Media,Culture & Society

This article investigates how the Eurozone crisis is thematically negotiated in a popular Greek television comedy. Inspired by the increasing interest in the ideological role of news media during the Eurozone crisis of the late 2000s, it turns the spotlight on the sphere of entertainment in an attempt to address the importance of fictional mediations and meaning-making processes. To that end, it proposes an understanding of television fiction as an accommodator and shaper of ‘hot moments’, instigating processes of self-assessment and evaluation of change. More specifically, the study examines the ways in which the family comedy Piso sto Spiti (MEGA Channel, 2011–2013) provides culturally based understandings of the Eurozone crisis by depicting it as associated with inherent flaws of the modern Greek and by assessing the possibility of change through a juxtaposition with national ‘others’. At the same time, it identifies ways that ideology leaks from television fiction in its interaction with other media discourses simultaneously circulating within a society.

In 2010, Germany was shattered by a cluster of scandals concerning child sexual abuse in residential educational institutions. Previous attempts to broach the issue of child sexual abuse in institutions have repeatedly failed. This article investigates the historical preconditions that led to the immense awareness of child sexual abuse as raised by the media during this particular time. In order to create a holistic picture of the preconditions and awareness potential of the scandal, a database based on searching using a semantic field approach was created. The results were analyzed with respect to published discourses on child sexual abuse generally and in institutions in particular. Quantitatively, until the beginning of the 1990s, search results show a low but stable level of publication activity. This level increased strongly in the 1990s and, after a slight decrease in the new millennium, reached its peak in 2010. Qualitatively, the way violence against children in institutional settings was framed in the media coverage changed from emphasizing the motives of the perpetrator only (until the 1990s) to including more and more institutional and structural conditions that contribute to child sexual abuse.

This article examines the role of television in Australia’s 1967 referendum, which is widely believed to have given rights to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. It presents an analysis of archival television footage to identify five stories that moved the nation: Australia’s shame, civil rights and global connections, admirable activists, ‘a fair go’ and consensus. It argues that television shaped the wider culture and opened a channel of communication that allowed Indigenous activists and everyday people to speak directly to non-Indigenous people and other First Nations people throughout the land for the first time. The referendum narrative that television did so much to craft and promote marks the shift from an older form of settler nationalism that simply excluded Indigenous people, to an ongoing project that seeks to recognise, respect and ‘reaccredit’ the nation-state through incorporation of Indigenous narratives. We conclude that whereas television is understood to have ‘united’ the nation in 1967, 50 years later seismic shifts in media and society have made the quest for further constitutional reform on Indigenous rights and recognition more sophisticated, diffuse, complex and challenging.

The attempted coup in Turkey in July 2016 provided a justification for the Turkish government to silence oppositional voices in the media and close down many television stations. Though the stated aim was to clamp down on the pro-coup Gulenist movement, the closure of TV channels has resulted in what I call a ‘communicative ethnocide’ silencing Alevi television in particular. Following Yalcinkaya, who builds on Clastres concept of ethnocide, I define ‘communicative ethnocide’ as the annihilation of the communicative capacity of a particular community by the state with the aim of destroying that community’s cultural identity. Although the closure of TV stations was not confined to Alevi channels, it has particular implications for the Alevi community by destroying its communicative capacity, infrastructure, relations with the viewers, and representation regime which are driven by the community’s political ambitions and attempts to sustain transnational connections. Parallels are drawn between Alevi and Kurdish TV to illustrate the Turkish context.

This article examines the construction of the Estonian–Russian border incident of 2014, where an Estonian security officer ended captured by Russian authorities, in Finnish, Estonian and British press. It asks (a) How did the press construct the event and the actors in the reporting of the Kohver case in Finnish, Estonian and British press? What happened? Who did what? Who was responsible? What is the outcome of these constructions? Are there differences in national reporting? (b) Can ‘Finlandisation’ explain the discursive choices in the press constructions? By Finlandisation we refer to a hypothesis about the effects that the proximity of a major power in the context of international tension has on media discourse and culture more broadly. We argue that although the discourse of the Kohver case in Finnish, Estonian and British press could be subsumed under the term ‘Finlandisation’ in the case of the first two countries, a more fruitful approach would be to consider the discursive differences in the framework of the ‘domestication’ of news. This implies that explaining the tone of the news discourse is as much a matter of media logic as it is of underlying and/or implicit ideology.

This article discusses the recent development of Xinhuanet.com, a news website launched by Xinhua News Agency, one of China’s key central state-owned news organisations. Xinhuanet Co. Ltd, the business entity running the website, went public in October 2016 in Shanghai. This marked the first step in the state news agency’s financialisation. Two main questions are addressed. First, what were the main driving forces behind Xinhuanet’s transformation from a governmental cultural organisation to a publicly traded enterprise, the majority shareholder of which remains Xinhua? Second, how should the nature of this transformation be understood, in relation to Xinhua’s wider marketisation process and that of the Chinese media sector as a whole? The article argues that Xinhua’s financialisation via Xinhuanet is best understood as part of a state-administrated initiative in accord with Xinhua’s own business ambitions. The financialisation of news by state players such as Xinhuanet does not alter the underlying ownership structure of Chinese news media, which remain ultimately state-controlled.

Drawing on critical research on the political economy of the media and intellectual property rights (IPR), this research examines copyright growth in China’s digital media. It sees copyright development as the creation of private cultural property, an ongoing process and part of China’s media marketization and the globalization of IPR. It focuses on three critical moments in the creation of digital copyright: the invention of ground rules by state organs, a bottom-up challenge to copyright control, and the correlated development between law and business agendas. It argues that digital copyright is part of China’s market-oriented reform, West-looking legal transplantation, elite-driven policymaking, and business-friendly Internet governance. The law and its implementation manifest the ascendance of proprietary cultural control in Chinese cyberspace, which needs to be assessed historically and critically.

This article examines the role of information and communication technologies (ICTs) in transnational expectant motherhood in the context of birth tourism, a growing form of transnational family arrangement. This research is primarily based on interviews with Taiwanese women who have participated in birth tourism in the United States. The findings suggest that long-distance intimacy is now primarily mediated through ICT use, which not only functions to fulfil the women’s emotional needs but also largely serves to bring the women’s reproductive bodies under the surveillance of their geographically distant spouses. This is because pregnant bodies serve as a spectacle of intimacy during expectant parenthood. To manage this digital surveillance, some mothers develop strategies of resistance regarding ICT use. This includes the choice of less media-rich tools and the delayed use of ICTs, which allow temporal and spatial distance from the digital gaze of the father.

Raymond Williams once wrote, ‘… there are in fact no masses, but only ways of seeing people as masses’. In an age of personalized media, the word ‘masses’ seems like an anachronism. Nevertheless, if Williams were to study contemporary online platforms, he would no doubt conclude that there are in fact no individuals, but only ways of seeing people as individuals. This article explores this idea by taking a closer look at online music streaming services. It first conducts a comparison of how two leading streaming platforms conceive of the individual music listener. Then, drawing from Gilbert Simondon’s theory of individuation, it demonstrates how ways of seeing the individual work to enact the individual on these platforms. In particular, ways of seeing are heavily influenced by the consumer categories that are defined and demanded by advertisers. This article concludes with an examination of how commercial imperatives shape ‘ways of seeing’ and ‘algorithmic individuation’ on music streaming platforms.