Impunity and the Media

Susana Velleggia

In a globalised world transnational enterprise is queen and its increasing power in the kingdom of the market is in inverse proportion to the weakening of the State and other institutions in this fin de siècle society. Submission to the blind laws of the globalised market is a new form of barbarism. Confronted by this situation, we have to forge more balanced relationships between the State, civil society and the market with the aim of establishing public policies that are lasting and interrelated in the different areas of public management. With particular reference to Argentina, the author of the following article argues that culture lies at the heart of such policies.

Manjunath Pendakur

Professor Herbert Schiller, who taught political economy of international communications for almost 25 years at the University of California-San Diego, passed away recently. His legacy of radical communications scholarship, inspired teaching, and activism are to be celebrated by people around the world. The author of Mass Communications and American Empire (1969, reprinted 1992), Schiller inspired a whole generation of scholars from the South to study media industries as economic and cultural institutions which are centrally involved in serving the interests of monopoly capital. He also absorbed scholarly influences from the South, in particular the anti-imperialist scholarship that came out of Africa and Latin America.

Philip Lee

Writers and poets lament the ‘lost domain’ of childhood, but for many, childhood never was. Children are robbed of their formative years by hard labour, prostitution and war. This abuse has been going on for decades despite all the international declarations of children’s rights. What has gone wrong? Children have become dispensable and are being massively exploited for political and economic aims. This article describes that reality in a series of case studies on the world’s children. It then documents some of the work that has succeeded in giving children a voice and a better life. More such voices are needed.

Manuel Calvo Hernando

A democracy will be incomplete if its citizens continue to lack knowledge and information to participate in a conscientious and thoughtful way in the way society is run. The author of the following article argues that there is a mutual dependency between science and democracy which can only be adequately sustained through the mass media of communication.

Teun A. van Dijk

Media monitoring requires media theory. Whether they do good or bad, we need to know how, why and with what consequences the media do so. This is especially true for the role of the media in the reproduction or the challenge of racism, world-wide but especially in Europe and North America. We need to know how exactly news or advertising, talk shows or other programmes are involved in the increasingly ethnocentric if not racist societies of the North West. The informal remarks presented here about media monitoring should be understood in the scholarly and academic framework of increasing racism and the need to study news text and talk, and their cognitive and socio-political contexts, in a systematic and explicit way.

Njabulo Ndebele

In a fledgling democracy the role of the media is crucial to balance and fair-play. In the new South Africa, where racism was the norm under apartheid, the media ought to be even more cautious when it comes to issues of responsibility and press freedom. The following article calls for journalism in South Africa to be wary of any kind of bias or distortion to ensure that the public both respects and trusts its press.

Summary of a study on the professional access of 'ethnic minorities' to the television industry in Europe. By Jamil Ouaj, The European Institute for the Media.

Stefan Mertens

An overview of conventional research topics on the relationship between racism and the mass media is offered in the following article. It argues that a culturalistic paradigm in this field of study is preferable, using two examples: one from cultural research and the other from cultural policy.

Kalinga Seneviratne

How does censorship operate in a so-called liberal ‘free media’ environment of a Western democracy? The following article argues that it is difficult to fight such insidious censorship devices and easier to challenge political censorship in developing countries implemented through government decrees or legislation. Similarly, the likes of ‘Freedom House’ and the western media are not there to back up those who have to battle this cultural censorship.

Dina Iordanova

What role do the media play in creating or perpetuation modern myths? Focusing on the recent life and death of a notorious Serbian gangster, Dina Iordanova suggests that ‘glamour’ is more newsworthy than any ‘victim’. In other words, it doesn’t matter what you do as long as you do it with style.