Global Media and Communication

This study maps the factors that impact and inform the practice of citizen journalism in the Global South, and asks how individuals in poor and marginalized communities produce contextually relevant news reports. Results obtained from 25 field interviews in the Dominican Republic contribute to the growing literature about practices that complement or contest journalism produced by mainstream news media. The findings suggest that we mind the gap of structural and institutional realities that pose practical challenges to individual agency for citizen journalists who operate in the Global South.

Alter-globalization movement (AGM) studies have been thus far focused almost exclusively on the left movements’ struggles against neo-liberal globalization. This article uses the Tea Party movement to demonstrate how a right-wing movement reacts to neo-liberal globalization. It discusses the grass-roots Tea Partiers’ (TPers) diagnoses and prognoses of neo-liberal globalization’s impacts in three realms: the US economy, popular control of the political processes and the preservation of the national community. My findings show that while the TPers largely agree with the left AGMs in locating the problems and causes of neo-liberal globalization, their solutions diverge sharply from that of the latter and point to a US-dominated neo-liberal global order. By thematizing conservative movements’ relation to AGM, this article indicates the possible coalitions and cleavages between the right-wing movements and left-leaning AGMs, which suggest that AGMs should not be solely defined negatively vis-à-vis neo-liberal globalization.

On the basis of interviews with several of the most well-known political satirists in China and content analysis of a corpus of satirical texts, this study demonstrates how censorship has been strengthened since the creation of the State Internet Information Office in 2011. It also examines censorship’s different forms and its impact on individuals. The Chinese government imposes mainstream censorship policies on social media, and it is impossible for political satirists to avoid the ‘red line’ to lower political risk. The threat of censorship causes political satirists to self-censor, abandon their creations and reduce their output. The influence of those who continue to work is diminished because the government controls all Chinese social media platforms. However, political satire still has strong vitality thanks to collective action, such as the anonymous production, distribution and sharing of work on Chinese social media. The future of political satire on social media depends on whether the race between netizens and censors continues.

Over the past two decades, India’s media sector has witnessed profound and transformative change reflected in the expansion of both outlets and audiences. According to recent estimates, the country has over a 100 news channels that reach 161 million TV households, about 94,067 newspapers, as well as over 200 million Internet users. These developments have engendered a growing discourse that emphasizes the growth and dynamism of Indian media. However, this predictably celebratory narrative does not focus on the more troubling structural trends that increasingly characterize the country’s media landscape. These include commercialism, rising levels of concentration and cross-media ownership, as well as the expansion of control by politicians and industrialists over the media. Employing a political economy perspective, this article explores the emergence and workings of these structural trends in depth. It challenges the popular perception that India represents a dynamic and pluralistic media landscape, and argues that contemporary trends in the Indian media landscape have significant and deeply negative implications for the production of news and the overall quality of journalism in the country.

This study examines, by comparative thematic analysis, public perceptions of global journalistic norms of independence and integrity by studying perceptions of news media corruption in three Eastern European countries: Serbia, Macedonia and Croatia. In-depth interviews with 61 representatives of the three nations revealed that, in the public eye, the breaches of journalistic independence and integrity are frequent and take different forms. The participants from Serbia, Macedonia and Croatia thought that journalists from their countries often succumb to pressures from politicians, owners and advertisers; that they receive direct bribes for positive coverage and even extort money from people; and that news media are engaged in hidden advertising and journalists are engaged in nepotism. The results show similarity of public perceptions of breaches of journalistic independence and integrity with academic and professional findings and are discussed from the point of view of the cross-country examination of the attribution theory in the context of audiences’ use of situational and trait characteristics in understanding journalistic ethical norms.

This article examines the role of the Caracas-based, pan-Latin American state broadcaster, TeleSUR, in the Latin American and Caribbean region. Drawing on Manuel Castells’ communication theory of the information age, in which global society has become a series of interlinked ‘networks’, and the ‘information economy’ has displaced manufacturing, the article argues that the Bolivarian Revolution, led by the late Hugo Chávez (1954–2013), is a network state, and as such is to be understood as a network of interconnected political, economic and communication interests. As an integral part of this network state, then, the TeleSUR broadcaster sets the agenda in the international sphere via satellite, cable and the Internet. Since petroleum is one of Venezuela’s main commodities – the country produces little in the way of manufacturing – and its main export, one of the ways in which Venezuela projects itself to the world is not with material commodities (oil notwithstanding), but images such as those that regularly appear on TeleSUR. This exportation of images of Chavismo and of Chávez himself, the article concludes, has become both a cultural policy and a form of incipient nation-building.