacetimes and distant suffering studies often overlook how media performances are shaped according to spacetimes where suffering occurs. Two spacetimes are contrasted here; the Syrian Civil War before and after the Islamic State gained prominence in it. In both cases, the aim is to interpret in what ways the distance is translated into difference through imaginative geographies and how it shapes television performances of suffering. The analysis shows that Orientalist imaginative geographies appear in both cases. However, while in the first case imaginative geographies empower pity and dispositions to act towards suffering, in the second case they do not. It is because of the difference between Bashar al-Assad as a local Oriental persecutor and the Islamic State as the global threat.     

The House Member as Teacher: An Analysis of the Newsletters of Barber B. Conable,Jr.

Scholars agree that postreform House majority leadership strategies distinguish contemporary leaders from their predecessors. One such strategy is leaders' use of media to fulfill personal and member goals. Commonly presented evidence of this strategy is the increase in the number of times leaders appear in national evening newscasts. Yet most studies do not investigate the kind of media coverage leaders receive over time. Hence they do not show whether leaders have been successful in generating the sort of television attention consistent with the incentives that the literature identifies as driving them to adopt a media-oriented strategy. This article begins to address this gap in our understanding. Conducting a content analysis of network news accounts, we find that while postreform leaders have received more attention than their predecessors, coverage of them declined and leveled off in the 1990s. We also find that despite the drop in levels of attention accorded House majority-party leaders, they have maintained a plateau of higher news visibility relative to their primary competitors in the House, committee chairs, though there have been some recent exceptions to this trend that are highly suggestive.     

The STSI-SOAS Indonesian television project

The Balinese Television Project is a collaborative venture between STSI Denpasar and SOAS, starting in 1990, to record, document, preserve archivally, and transcribe important Balinese cultural television broadcasts for educational and research purposes. The project now has an archive of some 1,500 hours of selected broadcasts, and is supposed to be among the largest archives on non-Western television in the world. Although Indonesia has a very important, active, and rapidly changing television broadcasting network, which is central to its role as a developing Pacific Asian country, the social and cultural implications of television on people's lives have remained largely unstudied. Among the problems is a relative lack of materials and of research on contemporary mass media in Indonesia. Television companies have virtually no archival facilities. So the project began as a pilot scheme in Bali to preserve broadcasts of particular cultural and religious value from destruction, by recording, transcribing, and establishing an archive for the use of both Indonesian and foreign scholars, teachers, and practitioners. The aim was that archive should also form a basis for more extensive research into Indonesian media.     

Team Arab: al‐Jazeera and the flagging of everyday Arabism during the 2008 Beijing Olympics

The linking of living rooms across state borders by al‐Jazeera and other pan‐Arab satellite television channels has prompted claims that a ‘new Arabism’ that undermines state nationalism is emerging. Until now, analysts have mostly focused on the ‘hot’ Arabism in the news coverage of politicised events such as the Israel–Palestine conflict. This article offers a new dimension by suggesting that as important to satellite television's construction and reproduction of Arab identity is the everyday discourse found in less overtly political programmes such as sport. To demonstrate this, it offers an analysis of al‐Jazeera's coverage of the 2008 Beijing Olympics showing how the broadcasts address viewers as a common Arab audience who are simultaneously encouraged to be nationalistic towards their separate nation‐states within a given ‘Arab arena’ of states with whom they should primarily compete. This suggests that new Arabism should in fact be considered a ‘supranationalism’, not a revived Arab nationalism as it simultaneously promotes Arab and state identities in tandem. Finally, it aims to expand our understanding of ‘everyday nationalism’ by adapting Michael Billig's theory and methodology of ‘banal nationalism’ in British newspapers to facilitate the study of sport on supranational Arab identity on satellite television.     

