Framing and Reframing
Rethinking Media Discourse on British Muslims: Public Contestation and the Democratic Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Nadia Haq
Muslims are seen to be represented in a negative context in the British mainstream media, contributing to populist and essentialised perceptions of Muslims and Islam. This media discourse is seen to reflect the wider discursive and contested debate about nation, identity, and culture, and the playing out of differing interpretations and assertions of ‘Britishness’ across social and political groups in the UK. But if ‘democratic’ news coverage is ‘attempting’ to be pluralist and debate a variety of contested views, why does it remain overwhelmingly negative towards British Muslims? This paper presents preliminary qualitative findings that tie together the analysis of how print media professionals explain and understand their reporting on Muslims with the underlying ideologies and values of a democratic media. I consider how the media draws on the normative assumptions of the democratic values that underlie its journalistic ideology as an objective public service seeking to inform the people of the ‘difficult’ realities of public life when faced with criticism about discriminatory news reporting. By juxtaposing these normative assumptions against empirical literature on the representation of Muslims, I build up a hypothesis of why the media will generally fail to address the presence of discriminatory media coverage of British Muslims at moments when their very identity is being politically and socially contested. Building up a more radical normative understanding of the role of the ‘democratic’ media can provide a clearer picture of how we can publicly discuss politically contested topics without resorting to the marginalisation of a particular group.
You Can’t Go Home Again: Infected Gay Men Returning to the U.S. Heartland in American Movies about HIV/AIDS of the Late Twentieth Century
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Kylo-Patrick Hart
Feature-length narrative movies about HIV/AIDS created and released in the United States during the last two decades of the twentieth century provide a unique form of narratives of place. Representational distinctions between urban and rural places that become evident through a comparative analysis of the contents of such media offerings reflect a noteworthy form of otherness that contributed significantly to the ongoing social construction of the AIDS pandemic during that era. Accordingly, this study explores the social construction of binary spaces (e.g., urban/rural, deviancy/normalcy, danger/safety) in relation to American AIDS movies, created and released during the 1980s and 1990s, that represent the ‘threat’ posed by urban gay men with AIDS who choose to return home to the U.S. heartland where they were born and raised. In doing so, it demonstrates how urban areas in such movies are socially constructed as the places of AIDS dystopia, in dramatic contrast to rural areas, which have historically been socially constructed as the places of moral utopia in U.S. society.
Authoritarian Regimes’ Responses to New Media Environment: The Case of Middle Eastern Countries
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Yushi Chiba
Contrary to the view that technological development would weaken the socio-political bases of authoritarian regimes, many recent studies emphasize the resilience of such regimes and their capabilities to adopt to the new media environment. Some scholars even propose that the new developments in media benefit the authoritarian regimes, more than the citizens and, therefore, facilitate their survival. In regards the situation in Middle Eastern countries, scholars emphasized the democratic role of media at the start of the Arab Uprisings; however, it took just a few years to convert their optimistic views to much more cynical ones. As this study shows, the media situation in the Middle East is deteriorating rapidly and there are no signs of improvement. Further, this deterioration is believed to be a worldwide phenomenon, rather than being confined to the Middle East. This research has two aims. First, with reference to some reports published by non-governmental organizations on media freedom, the degree of deterioration in the media environment in the Middle East is clarified. To do this, I compare the Middle Eastern case with that of other regions. Second, analysis of the methods historically used to control media explains the way authoritarian regimes adapt to the new media environment. This study serves as an opportunity to consider the current relationship between media and authoritarianism.
Public Visibility of Alternative Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Nursen Aydın
In this study, strategies carried out by the alternative media in order to survive and to resist against dominant structures by way of critical content is considered. In addition to this, as with the ideal alternative media model asserted by Christian Fuchs and Marisol Sandoval, can alternative media be both critical and emancipatory at the content level and use commercial media techniques for public visibility? If alternative media have both a critical and emancipatory attitude against the hegemonic views and structures and use capitalist financing techniques to provide public visibility and be functional, does the political power of the alternative media weaken? What strategies and solutions are needed to make alternative media more powerful and dominant? In this study, these questions will be answered via T24, Bianet, Sendika.org and Diken samples that are online alternative news sites published in Turkey. In this direction, I conduct semi-structured in-depth interviews with the responsible people of these sites. So, by examining the relationship between sources of finance and editorial policies of these sites, economic political conditions of public visibility of alternative media are revealed.
