Political Elites in Canada (Communication, Strategy, and Politics)
Political Elites in Canada offers a timely look at Canadian political power brokers and how they are adapting to a fast-paced digital media environment. Elite power structures are changing worldwide, with traditional influencers losing authority over prevailing social, economic, and political structures. This volume explores the changing landscape for power brokers, the ascent of new elites, and how they are using digital communication to connect with Canadians in unprecedented ways. Featuring s...
Rhetoric, Fantasy, and the War on Terror (Routledge Studies in Media, Communication, and Politics)
by Vaheed Ramazani
Drawing on psychoanalytic and semiotic perspectives, this book examines discourses mediating the global War on Terror, including governmental speeches, legal documents, print and broadcast journalism, and military memoirs. The book argues that these discourses motivate, and are motivated by, a myth of imminent harm that purportedly justifies a series of "preemptive" measures such as war, torture, and targeted killing, as well as an array of intrusive domestic security procedures such as profil...
A seasoned diplomat with deep knowledge of Islamist politics and digital innovation draws the first clear picture of the unprecedented impact of online networks Social media has dominated the discourse of recent events in the Muslim world—from the Arab Spring and its aftermath to ISIS’s online recruitment. Yet the roles of social media in these events and the use of the dark web, hacking, and digital attacks have received little attention. Haroon Ullah investigates the unprecedented impact o...
Palestinian Youth Activism in the Internet Age (SOAS Palestine Studies)
by Albana S. Dwonch
Since the Arab uprisings of 2011, Palestinian youth movements have formed unofficial and leaderless networks of political activism, using the internet to mobilise and bring together three generations of Palestinian activists. This book focuses on three key case studies that have marked a turning point in the development of youth-organised and grassroots Palestinian politics: the 15 March movement in Gaza, the Palestinians for Dignity movement in the West Bank, and the Prawer movement of young Pa...
This book is an exploration of the new forms of social movements and protests that are erupting in the world today, from the Arab uprisings to the indignadas movement in Spain, and the Occupy Wall Street movement in the US. While these and similar social movements differ in many important ways, there is one thing they share in common: they are all interwoven inextricably with the creation of autonomous communication networks supported by the Internet and wireless communication. In this timely...
United States of Distraction (City Lights Open Media)
by Mickey Huff and Nolan Higdon
A powerful critique of how manipulation of media gives rise to disinformation, intolerance, and divisiveness, and what can be done to change direction. "Mickey Huff and Nolan Higdon emphasize what we can do today to restore the power of facts, truth, and fair, inclusive journalism as tools for people to keep political and corporate power subordinate to the engaged citizenry and the common good."-Ralph Nader The role of news media in a free society is to investigate, inform, and provide a cruci...
Sleep-deprived reporters. Spin doctors. Deadlines. All constants in the world of television election reporting. But do they alone explain why television coverage of the 1992 presidential campaign looked the same night after night across the broadcast/cable media divide? Matthew Robert Kerbel says no, pointing instead to the shared interests and perspectives of news workers that bridge network differences. Edited for Television explores those common orientations as it tells the story of the 1992...
Media and Politics in Kurdistan (Kurdish Societies, Politics, and International Relations)
by Mohammedali Yaseen Taha
Media and Politics in Kurdistan studies the relationship between the media and politics in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq (KRI). KRI is approached as a case study, as an example of the struggle between authoritarian and democratization efforts at the same time. The book contributes towards understanding the dynamics of the media systems in the KRI and attempts to participate in the theoretical discussion of media and politics in this region. The research outcomes show which parts of the press, how...
Reimagining press freedom in a networked era: not just a journalist's right to speak but also a public's right to hear. In Networked Press Freedom, Mike Ananny offers a new way to think about freedom of the press in a time when media systems are in fundamental flux. Ananny challenges the idea that press freedom comes only from heroic, lone journalists who speak truth to power. Instead, drawing on journalism studies, institutional sociology, political theory, science and technology studies, and...
Nikki Haley has been widely hailed as an emerging force in American politics, her star power burnished over a decade that has seen her move from the national spotlight to the global stage. In Rising Star, political scientist Jason A. Kirk analyzes her ascendance in the Republican party, from her governorship of South Carolina as a woman of color—where she faced extraordinary challenges in a state reckoning with tragedy, race, and its own history—to her elevated profile as Donald Trump’s represen...
In this fascinating book, more relevant than ever in today's political climate of "alternative facts," bestselling author and historian Nathaniel Lande explores the Great War at the heart of the twentieth century through the prism of theater. He presents the war as a drama that evolved and developed as it progressed, a production staged and overseen by four contrasting masters: Roosevelt, Churchill, Hitler, and Stalin. Each leader used all the tools at his disposal to present his own distinctiv...