The Paradigmatic City: Postindustrial Illusion and the Los Angeles School

In the 1980s a group of geographers known informally as the Los Angeles School proclaimed Los Angeles as the paradigmatic metropolis of the late-twentieth century. The postmodern/flexible specialization model Los Angeles School adherents developed to explain Los Angeles and validate its paradigmatic status is critiqued theoretically and empirically. The unfortunate timing of their claims of Los Angeles' suzerainty over the Pacific Rim is discussed, and the development and status of its propulsive industrial sectors, such as armaments, aerospace, entertainment, finance, and real estate, are examined. The armaments industry receives special attention because of its critical role in postwar Los Angeles' growth and subsequent decline and because the Los Angeles School devoted considerable research and even praise to this particular type of government "warfare" spending as a key constituent of the area's technopole. The entertainment industry is not sufficient to extract Los Angeles from its continuing crisis. At the moment, Los Angeles lacks any credible plan for overcoming the contemporary malaise. The difficulties in the Los Angeles School's analysis are held to stem from their theoretical synthesis of postmodernism and flexible specialization, a natural but unfortunate Ptolemaic perspective expressed in the belief that one's particular locale is paradigmatic and a lack of recognition of the malignant aspects of defense-spurred economic development.     

When ‘Angelino’ squirrels don’t eat nuts: a feminist posthumanist politics of consumption across southern California

Eastern fox squirrels (Sciurus niger), reddish-brown tree squirrels native to the eastern and southeastern United States, were introduced to and now thrive in suburban/urban California. As a result, many residents in the greater Los Angeles region are grappling with living amongst tree squirrels, particularly because the state’s native western gray squirrel (Sciurus griseus) is less tolerant of human beings and, as a result, has historically been absent from most sections of the greater Los Angeles area. ‘Easties,’ as they are colloquially referred to in the popular press, are willing to feed on trash and have an ‘appetite for everything.’ Given that the shift in tree squirrel demographics is a relatively recent phenomenon, this case presents a unique opportunity to question and re-theorize the ontological given of ‘otherness’ that manifests, in part, through a politics whereby animal food choices ‘[come] to stand in for both compliance and resistance to the dominant forces in [human] culture’. I, therefore, juxtapose feminist posthumanist theories and feminist food studies scholarship to demonstrate how eastern fox squirrels are subjected to gendered, racialized, and speciesist thinking in the popular news media as a result of their feeding/eating practices, their unique and unfixed spatial arrangements in the greater Los Angeles region, and the western, modernist human frame through which humans interpret these actions. I conclude by drawing out the implications of this research for the fields of animal geography and feminist geography.     

Locating Home in a “Digital Age”: An Ethnographic Case Study of Second-Generation Iranian Americans in LA and their Use of Internet Media

This paper explores how children of Iranian immigrants engage with internet media in processes of identity formation. It conceptually centralizes places of home in order to bring together literatures on diaspora and digital media in order to understand the case of the second-generation immigrant home. It argues that this partially mediated home is both connected/mobile and emplaced/embodied. It is in this sense that the article discusses processes of locating home, in the sense of both a narrated discovery and a materially situated formation. The findings are generated from ethnographic fieldwork among second-generation Iranian Americans in Los Angeles carried out over a period of twelve months as part of an ongoing doctoral project with a focus on respondents' everyday practices of internet usage.     

Determinants of National Television News Coverage of Women in the House of Representatives, 1987-1998

This study adapts Timothy Cook's 1986 analysis of news coverage of members of Congress to women legislators. The relative impact of independent variables on the amount of television news coverage received by women in the House from 1987 to 1998 was determined using Poisson regression. These included structural variables (leadership, seniority, party control of the chamber, and membership on a prestigious committee), member characteristics (racial minority status, media market size, party and attractiveness), and member activities (legislative activity, ideology, scandal, authorship of women's bills, and running for higher office). Factors that were significantly related to the amount of coverage received by a congresswoman were: authorship of women's bills, running for higher office, media market size, political party, and seniority. Leadership did not have the same payoff for women's visibility that it did for the largely male group of legislators in Cook's study. Authoring a large number of pieces of legislation did not enhance women's coverage, but authoring bills on women's issues did.     

Election Campaigns and Television News Coverage: The Case of the 2001 Australian Election

This paper examines the patterns of television news coverage of the political parties, their leaders and the issues they raised during the 2001 Australian federal election campaign. By focusing on some issues, parties and leaders, television has long been argued to constrain voters' evaluations. We find that television news coverage in the 2001 Australian election campaign focused primarily on international issues, especially terrorism and asylum seekers, and on the two major parties—virtually to the exclusion of coverage of the minor parties and their leaders. Within the major party ‘two-horse race’, television gave substantially more coverage to the leaders than to the parties themselves, thereby sustaining what some have called a ‘presidential’-style political contest. John Howard emerged as the winner in the leaders' stakes, garnering more coverage than Labor's Kim Beazley.     

