Comedy Cameos And Campaign Communication

This book provides a thorough foundation for understanding the shift from political campaigning via legacy news media to campaigning through entertainment media. Public discourse that would once transpire on the newsprint of opinion pages or behind a news anchor’s desk and teleprompter is now happening through talk shows and sitcoms, celebrity partnerships and influencer accounts, memes and streams, video games, branded merchandise, and social media. Here, Turcotte explores how media consumption habits have reshaped contemporary campaign norms and shifted strategies for seeking public office and advancing policy goals. He shows how candidates are incorporating entertainment media in their strategic campaigns, moving beyond satirical programs to demonstrate a multi-pronged approach to campaign communication in the entertainment environment. With a compelling introduction to these campaign shifts and an examination of tangible applications, this text is suitable for scholars as well as students in both political science and mass communication courses, particularly courses in political communication and strategic communication.

"This book provides a thorough foundation for understanding the shift from political campaigning via legacy news media to campaigning through entertainment media. Public discourse that would once transpire on the newsprint of opinion pages or behind a news anchor's desk and teleprompter are now happening through talk shows and sitcoms, celebrity partnerships and influencer accounts, memes and streams, video games, branded merchandise, and social media. Here Turcotte explores how media consumption habits have reshaped contemporary campaign norms and shifted strategies for seeking public office and advancing policy goals. He shows how candidates are incorporating entertainment media in their strategic campaigns, moving beyond satirical programs to demonstrate a multi-pronged approach to campaign communication in the entertainment environment. With a compelling introduction to these campaign shifts and an examination of tangible applications, this text is suitable for scholars as well as students in both political science and mass communication courses, particularly courses in political communication and strategic communication"--

This book focuses on Australian mainstream media narratives about the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) from 2013 to 2020. Set against the background of Sino-Australian relations and taking into account the different media systems of China and Australia, this book also critically investigates the Chinese public diplomacy narratives of the BRI. Drawing on my analysis and semi-structured interviews with prominent experts in this area, the book addresses an important but under-explored question: how have Australian mainstream media narratives portrayed the BRI of the Chinese Government from 2013 to 2020? This book fills a gap regarding the portrayal of the BRI in Australian mainstream media and provides new insights into the reasons for narrative shifts in the coverage of the BRI. More concretely, the book finds that the public diplomacy narratives of the BRI were not explained well by Chinese officials, thus allowing Australian journalists and commentators to project their own negative, fearful narratives of China onto the BRI project, particularly from 2017 onwards. More importantly, this book argues that the Australian Federal Government’s policy towards China had a significant impact on the Australian media’s coverage of the BRI; that the media clearly followed the Australian Federal Government’s lead, and not vice versa. Thus, in many ways, Australian mainstream media narratives of the BRI have had a similar outcome as China’s ostensibly much more restrictive and propagandistic state-dominated media system. Noticeably, this book not only has academic significance in the international research community but also holds practical importance in the real world, benefiting Australian business leaders, media professionals, think tank specialists, and policymakers.

This collection reaches beyond fake news and propaganda, beyond misinformation and charismatic liars, to explore the lesser-publicized cultural forms and practices that serve as a cultural infrastructure for post-truth society and politics. Situating post-truth in specific contexts as a site of contestation or crisis, the book critically explores it as a dynamic and shifting site around which political and cultural practices in specific contexts revolve and overlap. Through a breadth of perspectives, the volume considers a number of overlapping cultural and political developments across varying national and transnational contexts: changing technologies and practices of cultural production that sometimes shift and at other times reproduce authority of traditional institutional truth-tellers; seismic cultural changes in representations, values and roles regarding gender, sexuality, race and historical memory about them, as well as corresponding reactionary discourses in the “culture wars”; questions of authenticity, honesty, and power relations that combine many of the former shifts within an all-encompassing culture of (self-) promotional, attentional capitalism. These considerations lead scholars to focus on corresponding shifting cultural dynamics of popular truth-telling and (dis-) trust-making that inform political culture. In this more global view, post-truth becomes foremost an influentially anxious public mood about the struggles to secure or undermine publicly accepted facts. This nuanced and insightful collection will interest scholars and students of communication studies, media and cultural studies, media ethics, journalism, media literacy, sociology, anthropology, philosophy, and politics.

