Russian repression grows despite regime stability

Significance 'Foreign agent', 'undesirable organisation' and 'extremist' designations have become the standard mechanisms for squeezing investigative journalists, independent media and other government critics. They are also an attack on Western values as they stigmatise contact with the world outside Russia as subservience to malign external influence. Impacts Repressive laws are used to justify Moscow's aversion to the West and liberal values. Legislation has multiplier effects since 'untainted' media can break the rules by quoting a designated organisation. The ongoing crackdown on domestic critics will be damaging for Russia's economic and investment attractiveness.

Who gets the rights to newsgathering? Media credentialing and press freedom in Hong Kong, Taiwan and Malaysia

Purpose Against the background of the 2019 anti-extradition bill protests, this paper aims to examine the legal-political negotiations over equal press rights in Hong Kong, focusing specifically on “the rights to newsgathering” – the rights of all journalistic actors to get access to certain places and events to collect first-hand news information, such as on the streets, during protests and in government events. Design/methodology/approach This paper adopts a comparative approach to the question of equal press rights by comparing Hong Kong’s situations with those of Taiwan and Malaysia. Drawing upon secondary sources such as existing studies and news archives, this paper attempts to delineate the legal-political negotiations over equal press rights in the three places in the past two decades. Findings This paper finds that in Hong Kong, there are signs of increasing suppression of press rights amidst the city’s authoritarian backlash in recent years. While the Hong Kong Government was willing to broaden the rights of online independent media a few years back, it has started to tighten its control over them after the 2019 anti-extradition bill protests. Without a constitutional guarantee of equal press rights, it remains to be seen how the online independent media would fare in the future, especially after the introduction of the national security law. Originality/value While Hong Kong is home to a variety of non-mainstream media, the issue of their press status has remained largely unrecognized by the public. This paper pays attention to this understudied yet important issue.

Crowdfunding for Independent Print Media: E-Commerce, Marketing, and Business Development

Crowdfunding, as an alternative method to fundraising, triggers increased awareness in society, while it is also an effective marketing tool for campaign runners. The production and release of independent print media poses significant hurdles in terms of financing. Including the community in raising funds through crowdfunding seems like a good possible alternative. This paper examines which types of crowdfunding the independent print media use, and why, and also focuses on the possible types of crowdfunding that are the best fit for organizations. The study applies a case example approach on a total of thirty independent print publications that have relied on crowdfunding. We found that independent print media focus on reward-based crowdfunding for the launch of publications, the method being not used solely for fundraising, but also specifically for community building. Practitioners benefit from the insights by being enabled to draft campaigns that are better-suited to the specific needs of the independent media target group, and to secure financing for the start of the operations. The approach of this study is of special value, as the research and empirical insights into the independent media sector are limited.

Visions of Europe in Crisis: Strategic narratives and their alternatives in Russian state and independent media coverage of the 2015-16 ‘Refugee Crisis’

What stories do states tell about themselves and their neighbours, and how are these narratives challenged? This study takes the case of the European ‘refugee crisis’ of 2015-2016, a period of hostile relations between Russia and the European Union, to examine the vision of Europe disseminated by Russian state-controlled media, and the alternative offered by independent media. It analyses 609 news reports on the ‘refugee crisis’ from state-controlled broadcaster Channel One and 181 news pieces from the independent web-based outlet TV Rain. Adopting the strategic narrative framework proposed by Miskimmon, O’Loughlin and Roselle (2013), this study both provides new detail on the narratives found on Russian state-controlled media, and asks the previously unresearched question: how do independent media outlets react to the dominant narratives seen on state broadcasters? It uses a grounded theory approach to elaborate new findings on the behaviour of independent media. The importance of independent media has traditionally been understood in terms of its ability to hold government to account, but the findings of this study suggest independent media can also act as a watchdog and corrective to state-controlled media. This study thus contributes to the literature on both strategic narratives, and media theory.

MEMEING AGAINST MAINSTREAM. AN ANALYSIS OF DANK MEMES AND THE PICTORIAL (COUNTER-)PRACTICES OF MEME CULTURE

Internet memes are now part of mainstream media culture. On social media, each day memes are created, consumed, and shared by millions of people. Advertising agencies create their own memes to promote brands and products. However, memes are also integral to subcultures on 4chan, Reddit, and Tumblr, where most memes originate from. These subcultures battle the mainstreamization of memes to protect the independent media making practice of memeing from outsiders, who they call ‘normies.’ Their weapon of choice are so-called ‘dank memes,’ which are self-reflexive internet memes that criticize mainstream memes and memeing. This critique is a form of visual vernacular criticism, which is highly understudied, especially in regard to digital metapictures such as dank memes. The question this paper wants to answer is: how are dank memes made and employed to reclaim the independent media making practice of memeing from mainstream and marketing culture? The focus lies on specific pictorial practices that counteract the popularization and commercialization of internet memes. To explore these counter-practices, the paper proposes a methodology that combines media philosophy with practice theory to stress that digital metapictures themselves such as dank memes hold knowledge about the media practices that mainstream memes are made of, and about how to counteract them. To explore this media knowledge, examples of the meta-meme $2 are closely examined in the context of the subreddit r/dankmemes. The conducted picture practice analysis suggests that dank memes oppose image macros, while being criticized themselves as mere shibboleths to meme culture.