From the author hailed by the New York Times Book Review for his “drive-by brilliance” and dubbed by the New York Times Magazine as “one of the country’s most eloquent and acid-tongued critics” comes a ruthless challenge to the conventional wisdom about the most consequential cultural development of our time: the Internet. Of course the Internet is not one thing or another; if anything, its boosters claim, the Web is everything at once. It’s become not only our primary medium for communication...
The common critique of media- and ratings-driven politics envisions democracy falling hostage to a popularity contest. By contrast, the following book reconceives politics as a speculative Keynesian beauty contest that alienates itself from the popular audience it ceaselessly targets. Political actors unknowingly lean on collective beliefs about the popular expectations they seek to gratify, and thus do not follow popular public opinion as it is, but popular public opinion about popular public o...
From an Eastern nation on the global periphery to a European neoliberal democracy enmeshed in transnational networks, Poland has experienced a dramatic transformation in the last century. Polish Media Art in an Expanded Field uses the lens, and mirror, of media art to think through the politics of a post-socialist 'New Europe', where artists are negotiating the tension between global cosmopolitanism and national self-enfranchisement. Situating Polish media art practices in the context of Poland’...
An analysis that traces the role of digital technology in multiplying precarity.Technoprecarious advances a new analytic for tracing how precarity unfolds across disparate geographical sites and cultural practices in the digital age. Digital technologies—whether apps like Uber, built on flexible labor, or platforms like Airbnb that shift accountability to users—have assisted in consolidating the wealth and influence of a small number of players. These platforms have also exacerbated increasingly...
Global Media's Preternatural Influence on Global Technological Singularity, Culture and Government
It may be stipulated that, in the emergent media age of illusion, the scope of media issues is vast and pervasive in every field of scientific research as-well-as mystical philosophy. Issues of a "conscious universe", "universal fractal "sentience", and subjects of nanotechnology and the "Psychic paranormal" have begun to be understood as issues of the global media that have been subdivided into issues of "fake news", social media, propaganda, transpersonal psychology, human "embodiment", climat...
THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER A Times and Sunday Times Book of the Year Updated with a new afterword by the author 'Douglas Murray fights the good fight for freedom of speech ... A truthful look at today's most divisive issues' – Jordan B. Peterson '[Murray’s] latest book is beyond brilliant and should be read, must be read, by everyone' – Richard Dawkins Are we living through the great derangement of our times? In The Madness of Crowds Douglas Murray investigates the dangers of ‘woke...
This timely book investigates the fascinating landscape of media-driven politics through the prisms of 'public opinion', political campaigning, and audiences.From Indigenous voting rights and climate change to talkback radio and right-wing populism, Public Opinion, Campaign Politics & Media Audiences showcases new research in political science, history and media studies. Contributors scrutinise the relationship between polls, party policy and voting behaviour, and evaluate the roles of oratory a...
Since the Founding, America’s faith in a democratic republic has depended on citizens who could be trusted to be communicators. Vigorous talk about equality, rights, and collaboration fueled the revolution, the Declaration of Independence, and the Constitution with its amendments. In a republic, the people set the terms for their lives not individually, but in community. The genius of keeping it alive exists in how everyday citizens talk and listen, write and read, for a common good. Dialogue an...
Communication and Social Change (Global Media and Communication)
by Thomas Tufte
How do the communication practices of governments, NGOs and social movements enhance opportunities for citizen-led change? In this incisive book, Thomas Tufte makes a call for a fundamental rethinking of what it takes to enable citizens’ voices, participation and power in processes of social change. Drawing on examples ranging from the Indignados movement in Spain to media activists in Brazil, from rural community workers in Malawi to UNICEF’s global outreach programmes, he presents cutting-edge...
We are supposed to have more information at our disposal now than at any time in history. So why, in a world of rising sea levels, populist leaders, resurgent fascism and a global pandemic, do so many people believe bizarre and untrue things about the world we live in? In After the Fact?, Marcus Gilroy-Ware shows us what really created the conditions for mis- and disinformation, from fake news and conspiracy theories, to bullshit journalism and the resurgence of the far-right, and why liberal...
Is a new progressive era in American life in the offing? Only time will tell, but journalist Theodore Hamm suggests that a new progressive media has already arrived. Satirical, hard- charging and unapologetically progressive, this new media movement is both reinvigorating old forms like late-night TV and documentaries, and inventing new forms like the blogosphere. In a breezy, accessible style, Hamm traces the rise during the Bush years of new media stars: the news-saturated satire of The Onion,...