Through its global and critical perspectives, this book brings together knowledge, ideas, and tools to understand the problems and identify effective solutions, best practices and alternative approaches to combat xenophobia in the media and build tolerance and social cohesion. Although various studies have been conducted on the extent to which the media construct xenophobic discourse against immigrants and refugees and how they represent immigrants, there exists a research lacuna as to the dynamics of the xenophobia construction in the media, the effect of xenophobic discourse of the media and its function, the nexus between xenophobia construction of the media and the social, economic and political conditions, and the impact of the xenophobic discourse of the media on immigrants and host communities. This book adds knowledge and empirical evidence to fill this research gap. This book will be an important resource for journalists, scholars and students of media and communication studies, journalism, political science, sociology, and anyone covering issues of race and racism, human rights, immigration and refugees.

This volume examines the global media coverage of the armed conflict in Ukraine, focusing on the marginalization of dissident perspectives in the West and the information quality and diversity on social media. Along with presenting original, empirical studies on how mainstream media in countries as diverse as Israel, the Czech Republic, Ghana, and the Netherlands have covered the conflict between NATO and Russia since 2022, this book sheds light on the role of the state and the media in policing the boundaries of permissible thought on the conflict in the West, as well as in Russia and Ukraine. It also delves into the war’s representation on prominent social media platforms. Written by a diverse group of international researchers, this multifaceted volume offers new perspectives and insights on the reporting of the ongoing conflict. It will interest scholars of international communication and media, foreign policy and international politics, war and conflict, content analysis, and journalism.

From Legacy Media to Going Viral: Generational Media Use and Citizen Engagement examines how the prominent media available shapes each rising generation of citizens. The authors discuss how global and national events along with the media each generational group most frequently accessed defined these groups. Drawing on interdisciplinary social science insights into social media and civic and political engagement, the book contextualizes the civic and political rise of the Millennials and Gen Z with comparative insights from Gen X and the Baby Boomers. With a focus on emergent patterns of American citizenship, the authors examine issues such as a decline in social trust, new and sustained patterns of civic and political engagement and the continuing importance of political consumerism. Looking beyond the impact of media on youth and issues of civic and political generational change, this book explores how the media accessible to each American generation contributes to that generation’s collective experience, thus solidifying their civic and political attitudes. The book will be of interest to students and scholars concerned with civic and political engagement, political consumerism and media use, in the areas of media studies, advertising, communication, journalism, political science and sociology.

Combining theoretical and practical information, this book presents a holistic overview of refugee settlement in Australia. It focuses on numerous critical aspects of refugee settlement which play a vital role in refugee integration into Australia. Starting with an overview of immigration history in Australia, the book then places an emphasis on 21st-century settlement of refugees. The chapters explore a gamut of topics including how culture is transmitted in refugee families, how media portrays refugees, and how to work with refugee communities in various contexts, without focusing on one specific refugee cohort/country group. This interdisciplinary angle is presented via the inclusion of voices from interviews with key refugee settlement providers, educators, former refugees, researchers, and second-generation youth from refugee backgrounds. It covers current Australia political debate and politicisation of refugees, digital technologies, the role of language in enabling successful settlement, education trajectories, social cohesion, the fractured diasporic family, and the impact of media coverage, which underpin the settlement of refugees in Australia. This is an ideal resource for advanced undergraduates, postgraduates, and scholars of refugee settlement in the disciplines of communication, media, politics and international relations, social work, education, and demographic studies, as well as government entities, policy makers, service providers, and NGOs looking to gain an understanding of the factors impacting refugee settlement in Australia.