For centuries, democracy and development have steered the imagination of governments, citizens, intelligentsia and policymakers alike. Democracy without free media is a contradiction, while development without democracy is futile. Highlighting the power and significance of contemporary media, this book deconstructs news and news-making on Indian television. In exploring the concepts of ‘sense-making’ and ‘meaning-generation’, it examines how news and the dissemination of information and opinion influence the public sphere, participatory democracy, citizenship and civil society. Providing an original interpretation of the paradigmatic shifts in news content and newsroom practices, this book focuses on changing ownership patterns, increasing ‘entertainmentalization’ of news and the resultant ‘developmental reportage deficit’. At the same time, it confronts the uneasy and critical consequences of commercialization and rising sensationalism in news media. Finally, it discusses the role of Public Service Broadcasting, journalistic ethics, objectivity, and the politics of language and ideology in the media today, pointing to the need for greater diversity of content on the one hand and an emphasis on public interest in media policy-making, on the other. Drawing upon comprehensive empirical data, the democracy–media–development relationship is demonstrated through critical analyses of the media’s coverage of recent news events. This includes exhaustive content examination of news programmes on all major news channels of India, surveys with media experts and news professionals by way of questionnaires, and interviews with the audience to gauge the impact of media content on their understanding of social, political and economic issues. This volume will be especially useful to those in journalism, media and communication studies, as also to students of political science, sociology and economics.

Imagination and the Public Sphere is an interdisciplinary collection which explores the politics of identities and the equally challenging politics of social space, seeking the potential for authentic debate and dissent in a public sphere transformed by the mass media and consumer culture. Using both contemporary and historical examples, contributors to this volume address such intersecting, and at times competing, elements of lived experience and cultural practice as art and politics, celebrity culture and staged display, gender and religion, religion and science, religion and technology, and technology and teaching, aware of the dynamic interplays of expression and regulation and alert for the emergence of unanticipated ways of living and making meaningful connection. This collection asks, in an era that sees identities increasingly pre-packaged and lives thoroughly mediatized and multiply surveyed, what it means to have collectivity, collective life, and what it means to imagine new possibilities and perform them into being. It asks that we take part in addressing these questions together.

Publisher Description

Religion has had been foundational in shaping Italy. Home to the Vatican State, the Italian peninsula is the religious centre for one billion Catholics globally. It is also increasingly home to those of other faiths, especially Islam. Italy's development as a contemporary post-secular and multi-religious society is fraught and fascinating. The recent return of religious discourse from the margins of Western society to a central position is a sign of what German philosopher, J?rgen Habermas, has defined as the post-secular condition. Habermas and others have questioned what most people in the West had, up to a few years ago, taken for granted: the unstoppable forward march of secularization and the subsequent marginalization of religion. Instead, one of the greatest global fault-lines in the contemporary world - the divide between absolutist extremist Islamic faith and liberal, but Christian-inflected, secular values - has religious identity at its core. The first book-length study to examine religion in contemporary Italian cinema and television fiction, Screening Religions in Italy identifies two key issues: how Italian filmmaking constructs the continuing position of religion in the public sphere and why religion persists on Italian screens. It spans genres such as horror, comedy, hagiopics, and TV fiction, and explores both commercial and art-house filmmaking. It treats films and television series that range from Moretti's Habemus Papam to Sorrentino's The Young Pope.

A comprehensive assessment of European public opinion and biotechnology. It brings together comparative research on policy making, media coverage and public perceptions. This book is the major output from a three-year research initiative undertaken by an international, multidisciplinary team of social scientists. Following an introductory conceptualisation of biotechnology in the public sphere, Part Two brings together information on the policy activity, media coverage and public perceptions of biotechnology in European countries. Part Three is a detailed analysis of a major European survey of public perceptions. Part Four brings together the three elements of the research and provides a synthetic overview of the development of public perceptions of biotechnology in Europe.

Screening Protest brings together a range of scholarly perspectives on the study of protest mediations on television and in film. Arguing that the screen is a fruitful, if overlooked, analytical focus, the book explores how visual narratives of protest wander across borders – territorial, temporal and generic. Chapters compare coverage of major protests in recent history by global news channels like Al Jazeera English, BBC World, CNN International and RT. They consider how geopolitical agendas, newsroom culture and the ubiquity of eyewitness footage shape the narration of events such as the ‘Umbrella Revolution’ in Hong Kong, anti-austerity protests in Greece, pro-EU mobilizations in the Ukraine and clashes in Ferguson. A focus on narrative allows authors to compare such news stories with popular cultural depictions of the protester, in films and television series such as The Hunger Games, Robin Hood and Suffragette. Although focussed on the screen, the scope of the book is broad, given its exploration of images distributed worldwide. Written with both scholars and students in mind, Screening Protest will interest researchers in political science, sociology, media and film studies, as well as the general reader interested in current affairs.

(Dis)Orientation appears to be a phenomenon that is connected to media in numerous respects: today, finding your way in the world often means finding your way with the help of as well as within media, which in turn creates new virtual realms of (dis)orientation. This book deals with recent media technologies and structures (navigation devices, databases, transmediality) and unconventional narrative patterns (narrative complexity, plot twists, non-linearity), using the ambivalent concept of (dis)orientation as a shared focus to analyse various phenomena of contemporary media, thereby raising overarching questions about current mediascapes.

How can love be understood globally as a problematic transgression rather than the narrative of "happy endings" that Hollywood has offered? The contributors utilize varying methodologies of textual analysis, psychoanalytic models, and cultural critique and engage with a broad range of films to explore issues of gender identity and spectatorship.

Focusing on images of or produced by nineteenth-century European women, this volume explores genteel femininity as resistant to easy codification vis-à-vis the public. Attending to various iterations of the public as space, sphere and discourse, sixteen essays challenge the false binary construct that has held the public as the sole preserve of prosperous men. By considering works in a range of media by an array of canonical and understudied women artists, they demonstrate that definitions of both femininity and the public were mutually defining and constantly shifting.

Beginning in the late 1950s, representations of and narratives about sex proliferated on French and U.S. movie screens. Cinema began to display forms of sexuality that were no longer strictly associated with domesticity nor limited to heterosexual relations between loving couples. Women’s bodies and queer sexualities became intensely charged figures of political contestation, aspiration, and allegory, central to new ways of imagining sexuality and to new liberal understandings of individual freedom and social responsibility. In Making Sex Public Damon R. Young tracks the emergence of two conflicting narratives: on the one hand, a new model of sex as harmoniously integrated into civic existence; on the other, an idea of women’s and queer sexuality as corrosive to the very fabric of social life. Taking a transatlantic perspective from the late '50s through the present, from And God Created Woman and Barbarella to Cruising and Shortbus, Young argues that cinema participated in the transformation of the sexual subject while showing how women and queers were both agents and objects of that transformation.