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Investment and expansion have made Turkish media a transnational powerhouse in the Middle East and Central Asia. Yet tensions continue to grow between media outlets and the Islamist AKP party that has governed the country for over a decade. This book unlocks the complexities surrounding and penetrating today's Turkish media. The book focuses on a convergence of global and domestic forces that range from the 1980 military coup to globalization's inroads and the recent resurgence of political Islam. The book's analysis foregrounds how these and other forces become intertwined, and it uses Turkey's media to unpack the ever-more-complex relationships. The book confronts essential questions regarding the role of the state and military in building the structures that shaped Turkey's media system; media adaptations to ever-shifting contours of political and economic power; how the far-flung economic interests of media conglomerates leave them vulnerable to state pressure; and the ways Turkey's politicized judiciary criminalizes certain speech. Drawing on local knowledge and a wealth of Turkish sources, the book provides an engrossing look at the fault lines carved by authoritarianism, tradition, neoliberal reform, and globalization within Turkey's increasingly far-reaching media.

Media concentration has been an issue around the world. To some observers the power of large corporations has never been higher. To others, the Internet has brought openness and diversity. What perspective is correct? The answer has significant implications for politics, business, culture, regulation, and innovation. It addresses a highly contentious subject of public debate in many countries around the world. In this discussion, one side fears the emergence of media empires that can sway public opinion and endanger democracy. The other side believes the Internet has opened media to unprecedented diversity and worries about excessive regulation by government. Strong opinions and policy advocates abound on each side, yet a lack of quantitative research across time, media industries, and countries undermines these positions. This book moves beyond the rhetoric of free media and free markets to provide a dispassionate and data-driven analysis of global media ownership trends and their drivers. The book covers thirteen media industries, including television, newspapers, book publishing, film, search engines, ISPs, wireless telecommunication, and others across a 10- to 25-year period in thirty countries. After examining these countries, this book offers comparisons and analysis across industries, regions, companies, and development levels. It calculates overall national concentration trends beyond specific media industries, the market share of individual companies in the overall national media sector, and the size and trends of transnational companies in overall global media.

The Studios after the Studios retells the recent history of the Hollywood film industry with the studios, and their movies, at the center. Individual movies are at the heart of this story—not structures, not personalities, and not “tastes.” Someone is supposed to be paying attention to every aspect of a Hollywood film. The Studios takes that seriously, looking in the dark corners of the frame to tell the secret history of Hollywood domination. In Part I, the studios bring directors and agents to heel. They manage that by emphasizing design over storytelling, replacing seventies grittiness with “high-concept” sheen. The Conversation gives way to Top Gun. Still, the movies were only a small part of the new media conglomerates. In Part II, the studios exert outsized influence on their owners by refashioning themselves as the headquarters of corporate strategy, spinning wild tales of media synergy and conglomeration. It is the era of Jurassic Park. In Part III, there are no more worlds left to conquer. The center of the conglomerates migrates toward television; Vivendi Universal implodes; AOL TimeWarner takes the largest write-down in the history of capitalism; and the idea that the studios should tell their own stories seems less and less compelling. “Synergy is bullshit,” TimeWarner chief Jeff Bewkes declares. The glory days of Gladiator give way to the epic failure of Alexander.

At the end of World War II, Hollywood basked in unprecedented prosperity. Since then, numerous challenges and crises have changed the American film industry in ways beyond imagination in 1945. Nonetheless, at the start of a new century, Hollywood's worldwide dominance is intact — indeed, in today's global economy the products of the American entertainment industry (of which movies are now only one part) are more ubiquitous than ever. How does today's ‘Hollywood’ — absorbed into transnational media conglomerates such as NewsCorp., Sony and Viacom — differ from the legendary studios of Hollywood's Golden Age? What are the dominant frameworks and conventions, the historical contexts and the governing attitudes through which films are made, marketed and consumed today? How have these changed across the last seven decades? And how have these evolving contexts helped shape the form, the style and the content of Hollywood movies, from Singin' in the Rain to Pirates of the Caribbean? This book explains and interrogates the concept of ‘post-classical’ Hollywood cinema — its coherence, its historical justification and how it can help or hinder our understanding of Hollywood from the 1940s to the present. Integrating film history, discussion of movies' social and political dimensions and analysis of Hollywood's distinctive methods of storytelling, the book charts critical debates alongside the histories they interpret, while offering its own account of the ‘post-classical’.