Civic activism for community access television in the US state of Maine

2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 135-152 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lyell Davies

For almost five decades Public, Educational and Governmental (PEG) TV has been a staple of US community media, providing a forum for the cablecast of locally made content and the expression of viewpoints unheard and unseen on commercial television. But PEG TV faces existential and other threats in the face of a neo-liberal attrition of non-commercial public arenas, policy deregulation and changes to the media marketplace. In this article, the volunteer-driven advocacy campaign on behalf of PEG TV launched in Maine after one of the cable corporations operating in this state sought to disenfranchise community access television by ‘slamming’ its channels is explored. How the campaign was able to mobilize and win support for its cause, leading to an eventual victory in Maine’s state legislature, is examined. This instance served as an important illustration of a media policy advocacy effort that targeted a US state’s law, rather than federal or local law, as is more commonly the case.

2021 ◽  
Vol 66 (1) ◽  
pp. 93-117
Author(s):  
Christian Henrich-Franke

Abstract The second half of the 20th century is commonly considered to be a time in which German companies lost their innovative strength, while promising new technologies presented an enormous potential for innovation in the US. The fact that German companies were quite successful in the production of medium data technology and had considerable influence on the development of electronic data processing was neglected by business and media historians alike until now. The article analyses the Siemag Feinmechanische Werke (Eiserfeld) as one of the most important producers of the predecessors to said medium data technologies in the 1950s and 1960s. Two transformation processes regarding the media – from mechanic to semiconductor and from semiconductor to all-electronic technology – are highlighted in particular. It poses the question of how and why a middling family enterprise such as Siemag was able to rise to being the leading provider for medium data processing office computers despite lacking expertise in the field of electrical engineering while also facing difficult location conditions. The article shows that Siemag successfully turned from its roots in heavy industry towards the production of innovative high technology devices. This development stems from the company’s strategic decisions. As long as their products were not mass-produced, a medium-sized family business like Siemag could hold its own on the market through clever decision-making which relied on flexible specialization, targeted license and patent cooperation as well as innovative products, even in the face of adverse conditions. Only in the second half of the 1960s, as profit margins dropped due to increasing sales figures and office machines had finally transformed into office computers, Siemag was forced to enter cooperation with Philips in order to broaden its spectrum and merge the production site in Eiserfeld into a larger business complex.


Pragmatics ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 111-136 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chihsia Tang

This research studied how English and Chinese speakers encode their criticisms in the media discourse, aiming to explore the correlation between the speakers’ applications of pragmalinguistic strategies and their sociocultural orientations. Criticisms analyzed in the present study were collected from evaluative communications elicited from the US-based talent competition Project Runway and the Taiwan-based talent competition Super Designer. The current analysis of the face attack act referred to Brown and Levinson’s politeness framework and face notion. The results showed different frequencies of criticizing strategies and redressive devices in the English and Chinese sub-corpora. In addition, the findings also manifested some cross-language variations in pragmalinguistic representation of the same criticizing strategy. The discrepancies were discussed from the perspective of context orientation of the American and Taiwanese societies, evidencing the strong linkage between the speakers’ communication patterns and the cultural norms of their social networks.


2009 ◽  
pp. 4-14 ◽  
Author(s):  
G. Gref ◽  
K. Yudaeva

Problems in the financial sector were at the core of the current economic crisis. Therefore, economic recovery will only become sustainable after taking care of the major weaknesses in the financial sector. This conclusion is relevant both for the US and UK - the two countries where crisis has started, and for other economies which financial institutions turned out to be fragile in the face of the swings in the risk appetite. Russia is one of the countries where the crisis has revealed serious deficiency in the financial sector. Our study of 11 banking crises during the last 25-30 years shows that sustainable economic recovery and decrease in the dependence on commodity prices will be virtually impossible without cleaning of balance sheets and capitalization of the financial sector.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Arathy Puthillam

That American and European participants are overrepresented in psychological studies has been previously established. In addition, researchers also often tend to be similarly homogenous. This continues to be alarming, especially given that this research is being used to inform policies across the world. In the face of a global pandemic where behavioral scientists propose solutions, we ask who is conducting research and on what samples. Forty papers on COVID-19 published in PsyArxiV were analyzed; the nationalities of the authors and the samples they recruited were assessed. Findings suggest that an overwhelming majority of the samples recruited were from the US and the authors were based in US and German institutions. Next, men constituted a large proportion of primary and sole authors. The implications of these findings are discussed.


Author(s):  
Chris Forster

Modernist literature is inextricable from the history of obscenity. The trials of such figures as James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, and Radclyffe Hall loom large in accounts of twentieth-century literature. Filthy Material: Modernism and the Media of Obscenity reveals the ways that debates about obscenity and literature were shaped by changes in the history of media. The emergence of film, photography, and new printing technologies shaped how “literary value” was understood, altering how obscenity was defined and which texts were considered obscene. Filthy Material rereads the history of modernist obscenity to discover the role played by technological media in debates about obscenity. The shift from the intense censorship of the early twentieth century to the effective “end of obscenity” for literature at the middle of the century was not simply a product of cultural liberalization but also of a changing media ecology. Filthy Material brings together media theory and archival research to offer a fresh account of modernist obscenity with novel readings of works of modernist literature. It sheds new light on figures at the center of modernism’s obscenity trials (such as Joyce and Lawrence), demonstrates the relevance of the discourse of obscenity to understanding figures not typically associated with obscenity debates (such as T. S. Eliot and Wyndham Lewis), and introduces new figures to our account of modernism (such as Norah James and Jack Kahane). It reveals how modernist obscenity reflected a contest over the literary in the face of new media technologies.


