Narrating Media History

Based on the work of media historian, James Curran, Narrating Media History explores British media history as a series of competing narratives. This unique and timely collection brings together leading international media history scholars, not only to identify and contrast the various interrelationships between media histories, but also to encourage dialogue between different historical, political, and theoretical perspectives including: liberalism, feminism, populism, nationalism, libertarianism, radicalism and technological determinism. Essays by distinguished academics cover television, radio, newspaper press and advertising (among others) and illustrate the particularities, affinities, strengths and weaknesses within media history. Each section includes a brief introduction by the editor, with discussion topics and suggestions for further reading, making this an invaluable guide for students of media history.

A sustained and systematic study of the construction, erosion and reconstruction of national histories across a wide variety of states is highly topical and extremely relevant in the context of the accelerating processes of Europeanization and globalization. However, as demonstrated in this volume, histories have not, of course, only been written by professional historians. Drawing on studies from a number of different European nation states, the contributors to this volume present a systematic exploration, of the representation of the national paradigm. In doing so, they contextualize the European experience in a more global framework by providing comparative perspectives on the national histories in the Far East and North America. As such, they expose the complex variables and diverse actors that lie behind the narration of a nation.

The Routledge Companion to British Media History provides a comprehensive exploration of how different media have evolved within social, regional and national contexts. The 50 chapters in this volume, written by an outstanding team of internationally respected scholars, bring together current debates and issues within media history in this era of rapid change, and also provide students and researchers with an essential collection of comparable media histories. The Routledge Companion to British Media History provides an essential guide to key ideas, issues, concepts and debates in the field. Chapter 40 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 3.0 license. https://www.routledgehandbooks.com/doi/10.4324/9781315756202.ch40

Media and Democracy addresses key topics and themes in relation to democratic theory, media and technology, comparative media studies, media and history, and the evolution of media research. Professor Curran’s response to these questions provides both a clear introduction to media research, written for university undergraduates studying in different countries, and an innovative analysis written by one of the field’s leading scholars.

Mediated Narration in the Digital Age examines mediated narration from 1991 through 2018. Peter Joseph Gloviczki considers this pivotal period spanning the rise of the World Wide Web through the growth of social media to understand how contemporary media accounts storied everyday life and times of crisis. He uses examples across media culture to show that complicated issues benefit from a critical poststructuralist approach to journalism, which promotes a communitarian ethos of respect, inclusion, and dialogue. Textual analysis of a wide range of media narratives--from a 2012 YouTube clip outlining a time line of the Sandy Hook school shootings, to coverage of then-newly-discovered footage of President Roosevelt in a wheelchair in 2013, to the Cincinnati Enquirer's 2017 piece "Seven Days of Heroin"--illustrate how theoretical concepts work in practice while explaining the new media environment. In response to the lack of awareness of news as mediated narration, Gloviczki calls for journalists to be aware of their role in meaning-making and the attendant ethical responsibilities. He provides the analysis essential to effective practice that emphasizes the connection between the individual and the community in order to more fully represent the mediated body.

The media have always played a central role in organising the way ideas flow through societies. But what happens when those ideas are disruptive to normal social relations? Bringing together work by scholars in history, media and cultural studies and sociology, this collection explores this role in more depth and with more attention paid to the complexities behind conventional analyses. Attention is paid to morality and regulation; empire and film; the role of women; authoritarianism; wartime and fears of treachery; and fears of cultural contamination. The book begins with essays that contextualise the theoretical and historiographical issues of the relationship between social fears, moral panics and the media. The second section provides case studies which illustrate the ways in which the media has participated in, or been seen as the source of, the creation of threats to society. Finally, the third section then shows how historical research calls into question simple assumptions about the relationship between the media and social disruption.

Ideologies have not been a focus of interest in the field of humanities and social sciences in recent decades, but rethinking the power of ideologies in the media sphere has recently returned to the scholarly discussion. The compilation book “Mediated Ideologies: Nordic Views on the History of the Press and Media Cultures” participates in this by providing selected yet justified approaches to media history from the point of view of ideological uses of media in the Nordic region. In this book, the role of media – comprising both popular media and news journalism – as a forum for ideologies and their circulation will be analyzed by focusing on the Nordic region. The perceived similarities in the media systems of the Nordic countries constitute a perfect extent for a regional media history against not only a European but also a global backdrop. This does not mean that there have not been many national differences. The book does not provide a chronological narrative of Nordic media history. Still, the ideology of media is approached not only from the standpoints of different media forms – film, television, newspapers, magazines, and periodicals – but also from several historical periods from the mid-19th century to the late 20th century. The chapters show the multidimensional role that the media has in transmitting ideologies to their audiences and the public sphere. They also demonstrate that analyzing the role of different ideologies, such as modernization, nationalism, solidarity, feminism, and peace movement in media history provides wider perspectives in understanding past and present media landscapes and people’s mediated experiences that are fostered by them. “Mediated Ideologies: Nordic Views on the History of the Press and Media Cultures” can be used both as a reference book and as a classroom adaption in the field of media, communication, and history studies.

This book showcases various ways in which digital archives allow for new approaches to journalism history. The chapters in this book were selected based on three overall objectives: 1) research that highlights specific concerns within journalism history through digital archives; 2) discussions of digital methodologies, as well as specific applications, that are accessible for journalism scholars with no prior experiences with such approaches; and 3) that journalism history and digital archives are connected in other ways than through specific methods, i.e., that the connection raises larger questions of historiography and power. The contributions address cases and developments in Asia, South and North America and Europe; and range from long-range, big-data, machine-leaning and topic modelling studies of journalistic characteristics and meta-journalistic discourses to critiques of archival practices and access in relation to gender, social movements and poverty. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Digital Journalism.