Media Nation

From the creation of newspapers with national reach in the late nineteenth century to the lightning-fast dispatches and debates of today's Internet, the media have played an enormous role in modern American politics. Scholars of political history universally concede the importance of this relationship yet have devoted scant attention to its development during the past century. Even as mass media have largely replaced party organizations as the main vehicles through which politicians communicate with and mobilize citizens, little historical scholarship traces the institutional changes, political organizations, and media structures that underlay this momentous shift. With Media Nation, editors Bruce J. Schulman and Julian E. Zelizer seek to bring the media back to the center of scholarship on the history of the United States since the Progressive Era. The book's revealing case studies examine key moments and questions within the evolution of the media from the early days of print news through the era of television and the Internet, including battles over press freedom in the early twentieth century, the social and cultural history of news reporters at the height of the Cold War, and the U.S. government's abandonment of the Fairness Doctrine and the consequent impact on news production, among others. Although they cover a diverse array of subjects, the book's contributors cohere around several critical ideas, including how elites interact with media, how key policy changes shaped media, and how media institutions play an important role in shaping society's power structure. Highlighting some of the most exciting voices in media and political history, Media Nation is a field-shaping volume that offers fresh perspectives on the role of mass media in the evolution of modern American politics. Contributors: Kathryn Cramer Brownell, David Greenberg, Julia Guarneri, Nicole Hemmer, Richard R. John, Sam Lebovic, Kevin Lerner, Kathryn J. McGarr, Matthew Pressman, Emilie Raymond, Michael Schudson, Bruce J. Schulman, Julian E. Zelizer.

Around the planet, Indigenous people are using old and new technologies to amplify their voices and broadcast information to a global audience. This is the first portrait of a powerful international movement that looks both inward and outward, helping to preserve ancient languages and cultures while communicating across cultural, political, and geographical boundaries. Based on more than twenty years of research, observation, and work experience in Indigenous journalism, film, music, and visual art, this volume includes specialized studies of Inuit in the circumpolar north, and First Nations peoples in the Yukon and southern Canada and the United States.

Media Nation brings together some of the most exciting voices in media and political history to present fresh perspectives on the role of mass media in the evolution of modern American politics. Together, these contributors offer a field-shaping work that aims to bring the media back to the center of scholarship modern American history.

This book examines the historical development of Korean food TV and its articulation of Koreanness in the era of globalization. Jaehyeon Jeong defines the evolution of Korean food TV as an outcome of the conjuncture between the television industry’s structural changes, the shift in food’s landscape and cultural legitimacy, and various sociocultural, political, and economic transformations. In addition, Jeong reveals how the state appropriates the banality of food to raise South Korea’s global image and how it utilizes domestic television to disseminate statist discourse of the nation. Understanding discourses of national cuisine as reflective of and formative of discourses of the nation, he argues that the growth of discourses of national cuisine is symptomatic of the struggle for nationness in a globalized world.

Building on the growing body of theoretical literature on the gendered nature of nationalism, this book offers a systematic examination of similarities and differences in the construction of gender and national identities in post-communist societies of Eastern and East Central Europe as well as established and the more stable democracies of Western Europe. It points to some of the key sources of inevitable tensions in the future united Europe, which stem from different perceptions of national and gender roles in different parts of the continent.

"While much has been written about the growing influence of television and the Internet on modern warfare, little is known about the relationship between media and nation building. This book explores, for the first time, this relationship by means of a paradigmatic case of successful nation building: Malaysia. Based on extended fieldwork and historical research, the author follows the diffusion, adoption, and social uses of media among the Iban of Sarawak, in Malaysian Borneo and demonstrates the wide-ranging process of nation building that has accompanied the adoption of radio, clocks, print media, and television."--BOOK JACKET.

Despite the fact that nationalism and its national projects have in recent years been severely criticised by postcolonial theorists for being fundamentalist and essentialist; by feminists for being patriarchal and exclusive; by global financial institutions for being antagonistic to development and globalisation; by Pan-Africanists for being anticontinental unity; and by those Africans born after decolonisation for being irrelevant; Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni and Finex Ndhlovu's book convincingly argues that nationalism has defied its death and displayed remarkable resilience and resonance. Since the end of the Cold War, what has been poignant has been the enduring contest, tensions and contradictions between the growth of various forms of transnationalism on the one hand and a resurgence of territorial as well as other narrow and xenophobic forms of nationalism on the other. In this important book, Ndlovu-Gatsheni and Ndhlovu provide new critical reflections on nationalism and its national projects in southern Africa covering South Africa, Zimbabwe and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC, a member of SADC). The national question is interrogated from different disciplinary vantage points to reveal how it impinges on contemporary challenges of nation-building, development, devolution of power, language questions, and citizenship on the one hand and ethnicity, nativism and xenophobia on the other.

How do videos, movies and documentaries dedicated to indigenous communities transform the media landscape of South Asia? Based on extensive original research, this book examines how in South Asia popular music videos, activist political clips, movies and documentaries about, by and for indigenous communities take on radically new significances. Media, Indigeneity and Nation in South Asia shows how in the portrayal of indigenous groups by both ‘insiders’ and ‘outsiders’ imaginations of indigeneity and nation become increasingly interlinked. Indigenous groups, typically marginal to the nation, are at the same time part of mainstream polities and cultures. Drawing on perspectives from media studies and visual anthropology, this book compares and contrasts the situation in South Asia with indigeneity globally. Chapter 1 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivatives (CC-BY-ND) 4.0 license.