Mythologizing the face mask: How protective covers became political during the fine-dust and COVID-19 crises in South Korea

This study aimed to demonstrate how South Korean news media routinized and sensationalized the face mask amid two recent public health crises: the fine-dust crisis and the COVID-19 epidemic. News media appropriated the mythologized meaning of the face mask as a symbol of individual safety during the two crises. This study analyses news articles to answer three questions: (1) How was wearing the face mask mythologized as a routinized practice in days of uncertain risk? (2) How was the face mask politicized as a mythologized sign indicating China as an external threat? and (3) How was the face mask politicized as a symbolic code of the government’s responsibility for the crisis? Once signified as the primary means of individual protection in the context of Korean risk society, the face mask became politicized amid the shortage of the face mask. Placed in the context of the recent disastrous crises in Korea, China was identified as the culprit not only in the epidemic but also in the shortage of the face mask. The meaning of China as an external threat was continuously strengthened when the South Korean government opted out of the entry ban on Chinese citizens. The last analytic part presents how news media politicized the epidemic by associating the face mask crisis with the Korean government.

Imagined Audiences: How Journalists Perceive and Pursue the Public, Jacob L. Nelson (2021)

Review of: Imagined Audiences: How Journalists Perceive and Pursue the Public, Jacob L. Nelson (2021) New York: Oxford University Press, 234 pp., ISBN 978-0-19754-260-6, p/bk, $27.95

The ‘other’ in the bowels of the hegemon: US media portrayals of Guam during the United States–North Korea tension

This article explores how America’s mainline institutional media portrayed Guam, an unincorporated US territory in the Pacific Ocean that is home to important American military bases, in a time of heightened tensions between the United States and North Korea. Guamanians represent marginal racial ‘others’ who are nonetheless ensconced in a consequential part of the US military architecture. Using a combination of topic modelling and network analysis, our study analysed 2480 articles from 44 different mainstream newspapers in the United States between April 2017 and June 2018 in order to examine the contradictory depiction of an ‘other’ that is simultaneously foreign and domestic. Our results present evidence of a hegemonic portrayal of Guam as an intrinsic part of the US as well as a depiction of the threat to Guam as an attack on the US without acknowledging the marginality of Guam and its inhabitants in US politics.

Community media’s role in changing centre–periphery relations through participatory, not-for-profit journalism

Traditional notions of journalism focus exclusively on professionals, often embedded in media outlets and publishing houses. However, preceding decades have seen transformations in the understanding of journalism. This contribution sets out to explore the role of community media in working towards the recognition of participatory, not-for-profit journalism, more diverse discourses and enhanced participation, especially in relation to minorities. This research draws on policy documents at the European level, reports from European projects with community media involvement as well as on interviews with community media activists and journalists. As a result, we can show strategies of bringing peripheral actors to the centre by using community media based on access and participation, social inclusion, giving a voice and media literacy development. The study proposes a model of the role of community media in shifting peripheral actors to more central positions.

Parade of diversity: Representations of places and identities of Indonesia through tourism brochures

The article examines the discourses of diversity within a nation by investigating the tourism brochures as the media produced by municipalities/regencies. Using empirical research, this study analyses four major inquiries to gain insights into the discourse of diversity in Indonesia from tourism products/services, geographical representations, ethnic diversity and occupational variations within the dynamic of media and society. The research project then analyse the cultural and social meanings on how the media function to showcase and develop a notion of ‘parade of diversity’ in the society. It reflects the ways of displaying places and people, which can include and exclude part of society, promenade through series of similar patterns across different municipalities/regencies in Indonesia. Critically, tourism brochures then facilitate the commercial definition of tourism spaces, geographical identity, the representation of the dominant groups and the interests of the powerful elites.

Making enemies: A theoretical approach to antagonism and emotion in the contemporary American action film

Conflict and adversity form an essential component of many American action films. Not only are these spectacular blockbuster films often grafted on forms of contemporary geopolitical warfare, moreover, the violent deaths of the film’s villains arguably form one of the genre’s key pleasures. Utilizing Laclau and Mouffe’s concept of antagonism, this article deconstructs how within the action film, discursive articulations of enemyhood attempt to structure heroic violence as just and the lives of villains as ungrievable. The action films Lone Survivor (2015) and London Has Fallen (2017) will operate as case studies in elucidating how antagonistic frontiers between the hero self and the enemy other are cinematically drawn and strengthened.