From audio tapes to video blogs: the delocalisation of authority in Islam

ABSTRACT. Today, a new breed of charismatic and media‐savvy religious figures are reinvigorating internal debates on Islam by drawing large audiences across the Muslim world and the Muslim diaspora in the West. Using satellite media, websites, blogs and video blogs, these new religious celebrities are changing the nature of debate in Islam from a doctrinaire discourse to a practical discussion that focuses on individual enterprise as a spiritual quest. These leaders have become religious entrepreneurs, with sophisticated networks of message distribution and media presence. From Amr Khaled and Moez Masood, two leading figures of Arab Islamic entertainment television, to Baba Ali, a famous Muslim video blogger from California, Islam has never been more marketable. Satellite television and the internet are becoming fertile discursive spaces where not only religious meanings are reconfigured but also new Islamic experiences are mediated transnationally. This delocalisation of Islamic authority beyond the traditional sources of Egypt and Saudi Arabia is generating new producers and locales of religious meaning in Dubai, London, Paris and Los Angeles. This article examines the impact of celebrity religious figures and their new media technologies on the relativisation of authority in Islam and the emergence of a cosmopolitan transnational audience of Muslims. I ask if this transnational and seemingly apolitical effort is generating a new form of religious nationalism that devalues the importance of national loyalties.     

PUBLIC INFORMATION ON SOCIAL CHANGE: TV COVERAGE OF WOMEN IN THE WORKFORCE*

This article analyzes the thematic and visual content of ten years of nightly television news coverage of women in the workforce and employment discrimination. The authors find that the total amount of coverage is small, the visual context often undercuts the usually anti-discriminatory text, and NBC provided the most coverage. The possible sources of these patterns are examined: the elite newspaper agents, male domination of network news, decision-making, cultural definitions of event news, and consensus values and news controversy.     

The looting of the Iraq Museum: Thoughts on archaeology in a time of crisis

Abstract

The looting of the Iraq Museum has been widely proclaimed to be the worst cultural destruction since World War II; some have compared it to the decimation wrought by the Mongol invasion of Baghdad. Others have contended that the damage was wildly exaggerated. Any attempt at understanding the events surrounding the looting and destruction of the museum's collections must examine both what happened and how it was represented to a worldwide audience through the news media. I compare these events with the toppling of a statue of Saddam Hussein in Fardus Square and the burning of major libraries in Baghdad and suggest that their perceived significances for Western audiences stem in large measure from the extent and tone of press reporting. The long-standing coverage by major mainstream news media of Mesopotamian archaeology as foundational to Western civilization may be a prime reason why otherwise pro-(US) government reporting also included some critical coverage about the loss of the museum collections. Such circumstances challenge archaeologists to use media interest to convey more nuanced and ethically responsible views of archaeology to broader publics.     

Listing and protecting culturally significant events: intangible cultural heritage and policy considerations for hockey broadcasting in Canada

ABSTRACT

Listed events are policies enacted by states to protect the free-to-air rights of specific television and radio broadcasts that are identified as being of particular national significance. Some states (including the UK, Belgium, and Argentina) have begun to adopt these listed events policies, typically regarding significant national sporting events. We re-conceptualize listed events as a practical means by which to protect the intangible cultural heritage of states – an issue addressed by international institutions such as ICOMOS and UNESCO. Furthermore, we engage in a critical analysis regarding both the merits and potential problems involved in the possibility of Canada adopting listed broadcasting events policies, specifically involving hockey broadcasts.     

Challenging a Terrorist Tag in the Media: Framing the Politics of Resistance and an Iranian Opposition Group

Scholars have shown that media framing has a powerful effect on citizen perception and policy debates. Research has provided less insight into the ability of marginalized actors to promote their preferred frames in the media in a dynamic political context. The efforts of an exiled Iranian opposition group to get its name removed from official terror lists in the United States, United Kingdom, and EU provides a valuable platform to examine this problem. Using content analysis, I explore how the group promoted its frames in the opinion sections of major world news publications over nine years (2003–2012). I then examine the extent to which journalists aligned to its frames, as opposed to rival official frames, over time in the larger arena of news. The results support research showing that by nurturing small opportunities, marginalized political actors can expand media capacity and influence, but these effects are mediated at least in part by critical or focusing events that make rival frames less salient. The study sheds light on the complex relationship between activists, the government, and the media. It has implications for the ability of marginalized political actors to get their frames into public discourse. It also has implications for terror tagging and media coverage of other controversial issues.     

