{"title":"Journalistic and reception mechanisms of remote threat domestication: EU asylum seekers in Israeli media","authors":"S. Lissitsa, Matan Aharoni, Nonna Kushnirovich","doi":"10.1177/01634437241245910","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/01634437241245910","url":null,"abstract":"The current study reveals the mechanisms used by both media and news consumers for domesticating distant threatening events. To this end, the study applies thematic analysis to textual and visual content presented in media items (Study 1) and media content reception from the perspective of news consumers (Study 2). Study 1 sample included 209 Israeli media items in Hebrew, covering asylum seekers in Europe from 2014 to 2019. Study 2 is based on semi-structured interviews with 30 Jewish Israeli heavy news consumers. The study was inspired by framing, priming, and media reception theories. The findings revealed the following threat domestication processes: (1) double selection of threatening narratives by media gatekeepers and the audience; (2) simplification of the media narratives to basic “good vs. bad” stories for easy comprehension and extension by news consumers; (3) creation and reception of both immediate threat (violence and crime) and deferred threat (deterministic processes); and (4) generation of a wide range of emotions and emotional processing through double victimhood. The audience actively adds to the domestication of the content through extended hegemonic and negotiated readings, thus finally shaping the framing so that it comes closer to the local contexts and communicates with the consumers’ lives and perceptions.","PeriodicalId":427430,"journal":{"name":"Media, Culture & Society","volume":"29 4","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-04-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140727785","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The details that matter: Racism in Norwegian media during the Covid-19 pandemic","authors":"Banafsheh Ranji, Cristina Archetti","doi":"10.1177/01634437241241482","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/01634437241241482","url":null,"abstract":"This article is about the role of the media in the phenomenon of contemporary racism. More specifically, it outlines the discursive mechanisms through which insidious, hidden forms of racism are able to exist “invisible in plain sight,” even in the media and public discourse of countries, like Norway, that regard themselves as democratic and tolerant. The study is part of a broader investigation into the role of the media in the life-experience of immigrants. It addresses the question: How did Norwegian media portray immigrants during the Covid-19 pandemic? Based on a discourse analysis of media coverage, the study demonstrates how racism is hidden “between the lines,” in the assumptions behind a text. It also explains how racism is produced and reproduced covertly, yet systematically, through a media text’s small, even “irrelevant”-looking details. The analysis, importantly, reveals the presence of already existing and widely shared racist scripts which, although they became more noticeable during the Covid-19 crisis, actually underlie public- and media discourse at all times. The results of the study, while related to the case of Norway and the pandemic crisis, help us more broadly understand how and why racism, under the shape of “normality,” tends to remain practically unchallenged.","PeriodicalId":427430,"journal":{"name":"Media, Culture & Society","volume":"131 15","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-04-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140725718","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"“Freedom is not free”: Visual activism and dispersed resistance in Hong Kong’s anti-extradition bill protests","authors":"I. Suglo","doi":"10.1177/01634437241241971","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/01634437241241971","url":null,"abstract":"Graffiti is widely used in social movements globally, yet media and communication research disproportionately focus on the role of social and new media technologies in protest movements. In this paper I ask why university students – a tech-savvy generation – resorted to graffiti and why campus graffiti were not widely circulated on social media during the Hong Kong anti-Extradition Law Amendment Bill (ELAB) protests. I argue that graffiti enables dispersed resistance and is one way to mobilize, voice dissent, and preserve memory in an increasingly surveilled and evolving repressive media environment. I pursue this argument by analyzing graffiti photographed on university campuses during the anti-ELAB protests. Situating graffiti within protest culture in Hong Kong, I conclude that graffiti are not always circulated on digital/social media to reach a broader audience. In times of crises, not reaching a wider audience is a manifestation of dispersed resistance in a hybrid media environment.","PeriodicalId":427430,"journal":{"name":"Media, Culture & Society","volume":"50 4","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-04-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140742972","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Gentlemen rappers: Masculinity and traditional style in Korean popular music performance","authors":"Vivien Nara","doi":"10.1177/01634437241241978","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/01634437241241978","url":null,"abstract":"Across its history, K-pop has put traditional Korean elements to a diversity of uses, including in music, dance and visual style. This article investigates the use of traditional elements in the sub-genre of Korean hip hop and rap performance. In this strongly masculine sub-genre, the cultural meanings invoked in the incorporation and remediation of traditional Korean elements take on a more particular generic significance, one that highlights the hegemonic masculinity enjoyed by the referenced figure of the ‘gentleman scholar’ ( seonbi). With this narrower scope of investigation, I argue that the use of traditional cultural elements in Korean popular music can simultaneously function as an element of attraction for global audiences, as has previously been argued, while still maintaining local, genre-specific meanings. In particular, I argue that the gentlemanliness of the ‘gentleman scholar’ comes from and expresses a position of power and privilege.","PeriodicalId":427430,"journal":{"name":"Media, Culture & Society","volume":"122 18","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-03-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140381030","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Towards a new progressive labour culture? Industry-oriented channels, bitter and precarious structure of feeling and worker solidarity in China","authors":"Zhou Yang","doi":"10.1177/01634437241242003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/01634437241242003","url":null,"abstract":"This article explores the progressive potential of commercial industry-oriented channels (IoCs), an emerging form of media produced by and addressed to workers of specific industries, on China’s digital platforms. Juxtaposing textual analysis with worker-audience interviews and participant observation, I found that despite the collusion of state surveillance and platform governance, IoCs prove instrumental in fostering resistive labour subjects and collectives among ordinary workers. This is due to IoCs’ genre convention and discourses, but more importantly, to worker-audience’s bitter and precarious structure of feeling that mediates their collective reception processes. The findings complicate our understanding of the potential of media/cultural production for labour resistance, highlighting the role of worker-audience in the circuit of progressive labour culture and the potential of commercial media in fostering radical class subjects. Drawing on the analysis, I further advance a model of worker media as double articulation, to open up more hermeneutic and