Abstract
The July issue of Journal of Communication Inquiry takes the reader on a journey spanning diverse geographic contexts and media forms.
In the opening article, Elida Høeg and Christopher D. Tulloch analyze the representations of climate refugees by two global news organizations: the BBC and Al Jazeera. The findings show that both outlets tend to construct refugees as dehumanized, aggregated actors who are denied agency and operate as generic symbols of climate change whose ordeal is limited to the countries of the global South. Such portrayals, the authors argue, relieve developed countries from responsibility for the environmental crisis and reinforce the status quo in power relations between the global North and the global South.
The conversation about the broader meaning-making role of the news media continues in the article by Leigh M. Moscowitz, Andrew C. Billings, Khadija Ejaz, and Jane O’Boyle, who analyze the news discourses that surrounded the coming-outs of two prominent professional gay male American athletes, the NBA’s Jason Collins and the NFL’s Michael Sam, in mainstream media outlets. The analysis shows that although media stories heralded these coming-out announcements as historic watershed moments that deserve celebration, the actual lived experiences of the gay athletes remained backgrounded whereas their physicality and athleticism were emphasized. Taken together, the authors conclude, such media narratives contributed to “safely containing gayness within traditional notions of orthodox masculinity” that are entrenched in the major American sports leagues as commercialized sports-media complexes.
Seeking to interrogate news discourses as part of a broader cultural conversation, Moscowitz and colleagues in their analysis do not differentiate news articles from editorials, commentary, and other media texts that belong to today’s converged media landscape. Neither does the author of the next article, Ryan Neville-Shepard, who in a similar fashion performs a close textual reading of regular news stories and opinion pieces from a variety of news publications to understand how the third-party voter in the 2016 U.S. presidential election was constructed in the broader news media discourse. The findings reveal that the media coverage mostly followed the logic of what Neville-Shepard refers to as “rhetorical containment,” a form of marginalization of third-party voters that paints them as immature, uniformed, and naïve intruders who disrupt the political process. This contributes to further delegitimizing third-party candidates as falling outside the bounds of mainstream political discourse.
Transitioning from the news media to strategic communication, Christopher A. Chávez and Ricardo J. Valencia analyze the advertising strategies of two competing marketers of the Havana Club rum: Havana Club International, an enterprise of the Cuban government, and Bacardi, a private global corporation. Produced on behalf of the agents embedded within different political ideologies, the two campaigns both make claims for Cuban authenticity, which makes it possible to explore the specific mechanisms by which ideology can be enacted through advertising practice.
In yet another transition, from media production to media consumption, Lisa G. Perks turns her attention to the concept of media marathoning, by approaching it as a strategy of coping with a health crisis. Drawing on in-depth interviews with media marathoners, Perks challenges the stereotypical representation of media marathoning as a socially isolating experience. Instead, she argues, the media marathoning experience helps cultivate meaningful connections with both real and fictive others, and by doing so, can function as a reservoir of social support and capital that preserves its value outside the immediate media consumption experience.
The July issue is rounded out by reviews of two books that resonate with some of the central themes of the issue. In his review of Nancy MacLean’s Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America, Brian Michael Goss invites us to cross-reference the book with external realities to find its central argument both well substantiated and timely: “Get ready for convulsions in the economic and political sphere in the proximal future as an antisocial set of doctrines become embedded.” Finally, Jeffrey O. G. Ogbar reviews Bryan J. McCann’s The Mark of Criminality: Rhetoric, Race, and Gangsta Rap in the War-on-Crime era, to conclude that, despite some criticism, the book makes a worthy scholarly contribution by offering the analysis of gansta rap through the lens of what McCann dubs “the mark of criminality,” which, despite functioning as a tool of oppressive utility, can prove useful for challenging racial subjugation.
Many thanks to all those who helped this issue to completion, including the Advisory Board members, Executive Editor, our reviewers, and authors. Happy reading!