International Journal of Media & Cultural Politics - Volume 4, Issue 3, 2008

This article examines the conflict in Darfur, which has been described by many including the President of the United States, as an ongoing genocide. To this end, I argue that the lack of adequate coverage of the killings in Darfur particularly in US network television evening news, has kept the public in the dark. This lack of information provided to the public has the potential to prolong the plight of Darfurians who have been killed, raped, starved and displaced, because there is little public pressure on policy makers, or outcry from the international community to stop the atrocities. It is also argued here that these television networks have the capacity to influence US foreign relations by mobilizing public opinion on pressing international issues such as the genocide in Darfur. Suggestions of how the news media can improve coverage are offered.

This article examines British press coverage of Renate Williams a female teacher accused of sexually assaulting her adolescent male pupil during a school trip. On the basis of a textual analysis of tabloid and broadsheet reporting of the case, I argue that through focus on her appearance, marital status, background and mental health, the press representation worked to construct Williams as guilty even though she was subsequently acquitted of all charges by the criminal justice system. The frame of Williams transgressing both gender and professional expectations was central to the press reporting in this case. Relating the media reports in the Williams case to existing feminist scholarship on gender, crime and the media, the article argues that her gender was used as a source of titillation to diminish her accusation, thereby exposing the potential contradictions in press representations of allegations of sexual abuse by women.

The stated purpose of the Norwegian Media Ownership Act is to promote freedom of expression. Its true purpose is to restrict the political impact of making expressions. The discrepancy between the stated and true purpose is the issue discussed in the article. It explains the act as a result of the party system having lost its historical control over the media system. Rather than regulating the freedom of expression the act therefore regulates the right to influence public opinion. The parties saw no need to regulate political influence at the time they monopolized it. That need emerged when the media became independent and started challenging the influence of the parties. The result is therefore a Media Ownership Act favouring political influence via state-controlled broadcast media answerable to the political system, and restricting political influence via a privately controlled daily press answerable to the market. An act really promoting the freedom of expression would not regulate the right to influence public opinion, but restrict the opportunities of both public and private media to censor the expressions of the citizens.

This article explores the new Audiovisual Media Services Directive which will be the main instrument of media regulation in the European Union for the next years. However, instead of analyzing the directive itself which entered into force in December 2007 I am interested in its history. I will focus on 2 years of intense deliberation among EU institutions that preceded the final directive. A discourse analysis highlights the conflicting rationales that two EU institutions, the European Parliament and the European Commission, use in their respective drafts of the directive. The central point of reference in the Commission's draft is the Single Market, with Europeans being addressed as consumers. In contrast, at the heart of the Parliament's concept of media regulation is a European public sphere composed of European citizens. My analysis illustrates how, in the process of drafting and redrafting the law text, the Parliament's emphasis on the media's role for democracy is considerably stripped down.

The aim of this article is to examine the way technological developments and the internationalisation of the television industry affects public television (PTV) broadcasters in Europe. The work focuses on the policies pursued by PTV broadcasters in selected European countries in response to the challenges that confront them in the era of digital convergence. The changes in the European television landscape force public channels to rethink their position towards new digital technologies, organisational structures and programming policy and scheduling. To illustrate the difficulties but also the opportunities that arise during this period of change, the article analyses specific activities and strategies undertaken by public channels in the main areas examined (reorganisation, programming and technology) in one large (France) and one small European country (Greece).

The need for a measure of women's empowerment has been long and well recognised. There remains much debate over how this can be done and most of the tools produced so far have been inadequate to the task. Two issues have hindered the development of a representative tool: first, the lack of agreement on what women's empowerment actually is; and second, the tension existent between the empowerment of individual women and women as a social group, because not all women experience their disempowerment by patriarchy similarly, and some women will benefit more from empowerment than others. Historically the means to measure women's empowerment have been based on what feminist statisticians and economists nominate as male normative indices, which do not represent women as a social group. I developed a qualitative longitudinal means for measuring empirically the empowerment of targeted, or project specific, groups of women that uses the women's experiences as yardsticks. In this article, I use my study of women's empowerment through ICTs as an example of women's empowerment generally.

Atlantic Reverberations: French Representations of an American Presidential Election, Paul C. Adams (2007) Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 240 pp., ISBN 978-0754670230 (hbk), 55.00

The Citizen Audience: Crowds, Publics, and Individuals, Richard Butsch (2007) London: Routledge, 200 pp., ISBN: 978-0415977890, 95.00 (hbk), ISBN: 978-0415977906, 27.95 (pbk)

Who among us is free from genocide? A review of Terror's AdvocateTerror's Advocate (2007, DVD Release Feb. 19, 2008), Directed by Barbet Schroeder, French, with English, German and Khmer subtitles, Produced by Canal+ and Magnolia Pictures, 135 minutes