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This chapter discusses how naming or labeling a speech style and linking it to a social group is itself a political act, a creation of indexicality. As such, it allows for second orders of indexicality to emerge, that is, characterizations of the kind of people who recognize and name such speech styles. The writing of this book is itself therefore a multiply performative and socially creative act. The chapter also highlights the importance of perspective ‐‐ such as insider vs. outsider ‐‐ in analyzing stereotypes and humor in the mass mediated messages discussed in the book.

When does someone's inability to copy, distribute, or build upon a copyrighted work rise to the level of a burden on free speech? When, in contrast, should we readily countenance the restraints that copyright imposes? To answer, this chapter begins with more fundamental questions: What counts as “speech” for purpose of “freedom of speech”? And what free speech principles apply to copyright? This chapter demonstrates that copyright law is an integral part of media and communications policy. It also argues that the important First Amendment value of “expressive diversity” requires a dispersal of communicative power and ample opportunity for speech that directly challenges mainstream culture and popular works. Creative appropriation, the ability to convey one's message and artistic vision by incorporating and building upon mass media sounds and images, thus lies at the heart, not the margins, of freedom of speech. But peer‐to‐peer file sharing is not “speech.”

A major debate has been unfolding in the United States and around the world over media concentration and its implications. This book is a study of the American mass media and information sector over two decades—its change, its dynamics, and its concentration and ownership trends. First, it discusses the dynamics of industries or industry clusters and provides a methodology. It then provides market share data analysis and narration for each industry; calculates national, local, vertical, and ownership concentration trends; and aggregates the data into increasingly larger segments and sectors. It provides an explanatory model for long-term concentration trends and a new index for measuring local media concentration. This chapter provides the setting for the book: its aim; the history of media concentration issues in America; today's debate and its combatants; goals and fears (localism, commercialism, quality, diversity, social reform); past research; and the international dimension.

Focuses on the cultural changes produced by the movement against child sexual abuse, by tracing changes in mass media portrayals of child sexual abuse from 1970s to the 1990s. Media reflected a contradictory mixture of meanings drawn both from movement organizations and mainstream culture. Mass media coverage increased dramatically; it reflected movement success, but like policy gains, media selection processes favored movement messages that resonated with mainstream beliefs. Coverage emphasized abuse by strangers over incest, breaking silence, the need for therapy and healing, but de‐emphasized the movement's emphases on self‐help and solidarity among survivors. By the early 1990s, medical and criminal frames dominated and sceptical coverage increased as a countermovement emerged. Contrary to the view that media coverage represented a “moral panic,” the chapter argues that it did not have the characteristics of a moral panic, and is better understood through the interactions of movement, experts, and media selection processes.

Despite the institutionalization of environmentalism, it appears that there was no universal or monotonic decline of environmental protests during the decade 1988–97. Patterns of the incidence of protest varied considerably and remained nationally idiosyncratic, with protest appearing to decline and become less confrontational in Greece, whereas it rose and became more confrontational in Britain, and declined only to revive sharply in Germany, Spain, and Italy. Considerable cross‐national variations in the issues and the forms of protest tended to persist over time. There was no evidence of any Europeanization of environmental protest in the shape of either a convergence of national patterns or a rise of protest mobilized on the level of, stimulated by, or targeted at the European Union and its institutions. On the basis of a protest event analysis of newspaper reports during a decade in which environmental protest was no longer novel, there is little or no evidence of the demobilization of environmentalism during the decade, and some that the institutionalization of environmental activism may be self‐limiting.

Civil society should be understood not merely in terms of contrasting symbolic categories but as structures of feeling, the diffusely sensed obligations and rights that represent, and are at the same time evoked by, contrasting solidary ties. Collective representations of such social relationships are broadcast by civil society institutions specializing in communicative, not regulative tasks—by the mass media, public opinion polls, and voluntary organizations. The structures of feeling that such institutions produce must be conceptualized as influence rather than authoritative control, or power in a more structural sense. They institutionalize civil society by creating messages that translate general codes into situationally specific evaluations and descriptions. This chapter analyzes these organizations of influence. It begins by discussing the lifeworld of public opinion which anchors communicative and regulative institutions alike.

