Faye D. Ginsburg, Lila Abu-Lughod, Brian Larkin (eds.): Media Worlds: Anthropology on New Terrain (2002)

This groundbreaking volume showcases the exciting work emerging from the ethnography of media, a burgeoning new area in anthropology that expands both social theory and ethnographic fieldwork to examine the way media–film, television, video–are used in societies around the globe, often in places that have been off the map of conventional media studies. The contributors, key figures in this new field, cover topics ranging from indigenous media projects around the world to the unexpected effects of state control of media to the local impact of film and television as they travel transnationally. Their essays, mostly new work produced for this volume, bring provocative new theoretical perspectives grounded in cross-cultural ethnographic realities to the study of media.

Publisher University of California Press, 2002
ISBN 0520224485, 9780520224483
413 pages

More info (publisher)
More info (google books)

PDF (updated on 2012-7-14)

Brian McNair: Glasnost, Perestroika and the Soviet Media (1991)

Soviet journalists are at the center of the tumultuous changes taking place in the USSR today. As Stalinist regimes across Eastern Europe are dismantled, the reforms of Mikhail Gorbachev have transformed Soviet political, social and economic life.

Glasnost, Perestroika and the Soviet Media examines the implications of these changes for the Soviet news and television media. It traces the development of Soviet journalism through the writings of Marx and Lenin, the distortions of Stalin and Brezhnev, and the reforms of the Gorbachev era, culminating in the new press law, which provides greater freedom of the press and freedom of information.

The discussion is accompanied by analysis of the content of Soviet print and television journalism, including chapters on Soviet news coverage of the superpower summits in Rejkyavik and Moscow, a comparison of Soviet and Western reporting of international affairs, and the impact of glasnost on Soviet media images of women.

Publisher Routledge, 1991
ISBN 0415035511, 9780415035514
Length 231 pages

publisher
google books

PDF (updated on 2012-7-27)

Pierre Bourdieu: On Television (1996–) [French, English]

On Television exposes the invisible mechanisms of manipulation and censorship that determine what appears on the small screen. Bourdieu shows how the ratings game has transformed journalism — and hence politics — and even such seemingly removed fields as law, science, art, and philosophy. Bourdieu had long been concerned with the role of television in cultural and political life when he bypassed the political and commercial control of the television networks and addressed his country’s viewers from the television station of the College de France. On Television, which expands on that lecture, not only describes the limiting and distorting effect of television on journalism and the world of ideas, but offers the blueprint for a counterattack.

Publisher Liber-Raisons d’Agir, Paris, 1996
95 pages

English edition
Publisher New Press, 1998
Translated by Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson
ISBN 1565844076
104 pages

Publisher (EN)

Sur la télévision; suivi de l’emprise du journalisme (French, added on 2014-8-29)
On Television (English, updated on 2014-8-29)