A world geography of global media cities

This is an empirical study that analyses the geography of 33 global media firms through their locations in 284 cities across the world. The analyses are set within the world cities literature and a methodology is used that searches out city networks from data on firms to define ‘global media cities’. Resulting definitions of network connectivities allow comparisons to be made with more familiar world city network results on global service centres. The relative importance of media industries in European cities is highlighted. The main analysis uses a principal components model to discover global media fields centred upon specific articulator cities, notably New York, Los Angeles, Munich, Berlin, London and Paris. It is concluded that there is a geographical logic to the growth of large media companies.     

Debating contemporary museum ethics: reporting Sekhemka

The sale by Northampton Borough Council (UK) of the Egyptian Sekhemka statue at auction house Christie’s became a key focus of international debate about contemporary museum ethics in 2015–2016. A decision to deaccession and dispose of a museum object would not traditionally be the subject of intense media scrutiny, but the case of Sekhemka was widely reported in local, national and international press. This article takes as its start point the question ‘What did media reporting of the sale of Sekhemka reveal about contemporary museum ethics, and the terms of their debate?’ It reports findings from a content and discourse analysis of 229 news stories dating from late 2012 when the sale was first proposed, to May 2016 when it was reported that in all probability the Sekhemka statue had finally left the country. The ambiguous and intriguing sale of Sekhemka might not be the last as global economic and geopolitical circumstances continue to impact our valuations and uses of cultural heritage. This paper demonstrates that we would do well to keep media reporting of such events under close scrutiny in the interests of a considered and informed contemporary museum ethics.     

‘Defining Moments’ and Refining Myths in the Making of Place Identity: the Newcastle Knights and the Australian Rugby League Grand Final

This paper deals with the role of the media in refashioning place identity and in repositioning places in the cultural system of space. Specifically, it examines as a case study the media coverage of the September 1997 success of the ‘Newcastle Knights’ in the Australian Rugby League Grand Final. This event produced an intriguing moment in the reimagination of the identity of Newcastle (New South Wales), an industrial city undergoing ‘deindustrialisation‘. The paper draws on Hall’s (1997) notion of ‘resemanticisation‘ in repositioning place identity to explore how key elements of Newcastle’s dominant identity myths were utilised by the media in the post‐match media coverage. Traditional industrial narratives of embattled place were merged with the vision of a bright economic future for a re‐identified Newcastle and recoverable elements of Newcastle’s problematic industrial place identity were recast, stripped of their troubling connotations, and deployed in furthering the project of reimagining a prosperous future for the city. The paper thus considers the role of the media and sport in locating and relocating places in the Australian cultural system of space.     

Reporting on Two Presidencies: News Coverage of George W. Bush's First Year in Office

Personal coverage of President Bush during 2001 on network television and in six U.S. newspapers became far more positive after September 11, 2001, with the largest gains found in network television coverage. Coverage of the rest of the Bush administration, in contrast, became distinctly more negative after the terrorist attacks. The vast majority of the executive branch coverage both before and after the terrorist attacks in all media outlets focused on job performance, not the questions of character, ethics and political conduct that often dominate presidential campaign coverage.     

‘Child sacrifice’ in Uganda? The BBC, ‘witch doctors’ and anthropologists (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

This article discusses both several recent BBC broadcasts on allegations of ‘child sacrifice’ in Uganda and criticisms of the programmes by a number of British anthropologists. It pursues the idea that both the broadcasts and the criticisms raise two sets of crucial questions: the first is in regard to the interpretation of alleged ritual killings in contemporary Africa and the effects of their representation on lay audiences, both non‐African and African; the second concerns media representations of Africa and public anthropology. Anthropologists (and indeed scholars from other disciplines such as history) have a lot of expertise to offer in terms of understanding the occult in many societies, including contextualising this realm in terms of historical processes and material concerns and suggesting links between apparently disparate issues. In this way, they can they can sometimes go beyond surface manifestations, offer alternative explanations and show that things are not always the way they first seem. However, in order to play an effective public role in this regard, anthropologists need to be willing to grapple pro‐actively with such matters of public concern, not least by engaging constructively with the media.