2021 ◽  
pp. 174804852199056
Author(s):  
Baruch Shomron ◽  
Amit Schejter

This study examines how media representations of Palestinian-Israeli politicians, can help community members realize their capabilities. The study’s database is comprised of 1,207 interviews conducted with Palestinian-Israeli politicians on news and current affairs programs on the three national television channels and the two national radio stations in Israel, for 24 months (2016-2017). We identified and analyzed the differences in the modes of representation between national and local Palestinian-Israeli politicians and between Palestinian-Israeli parliament members in the Joint List and Palestinian-Israeli parliament members in Zionist parties, all through the capabilities prism. In this study, we demonstrated how different types of Palestinian-Israeli politicians may potentially affect the realization of different political functions and capabilities. Analyzing political representations in the media through the theoretical framework of the ‘capabilities approach’ contributes to a more comprehensive insight into the roles the media can play promoting people’s wellbeing and human rights, relative to traditional media theories.


Journalism ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 146488492110017
Author(s):  
Omega Douglas

Over 100 British journalists of colour are signatories to an open letter demanding the US Ambassador to the UK condemns the arrest of African-American journalist, Omar Jimenez, on May 29th 2020, whilst he was reporting for CNN on the Minneapolis protests following the police killing of George Floyd. The letter is a vital act of black transatlantic solidarity during a moment when journalism is under threat, economically and politically, and there’s a pandemic of racism in the west. These factors make journalism challenging for reporters from racial minorities, who are already underrepresented in western newsrooms and, as this paper shows, encounter discrimination in the field, as well as within the institutions they work for. The letter speaks to how black British journalists are all too aware that the British journalistic field, like the American one, has a race problem, and institutional commitments to diversity often don’t correspond with the experiences of those included, impacting negatively on the retention of black journalists. Drawing on original interviews with 26 journalists of colour who work for Britain’s largest news organisations, this paper theoretically grounds empirical findings to illustrate why and how discriminatory patterns, as well as contradictions, occur and recur in British news production.


2020 ◽  
Vol 33 (3) ◽  
pp. 541-555
Author(s):  
Juan Pablo Scarfi

AbstractThe Monroe Doctrine was originally formulated as a US foreign policy principle, but in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries it began to be redefined in relation to both the hemispheric policy of Pan-Americanism and the interventionist policies of the US in Central America and the Caribbean. Although historians and social scientists have devoted a great deal of attention to Latin American anti-imperialist ideologies, there was a distinct legal tradition within the broader Latin American anti-imperialist traditions especially concerned with the nature and application of the Monroe Doctrine, which has been overlooked by international law scholars and the scholarship focusing on Latin America. In recent years, a new revisionist body of research has emerged exploring the complicity between the history of modern international law and imperialism, as well as Third World perspectives on international law, but this scholarship has begun only recently to explore legal anti-imperialist contributions and their legacy. The purpose of this article is to trace the rise of this Latin American anti-imperialist legal tradition, assessing its legal critique of the Monroe Doctrine and its implications for current debates about US exceptionalism and elastic behaviour in international law and organizations, especially since 2001.


2018 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 222-231
Author(s):  
V.S. Pai

Maggi was the most popular instant noodles brand in India, which children in particular loved to snack on. The brand had a dominant position until suddenly in mid-2015 it got engulfed in controversy. Several state food regulators found that Maggi contained monosodium glutamate as well as lead well above the prescribed limits. Both these substances were harmful especially for children. When Nestlé India was confronted with lab test results it stuck to its position that they had a world class quality control process in place and that their products were safe for consumption. Finally, the national food regulator FSSAI, ordered a ban on the sale of Maggi including product recall. Consequently, several state governments imposed temporary ban on the sale of Maggi noodles in their respective states. The future of the company suddenly looked very bleak. Nestlé India was slow to respond to this fast unfolding crisis. Further, their responses were very brief and not adequately culture-sensitive. This led to the feeling in several quarters that the company was probably guilty of wrongdoing. To set right things Nestlé's worldwide CEO flew into India to douse the flames of the controversy and draw up an appropriate strategy to bail out the brand. He address the media, put in place a new CEO for Nestlé India and set brand Maggi on the path of recovery. However, Nestlé India was still facing a number of critical issues. What should be done to win over the trust of its customers? How should it recover market share lost to competitors both old rivals and new entrants? What strategy should it develop to succeed with the new products, especially hot heads, launched along with the comeback strategy? Should it change its approach to dealing with government health officials to prevent confrontations in future? How should it shorten the response time and make it effective in the face of a media backed public outcry in future?


2014 ◽  
Vol 652 (1) ◽  
pp. 206-221
Author(s):  
Anton Harber

Two decades of contestation over the nature and extent of transformation in the South African news media have left a sector different in substantive ways from the apartheid inheritance but still patchy in its capacity to fill the democratic ideal. Change came fast to a newly open broadcasting sector, but has faltered in recent years, particularly in a public broadcaster troubled by political interference and poor management. The potential of online media to provide much greater media access has been hindered by the cost of bandwidth. Community media has grown but struggled to survive financially. Print media has been aggressive in investigative exposé, but financial cutbacks have damaged routine daily coverage. In the face of this, the government has turned its attention to the print sector, demanding greater—but vaguely defined—transformation and threatened legislation. This has met strong resistance.


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