International Communication Gazette

This comparative content analysis study (N = 946) examines how far political news is mediatized in the US and UK by systematically exploring the conventions used in television news bulletins. According to many of our mediatization of politics indicators – which included sound and imagebites, lip flaps, journalistic visibility, ‘wrapping up’, live and interpretive news – broadcasters with the most public service responsibilities supplied the highest level of mediatized political news. Our study thus appears to challenge conventional academic wisdom that US journalistic interventionism is greater than other advanced Western democracies and that enhanced commercialization is a precursor to higher degrees of mediatization. We suggest that the form, structure and style of journalism should be understood more carefully by scholars when making sense of how far news is mediatized, since the greater length of UK television news conventions and the ability to ‘go live’ longer allowed journalists greater freedom to interpret politics.

In March 2012, American NGO Invisible Children released an online video about the crimes committed by Ugandan war lord Joseph Kony and his Lord’s Resistance Army. Rapidly shared through social network sites, Kony 2012 soon earned the title of fastest spreading online video ever produced. At the same time, the video and its makers also came under massive criticism from bloggers, journalists, academics, and the general public. This study offers an exploration of the phenomenon Kony 2012 from an audience perspective. Theoretically building on the literature on mediated distant suffering and empirically based on an online survey, we explore how the video was successful in exerting moral pressure on a critical online audience of ‘Ironic Spectators’. In particular, we investigate to what extent different forms of being critical towards the video and its makers have mitigated a sense of personal moral responsibility to act towards the distant suffering other.

Maoist struggles in Eastern and Central India against the Indian State have been under-reported in International Media. These struggles by mainly indigenous communities against the corporate-state mining nexus have become a national crisis and literally hundreds of Indian paramilitary forces, Maoists and indigenous people have died as a result of these conflicts. Local media have typically reported Maoism in terms of a law and order and security issue. This article highlights some of the ‘frames’ used by the media within a critical political economy inspired reading of the conflict that the Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has described as India's number one security issue. It deals with uneven globalisation, the under-reporting of lives lived by India’s most deprived communities and the other side of India’s tryst of globalisation that has led to many indigenous communities living lives on the edge.

The article aims to analyse the role of measurement in legitimising a specific conception of freedom of information. From a neo-Gramscian perspective, the work draws attention to the way a political and ideological paradigm influences measuring instruments, as well as the contribution of such tools in strengthening the hegemony of that paradigm. By illustrating the rise of neoliberalism as a case in point, the study hypothesises a neoliberal influence on the measurement of freedom of information. To test such assumption, the work describes three ideal typical models of freedom of information – the liberal, egalitarian and neoliberal models – and their connection with specific conceptions of democracy. Then, the article focuses on the Freedom of the Press Index by Freedom House, that is the most used and recognised instrument for measuring freedom of information. Though the Freedom House contends to measure a liberal conception of freedom of information, the analysis of the indicators of the Freedom of the Press Index shows that they mirror the neoliberal model at least with respect to the role of State and Market on media systems, and the conception of media pluralism. The results bring into question the uncritical acceptance of the Freedom of the Press Index as the universal yardstick of freedom of information.