The New Media Nation

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.

The second generation of Aspers that now runs Canada's largest news media company is much like the first. Israel "Izzy" Asper's three children often appear in today's headlines. David is bidding to buy the Winnipeg Blue Bombers football team. Gail heads fundraising efforts for the new Canadian Museum of Human Rights. Leonard sits in his father's place as head of CanWest Global Communications. Like its founder, they also use their media empire to influence public opinion. Asper Nation explains why Canadians should be concerned about where the country's first family of news media is coming from, politically. Izzy Asper was an oddity as a Liberal politician in the 1970s. Fiscally, he was to the right of most Conservatives. As a nationally syndicated newspaper columnist, he called for a flat tax and "workfare." As a best-selling author, he helped thwart a plan to shift Canada's tax burden from the middle class onto corporations. But when Asper took his policies to Manitobans as Liberal leader in 1973, he was soundly defeated. Asper got into the television business instead and built Canada's third network. Asper made CanWest the country's most profitable broadcaster by feasting on regulations that encouraged the importation of cheap American programming. He took his formula to the world in the 1990s, buying television networks in New Zealand, Australia, and Ireland. Then in 2000, Asper pioneered media "convergence," buying Canada's largest newspaper chain from Conrad Black. Southam dailies were soon ordered to run "national" editorials written at CanWest Global headquarters in Winnipeg. This corporate news control brought protest from journalists and two government inquiries. Neither resulted in long-sought limits on media ownership, however. Marc Edge offers a compelling account of the political perils involved in allowing the Asper family to dominate Canadian media.

In the four decades or so since its invention, the internet has become pivotal to how many societies function, influencing how individual citizens interact with and respond to their governments. Within Southeast Asia, while most governments subscribe to the belief that new media technological advancement improves their nation’s socio-economic conditions, they also worry about its cultural and political effects. This book examines how this set of dynamics operates through its study of new media in contemporary Malaysian society. Using the social imaginary framework and adopting a socio-historical approach, the book explains the varied understandings of new media as a continuing process wherein individuals and their societies operate in tandem to create, negotiate and enact the meaning ascribed to concepts and ideas. In doing so, it also highlights the importance of non-users to national technological policies. Through its examination of the ideation and development of Malaysia’s Multimedia Super Corridor mega project to-date and reference to the seminal socio-political events of 2007-2012 including the 2008 General Elections, Bersih and Hindraf rallies, this book provides a clear explanation for new media’s prominence in the multi-ethnic and majority Islamic society of Malaysia today. It is of interest to academics working in the field of Media and Internet Studies and Southeast Asian Politics.

What does it mean to watch two-hour long news programmes every evening? Why are some people 'addicted' to the news while others prefer to switch off? Television is an indispensable part of the fabric of modern life and this book investigates a facet of this process: its impact on the ways that we experience the political entity of the nation and our national and transnational identities. Drawing on anthropological, social and media theory and grounded on a two-year original ethnography of television news viewing in Athens, the book offers a fresh, interdisciplinary perspective in understanding the media/identity relationship. Starting from a perspective that examines identities as lived and as performed, the book follows the circulation of discourses about the nation and belonging and contrasts the articulation of identities at a local level with the discourses about the nation in the national television channels. The book asks: whether, and in what ways does television influence identity discourses and practices? When do people contest the official discourses about the nation and when do they rely on them? Do the media play a role in relation to inclusion and exclusion from public life, particularly in the case of minorities? The book presents a compelling account of the contradictory and ambivalent nature of national and transnational identities while developing a nuanced approach to media power. It is argued that although the media do not shape identities in a causal way, they do contribute in creating common communicative spaces which often catalyse feelings of belonging or exclusion. The book claims a place in the emerging sub-field of media anthropology and represents the new generation of audience research that places media consumption in the wider social, economic and political context.

"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.

In an updated study, a conservative spokesperson and author of Tales from the Left Coast offers an insightful look at how the line between news and entertainment has become blurred, as well as how the situation has allowed the liberal media to present their political views within entertainment product. Reprint. 15,000 first printing.