Overview
Remaking Media is a unique and timely reading of the contemporary struggle to democratize communication.
With a focus on activism directed towards challenging and changing media content, practices and structures, the book explores the burning question: What is the political significance and potential of democratic media activism in the western world today?
Taking an innovative approach, Robert Hackett and William Carroll pay attention to an emerging social movement that appears at the cutting edge of cultural and political contention, and ground their work in three scholarly traditions that provide interpretive resources for the study of democratic media activism:
- political theories of democracy
- critical media scholarship
- the sociology of social movements.
Remaking Media examines the democratization of the media and the efforts to transform the machinery of representation. Such an examination will prove invaluable not only to media and communication studies students, but also to students of political science.
Synopsis
This is a co-authored book of all new material on the topic of media democracy and activism.
The authors consider the ways in which media, particularly broadcast media is made by and for a narrow audience of white, middle-class, heterosexual, Westerners that conform to the ideal values of the governing body. They consider how certain demographics are denied representation in the news, how they are unable to afford new technologies (digitalization, the internet, broadband) and cannot afford the education in order to get employment in the media industries and thus gain equality in choosing content. The authors call this the democratic deficit of mainstream media and look at alternate forms of activism to redress the imbalance in the media. They consider ways in which new media like the internet could be used to allow multiple perspectives of the same event, rather than only one side of the story being broadcast, and then consider how this still negates the reason for the activism as the internet is not available to all.
The text considers the key concepts of political media theory. The main cast are all here: Gramsci, Bourdieu, Habermas, Baudrillard etc as well as the new activism groups - CPBF, Media Alliance, FAIR.
Freedom of speech and the importance of freedom of the media is more at debate now than ever before with the issuance of special journalism visas for British journalists to enter the USA and the whole BBC sexing up Iraq debacle, so the book will be quite topical if the authors deliver on time.