Battleground+the+media+Notes

CD McLean's Notes on the book: Battleground: The Media edited by Robin Andersen and Jonathan Gray.

The editors are looking at media studes as an interdisciplinary field of study, which ties into our desires completely. I think that these two volumes fit into our needs very well, particularly Jaimie's needs for writing assignments for AP Lang, as we can use the Table of Contents for her students to draw topics from. The essays are broken out into main topic, side bars, brief backgrounds, conclusions, and further readings. The students could easily be assigned to go get some of those further readings and then to compare and contrast or to analyse and compare with their own thoughts and see where their ideas fit on the spectrum.

Interesting quote from Al-jazeera essay p. 19 "All media have inherent biases, and all news is manufactured to appeal to a certain audience. That is why people prefer one network over another. But the question is: how do networks strike the balance that provides audiences with a true representation of real events while still appealing to public sensibilities?"

There were several essays in particular that I thought that we would be interested in:


 * Al-Jazeera: 40 million arab viewers world wide. launched in Qatar on 11-1-96. article has a timeline. is now 24/7. also launched an english language network called al-jazeera international (aji) on 11-15-06 poses the first "serious challenge to the censorial culture of the political and media resporaint in the Arab world." It airs live talk shows. Essay says that AlJazeera is contextually objective, "which deomonstrates the hybrid struggle between attaining objectivity in news covereage by covering all sides of the story while appealing to network audiences through contextualization. Contextualization demonstrates a situational perspective, allowing for sensitivity to the environment in which the netowrk is broadcasting." (p18) the network's motto is The Opinion and the Other Opinion.
 * Bias and Objectivity
 * Blogosphere: Politics and Internet Journalism
 * Communication Rights in a Global Context
 * Global Community Media
 * Government Censorship and Freedom of Speech
 * Islam and the Media
 * Media and Citzenship
 * Media and Crisis of Values
 * Media and Electoral Campaigns
 * Media Literacy: Creating Better Citizens or Better Consumers
 * Media Reform
 * Media Watch Groups
 * News Satire: Comed Central and Beyond

Volume 2 only had one essay on youth and the media, but it wasn't all that interesting as we have read all the info elsewhere.