This summarizes the findings of this book. Partisanship in the electorate is clearly declining in many respects, but there has been little impact on parties in government to date. In the meantime, parties as organizations have neither declined nor stayed stable, but rather adapted to a much‐changed political environment. Thus, V.O. Key's distinction between the three different levels of parties becomes crucial to keep in mind when considering the topic of partisan change in advanced industrialized democracies. The chapter offers several scenarios concerning how foreseeable changes in communication technology may affect parties in the near future.

Placed in a comparative perspective, the hallmark of Australian politics is the dominance of party: the vast majority of voters identify with and vote for one of the major political parties, and gaining election at the federal level is next to impossible without the benefit of one of three party labels (Liberal, National, or Labour). Within the legislature, party government operates in every sense of the word, with parties determining the legislative agenda and enforcing rigid discipline among their members. Perhaps more interestingly from a comparative perspective, Australia has seen little decline in the strength of the major parties in recent years, in contrast to Britain, the US, or many of the other advanced democracies. The explanation for the continuing strength of political parties in Australia can be traced to the origins and development of the country's political culture; Australia's split from Britain was imbued with the utilitarian ideas of Jeremy Bentham and his followers, and political parties are a necessary and important part of this utilitarian political culture. The introductory part discusses these factors, and also presents a separate account of the development of the party system; the next three sections cover the same topics as those in the other country case studies in the book, and examine party legitimacy (turnout—voting is compulsory, party identification, party membership, and attitudes towards parties), organizational strength (party finance, and mass media), and systemic functionality (governance, interest articulation and aggregation, political recruitment, political organization, political participation, and political communication and education).

This book deals with market concentration trends in the information sector as a whole. Its thesis is that similar dynamics take place across industries, including mass media, and that they lead to further media concentration trends. It looks at the size of the major segments of the information sector: mass media, telecommunications, information technology, and the Internet. Combined, the United States information sector accounts for over one trillion dollars, not including its considerable exports to other countries. The chapter presents final averaging across all 100 information sector industries, and also across the twenty-seven mass media industries that have been investigated here. The chapter gives an interpretation of this. National concentration, horizontal concentration, and vertical concentration as well as media conglomerates and ownership are discussed.

The incidence of environmental protest in France is examined by means of an analysis of all the environmental protest events reported in Le Monde during the years 1988–97. The relatively low level of protests reported is partly explained by the systematic bias of Le Monde toward institutional politics and formal political actors, as well as by its tendency to neglect local and regional associations and events. Nevertheless, the impression remains that environmental protest in France was relatively subdued during the decade, and explanations are offered in terms of the tendency of environmentalism in France to become mobilized into formal politics via Green parties, and to have become institutionalized at local and regional levels through partnerships with decentralized governmental agencies. The disastrous defeat of the anti‐nuclear movement of the 1970s appears to have depressed levels of national environmental protest in subsequent years.

Environmental protest in the Basque Country has been distinguished by its intensity and its frequency as well as by its association with the cause of Basque nationalism. To analyse the transformation of environmental protest in the Basque Country during a decade (198897), in the course of which environmental concerns became increasingly autonomous of the national question and instead became more embedded in the struggles of local communities to preserve their quality of life, we examined reports of environmental protest published in the newspaper EGIN. The majority of ecological organizations, while they appear to have distanced themselves from the protest‐oriented and anti‐institutional scenario and discursive frame of radical Basque nationalism, have not embarked on a determined process of institutionalization. Instead, they seem to have found a new ecological space, ’eco‐localism’, from which to continue their work. In this respect, it would seem that the movement is following the famous slogan ’Think globally, act locally.’