action space for cultural labour activism.","PeriodicalId":427430,"journal":{"name":"Media, Culture & Society","volume":" July","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-03-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140383257","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Advertising as governance: The digital commodity audience and platform advertising dependency","authors":"Daniel Joseph, Sophie Bishop","doi":"10.1177/01634437241237935","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/01634437241237935","url":null,"abstract":"This article draws from an ethnographic investigation of YouTube to argue the significant and specific role of advertising in the governance of platformised cultural production. We pursue this investigation in a critical dialog with theoretical approaches drawn from platform governance, platformisation and political economy communications, foregrounding the concept of the audience commodity. In our analysis of official and unofficial YouTube content, the role and desires of advertisers were discussed in depth. Community commentary videos publicly argued that YouTube cared about advertisers more than a content creating community; marketing-orientated entrepreneurial growth content advised creators to pursue a ‘buying audience’; and YouTube’s official communications painstakingly reminded creators to ‘put themselves in advertisers’ shoes’. Each of these perspectives contributes an understanding of the ways advertising structurally shapes the governance of cultural production in practice.","PeriodicalId":427430,"journal":{"name":"Media, Culture & Society","volume":"61 1‐2","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-03-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140223317","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The life-transition perspective in mediatization research: Exploring lived experiences of media-related social changes through transitioning social roles","authors":"Maja Sonne Damkjaer","doi":"10.1177/01634437241237946","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/01634437241237946","url":null,"abstract":"This article introduces the life-transition perspective as a novel conceptual framework for mediatization research. By examining individuals’ media engagement during significant life transitions, this perspective illuminates the interplay between media-communicative practices and transitioning social roles. The article argues that the life-transition perspective offers methodological advantages and fosters integration between audience research and mediatization research. It enables in-depth analysis of lived experiences of media-related social change in the context of digital everyday life and provides a comprehensive concept for synthesizing existing research on the evolving role of media across diverse domains.","PeriodicalId":427430,"journal":{"name":"Media, Culture & Society","volume":"46 6","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-03-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140248102","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Ordinary lives – Extraordinary journeys: Television entertainment from game shows to reality TV","authors":"J. Chalaby","doi":"10.1177/01634437241237954","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/01634437241237954","url":null,"abstract":"This article defends the thesis that game shows were a key influence in the development of reality TV, and understanding the latter depends on our knowledge of the former. The first section addresses the knowledge gap about game shows and asks the following questions: What are they made of, and what are the core elements that distinguish them from any other genre? The second part examines the relationship between game shows and reality programming. This article highlights the similarities between the two genres and demonstrates that the latter adopted many of the storytelling techniques pioneered by the former. Thus, this research seeks to make a double contribution to media and communication studies: it addresses a knowledge gap and thinks about game shows in relation to another TV genre. From a theoretical perspective, this research mixes a sociological approach to discourse with practice-oriented narrative analysis. It uses secondary and primary sources, which consist of interviews with UK-based TV executives and producers.","PeriodicalId":427430,"journal":{"name":"Media, Culture & Society","volume":"6 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-03-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140245600","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"‘Telling China’s Story Well’ as propaganda campaign slogan: International, domestic and the pandemic","authors":"Jian Xu, Qian Gong","doi":"10.1177/01634437241237942","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/01634437241237942","url":null,"abstract":"The article critically examines ‘Telling China’s Story Well’ (TCSW), a popular propaganda campaign slogan proposed by Chinese President Xi Jinping in 2013. Drawing on theories about storytelling and propaganda and using the COVID-19 as a contextualised example, the paper discusses how the slogan was adapted into ‘Telling China’s Anti-pandemic Story Well’ to mobilise domestic and external propaganda of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) during the pandemic. We argue that TCSW should be understood as a well-crafted political watchword which promotes and commands strategic narratives of doing propaganda. It has the rhetorical power to integrate and reinvigorate domestic and external propaganda, and to facilitate their convergence. Adapting this slogan to mobilise propaganda campaigns of national or global importance and interest demonstrates the CCP’s ambition to harness strategic storytelling to improve the coherence, effectiveness and reputation of its propaganda at home and abroad.","PeriodicalId":427430,"journal":{"name":"Media, Culture & Society","volume":"1994 7","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-03-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140246446","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Europe is not like you see on TV! Ramadan drama as a platform of education on Harga in Tunisia","authors":"Omar Sayfo","doi":"10.1177/01634437241237943","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/01634437241237943","url":null,"abstract":"The increase in clandestine migrants to Italy following the 2010 Tunisian uprising has been an issue of popular and political concern in both countries. This article investigates Harga (2021, 2022), a top-rated and critically acclaimed drama series. Produced and aired by Tunisian national television as a vehicle of entertainment-education, Harga strove to make a geopolitical intervention in the process of irregular migration. Combining textual analysis with interviews conducted with the production’s producers and participants, the article explores how local and transnational actors came together to create a counternarrative to the popular success stories of clandestine migrants. This approach contributes to a better understanding of the relationship between media and socio-cultural and political dynamics as well as of their effect on formulating mediated narratives on clandestine migration. Due to Harga’s documentarist depiction of the social and political driving forces behind irregular migration and its open criticism of Tunisian authorities, the show is investigated within the framework of post-uprising Tunisia’s mediascape, and domestic and international political environment. In this regard, it offers a good case study for examining how local politics, transnationalism, and postcolonialism are intertwined in formulating discourses on irregular migration.","PeriodicalId":427430,"journal":{"name":"Media, Culture & Society","volume":"7 5","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-03-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140247783","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}