International Journal of Media & Cultural Politics - Volume 2, Issue 2, 2006

A continuing debate regarding public intellectuals consistently involves a narrative of decline. This declinist position rests on an assumption that the media are central to the public intellectual role, though the declinists focus strictly on institutional explanations, to the neglect of the role played by the media. This paper explains how the application of media theory to this debate will give us a better understanding of the public intellectual. I suggest five avenues for the integration of communication theory into the study of public intellectuals. First, there are fruitful comparisons to be made between public intellectuals and journalists. Second, the ritual dimension of public intellectual communication is worth exploring. Third, we should consider the roles played by media organizations and institutions as they shape the public intellectual role. Fourth, recent developments in the sphere of public intellectuals demonstrate the need to examine public intellectuals across all media. Fifth, we should be careful to analyse the authority at work in public intellectual communication.

Reality television programming simultaneously narrates the conditions of the social factory and produces new forms of labour in and through them. This essay explores the nature of the labour performed by the shows' participants and argues that it involves the self-conscious development and management of public persona based on templates of the self supplied by corporate media culture. This labour of self-presentation operates simultaneously as work for the television industry and as a form of image-entrepreneurship for the individual participants. Insofar as this form of labour involves the alienation of embodied subjectivity into image commodities with recognizable market value, it constitutes a form of self-spectacularization. Reality television programming also provides templates for these spectacular selves within a distinct corporate culture, which aims to contain and control individuals' virtuosity, thus incorporating identity. The Apprentice and Joe Schmo are explored as examples of reality shows that dramatize and embody the collapse of any meaningful distinction between notions of the self and capitalist processes of production. This process of both narrating and producing a branded self enacted by the reality television might be seen as part of a broader multi-level marketing campaign we could call the corporate colonization of the real.

Sport is a social institution that has a considerable impact on the shaping of gay and lesbian subjects. On the eve of the 2006 Gay Games in Chicago and its new rival, the Outgames, in Montreal, this article explores dimensions of participation in such gay and lesbian sports events through a study (based on participant observation and interviews) of their most recent major predecessor, the Sydney 2002 Gay Games. In particular, it points to the centrality to many participants' experiences of both individual and collective forms of identification, including those associated with sexuality and nation. Through their participation in the event, respondents must negotiate the significant tensions that underpin the ideals and demands of these often-contradictory forms of identification. The article suggests that it is this negotiation of competing identities and subjectivities that illuminates the broader political significance of the Gay Games.

On 1 December 2001, North America was officially introduced to John Walker Lindh The American Taliban. Lindh was captured in Afghanistan fighting against the Northern Alliance. The event created a groundswell of news reports concerning the political development of Lindh. In this paper, I interrogate the ways in which race is reproduced through a popular online magazine and its account of the John Walker Lindh case. There is a series of narratives used to describe Lindh that relies upon a moral panic of sorts to accomplish two critical tasks. First, it polices the boundaries of whiteness by alternately whitening Lindh and othering Islam. Second, these depictions mobilize support for a metanarrative of national discipline exemplified by the Patriot Act. Both discourses represent a cautionary tale against border crossing and racial transcendence in a so-called post-9/11 era.

From the nineteenth century sculptures of Edmonia Lewis to contemporary art installations by Pat Ward Williams, the history and aesthetics of African cultures have inspired art-making and political solidarity for artists of African descent in the United States. This article examines the ways in which African American artists have explored diverse aspects of African history and cultures in their artwork. Their desire to create a Pan-African community by visualizing common black experiences expresses their solidarity with black struggles in Africa and desire to reconnect with an African heritage lost through the violence of the Atlantic slave trade.

The article discusses the role of Pan-Africanism as a political ideal through which people of African descent can work toward political freedom. It discusses the visual history of Pan-Africanist ideology by African American artists and explores the current possibility for transnational reciprocity and identification despite cultural and ethnic differences between the African and American contexts.

This study explored the interplay of Soviet-style and western journalistic conventions by examining an Armenian commercial radio news programme, Aniv, which is broadcast nationally and produced through an American-funded non-governmental organization, Internews. Six issues guided the inquiry: (1) objectivity, (2) newsworthiness, (3) social role of journalism, (4) competition, (5) professional values, (6) education and employment. Results of personal interviews and observations indicated that success in promoting societal discourse is dependent on adapting imported practices to local circumstances.

Mekim Nius: South Pacific Media, Politics, and Education, David Robie (2004) Fiji Islands: The University of South Pacific Book Centre, 306 pp., ISBN 1877314307 (pbk), 35.00

What the Media are doing to our media Guardians of Power: The Myth of the Liberal Media, David Edwards and David Cromwell (2005) London: Pluto Press, 241 pp., ISBN 07453 2483 5 (pbk), 14.99

What the Media are Doing to Our Politics, John Lloyd (2003) London: Constable 2004, 218 pp., ISBN 1-84119-900-1 (pbk), 12.99