Documentary Photography and Protest under Chile’s Dictatorship

An array of documentary photographic practices that emerged during the dictatorship in Chile (1973–1990) remain understudied, despite their political, aesthetical, and historical import. From the mid-1970s onward, these different practices served different purposes: some made visible the crime of disappearance and its disavowal by the repressive state; others stood as supplementary evidence that confirmed the legal existence of the detained-disappeared; some were a crucial force in denouncing state repression and demanding justice for victims; and some made it possible for independent media to simultaneously comply with and ridicule the censorship of images imposed by the dictatorship in 1984. These practices also helped to consolidate the expanding photographic field under dictatorship. They include the public display of ID photos and portraits torn from family albums; documentary images that relatives of the victims of repression pinned to their chests; the reproduction, compilation, and incorporation of these portraits into legal files and habeas corpus claims; the publication of countless photos of popular protests in independent media; and different photographic initiatives put forward by a group of photographers who established the Independent Photographers Association in 1981. Notably, the expanding photographic field under dictatorship engaged not only individuals and groups directly involved with photography but also ad-hoc human rights collectives and organizations (especially the Group of Family Members of the Detained-Disappeared and the Vicariate of Solidarity), as well as lawyers, judges, journalists, and everyday users of photography. Given the different arenas in which documentary images circulated, the transformations they underwent to resist repression and censorship, and the array of individuals involved in their (re)production and dissemination, a study of documentary photography under dictatorship in Chile cannot content itself, as has been the case, with surveying the practices that emerged within the artistic field. A study of the visual culture under dictatorship instead reveals both the different uses of photography in the public space and the transformations of documentary images in their successive circulations and disseminations.

Marginalizing the Victim and the Political Body of the People

The article examines Judith Butler’s performative approach to the concept of the people, which allows to not only outline the boundaries of a certain model of political theology, so important for conservative political thought, but to also see the significance born by the acts of entry by collective bodies into public space. In this context, the figure of the victim can have a consolidating function, being the potentially affectively condensed point of the collective body’s assembling. The marginalization of the victim’s body is analyzed through the concept of the politics of grief and that of ungrievable lives. The victim’s marginalization is shown to be a multidimensional phenomenon. Not only the victim, but also the criminal can be marginalized, as well as various circumstances of catastrophic events and acts of violence. Examples taken from the Russian news in recent years illustrate how important the independent media audience’s perception of victims are: whether they perceive the victims they are informed about as marginal or as pertinent to their own lives and identities, whether the audience is ready to shift the boundaries toward greater inclusivity and to reinstate

Serbs will vote in 2022 with few independent media

Significance The government's tightening grip on the media is part of efforts by the ruling elite to prepare for elections in spring or summer 2022. Recent media market entrant Euronews is only notionally independent: its franchise operation in Serbia is a joint venture with the state telecoms company. Meanwhile, pressures have increased on CNN-affiliated news programme N1. Impacts Neutralising independent media outlets gives room to government-linked tabloids and private TVs to spread misinformation. Telekom Srbija’s involvement with Euronews may contravene a legal ban on state ownership of the media. Under increased pressure in the region, UG may diversify its operations further afield, having bid for RTL Lux in Luxembourg. Serbia's EU accession bid, already on hold, will be further hampered by increasing government media capture and state capture more widely.

Indie Cinema and the Short Film Assemblage

Dewi pulang (Dewi goes home), the 2016 short film by Candra Aditya, offers a means to redefine the meaning of independence for contemporary Indonesian screen production. In the years of Reformasi following the end of the New Order, to be independent was to be in solidarity with the reform movement, and to express a DIY sensibility that did not rely on big production companies or the state. In recent years, the meaning of independence has been complicated by a changing cultural economy of film, including the accommodation of many previously independent filmmakers into the mainstream. Rather than seeing independence embodied in the film or filmmaker, this essay considers the history of short film and the foundational role of komunitas (communities) as the location for independent media practice. Independence is theorized as a characteristic of the assemblage of organizations, events, and infrastructures that facilitate the production, circulation, and consumption of short film.