Records and radio built an industry around imagination. Media technologies created an auditory world where sound, language, and music expanded listeners’ mental worlds. The Cajun imaginary represents in this study the varied ways in which individuals understood their connection to a larger imagined community—America—through the soundscape generated by mass communication. This chapter examines those communication networks directing the flow of cultural exchange between Cajuns and mainstream mass media between 1946 and 1955. As this auditory sphere enveloped Cajun life, an emergent Cajun musical subgenre sprouted: Cajun honky tonk—small but amplified string bands featuring an accordion. The Opera, O.T., Khoury, and Folk Star labels are also discussed here in relation to the most famous and influential Cajun artists to emerge during the post-World War II era—fiddler Harry Choates and accordionist Iry LeJeune. The premise of this study is derived from conclusions of the landmark treatise The Psychology of Radio compiled in 1935 by Hadley Catril and Gordon Allport, who suggest that an individual’s engagement with mass culture within this universal network of sound could stimulate a “new mental world” for the listener.

This chapter examines the relationship between mass society, social participation and the mass media. It reviews research on social participation in the U.S. and the very limited cross-national data on participation and stresses the need for more relevant research on membership and participation in various types of associations. It describes trends in media content and style and provides explanations on the impact of the mass media in culture and politics. It also proposes hypotheses and some data about how different patterns of participation shape consensus and conflict.

Mergers among content providers, distributors, retail outlets, and technology firms raise questions about vertical integration. The fear is of an extension of market power from one industry to a related one. However, vertical integration may also result in efficiency gains, commonly referred to as synergies. To what extent is the American information sector vertically integrated? And how much more now than twenty years ago? This chapter analyzes market concentration trends for the largest fifty information industry firms, as well as the top twenty-five mass media companies, for the year 1984 and subsequent years. These firms are ranked according to their information sector revenue. All revenues are those in the United States, whether by American or non-American firms. Three measures for vertical integration are described: Participation Index, Sector Share Index, and Company Power Index.

Considers the organizational consequences for parties of the professionalization of election campaigning. This process has gone through three main stages, from pre‐modern, through the TV‐dominated modern stage, and onto the current advanced‐modern stage of campaigning personified by the use of new telecommunications technology. The chapter shows party organizations to be highly adaptive, investing heavily in time and resources in the new campaign techniques, professionalizing, and centralizing their organizations (particularly around their top leaderships), and paying far more attention to image and specific campaign issues as opposed to traditional ideological standpoints. There has been a shift from parties selling themselves to voters to designing an appropriate product to match voter needs. Because of these changes, contemporary political parties have repositioned themselves to survive the uncertainties of operating as representative institutions in the increasingly participatory age of the end of the millennium.

This chapter examines the place of hypnosis in Weimar Germany's cultural imaginary and its connection to a broad set of fears articulated around the “masses,” “mass culture,” and the problem of “mass psychology.” It relates this motif to debates about Weimar cinema, which aroused both intense apprehension concerning its impact on audiences and equally intense hopes concerning its possibilities as a medium of public instruction or enlightenment. In particular, it looks at Fritz Lang's film The Testament of Dr. Mabuse, which was banned in 1933 by Germany's film censor board due to fear that it represented an incitement not merely to crime but to revolution and terror. The chapter shows that Testament both casts a hypnotic spell and undoes it through a kind of “counterhypnosis.” It also discusses some of the questions raised by the banning of Testament, including one relating to the role of the mass media in modern public life.

This chapter summarizes the conclusions and recommendations from the Task Force on interventions to reduce the initiation of tobacco use, to increase tobacco use cessation, and to reduce the exposure to environmental tobacco smoke (ETS). To reduce tobacco use initiation, the Task Force recommends increasing the unit price for tobacco products, mass media education campaigns, and community mobilization. To increase the cessation of tobacco use, the Task Force recommends increasing the unit price of tobacco products, mass media campaigns, healthcare provider reminder systems, and reducing out-of-pocket client costs for effective cessation therapies. To reduce exposure to ETS, the Task Force recommends smoking bans and restrictions.