Educators and policymakers increasingly pursue programs that aim to strengthen democracy through civic education, service learning, and other pedagogies. Their underlying beliefs, however, differ. This article calls attention to the spectrum of ideas about what good citizenship is and what good citizens do that are embodied in democratic education programs. It offers analyses of a 2-year study of educational programs in the United States that aimed to promote democracy. Drawing on democratic theory and on findings from their study, the authors detail three conceptions of the “good” citizen—personally responsible, participatory, and justice oriented—that underscore political implications of education for democracy. The article demonstrates that the narrow and often ideologically conservative conception of citizenship embedded in many current efforts at teaching for democracy reflects not arbitrary choices but, rather, political choices with political consequences.

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What Kind of Citizen? The Politics of Educating for Democracy

Why did the occupational norm of ‘objectivity’ arise in American journalism? This question has attracted the interest of many journalism historians but it has not previously been examined as an instance of a more general social phenomenon, the emergence of new cultural norms and ideals. Four conditions for the emergence of new norms are identified – two having to do with the self-conscious pursuit of internal group solidarity; and two having to do with the need to articulate the ideals of social practice in a group in order to exercise control over subordinates and to pass on group culture to the next generation. Reviewing the history of the professionalization of American journalism, this essay identifies the late 19th and early 20th century as the period when these conditions crystallized. Alternative technological and economic explanations of the emergence of objectivity are criticized and the difficulty of understanding why objectivity as a norm emerged first and most fully in the United States rather...

The objectivity norm in American journalism

Democracies, and the citizenries that stand at their center, are not natural phenomena; they are made and sustained through politics. Government policies can play a crucial role in this process, shaping the things publics believe and want, the ways citizens view themselves and others, and how they understand and act toward the political system. Yet, while political scientists have said a great deal about how publics influence policies, they know far less about the ways policies influence publics. In this article, we seek to clarify how policies, once enacted, are likely to affect political thought and action in the citizenry. Such effects are hard to locate within the standard framework of approaches to mass behavior, and they are generally ignored by program evaluators and policy analysts. To bridge this gap, we direct attention toward a long and vibrant, but underappreciated, line of inquiry we call the “political tradition” of mass behavior research. Drawing this tradition together with recent work on “policy feedback,” we outline a framework for thinking about how policies influence mass politics. The major types of such effects include defining membership; forging political cohesion and group divisions; building or undermining civic capacities; framing policy agendas, problems, and evaluations; and structuring, stimulating, and stalling political participation.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/71C8181CFDA721D9F63EFEDB26D28FE1/S1537592704000623a.pdf/the-consequences-of-public-policy-for-democratic-citizenship-bridging-policy-studies-and-mass-politics.pdf

The Consequences of Public Policy for Democratic Citizenship: Bridging Policy Studies and Mass Politics

This study examines the impact of social media spaces on news consumption, based on an online survey of 1600 Canadians. News organizations are rushing into social media, viewing services like Facebook and Twitter as opportunities to market and distribute content. There has been limited research outside the United States into the effects of social media on news consumption. Our study found that social networks are becoming a significant source of news for Canadians. Two-fifths of social networking users said they receive news from people they follow on services like Facebook, while a fifth get news from news organizations and individual journalists they follow. Users said they valued social media because it helped them keep up with events and exposed them to a wider range of news and information. While social interaction has always affected the dissemination of news, our study contributes to research that suggests social media are becoming central to the way people experience news. Networked media technolo...

SHARE, LIKE, RECOMMEND: Decoding the social media news consumer

Within media theory the worldwide shift from a 19th-century print culture via a 20th-century electronic culture to a 21st-century digital culture is well documented. In this essay the emergence of a digital culture as amplified and accelerated by the popularity of networked computers, multiple-user software, and Internet is investigated in terms of its principal components. A digital culture as an underdetermined praxis is conceptualized as consisting of participation, remediation, and bricolage. Using the literature on presumably “typical” Internet phenomena such as the worldwide proliferation of independent media centers (indymedia) linked with (radical) online journalism practices and the popularity of (individual and group) weblogging, the various meanings and implications of this particular understanding of digital culture are explored. In the context of this essay, digital culture can be seen as an emerging set of values, practices, and expectations regarding the way people (should) act and interact within the contemporary network society. This digital culture has emergent properties with roots in both online and offline phenomena, with links to trends and developments predating the World Wide Web, yet having an immediate impact and particularly changing the ways in which we use and give meaning to living in an increasingly interconnected, always on(line) environment.

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Participation, Remediation, Bricolage: Considering Principal Components of a Digital Culture

The Good Citizen: A History of American Civic Life

Benjamin Franklin: Writings.

Hogarth, David. Reader than Reel: Global Directions in Documentary. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2006. 198 pp. $19.95 David Hogarth's look at the fate of the documentary in the era of global media markets confronts a transitional moment in the history of the genre. His treatment is not a reflective, systematic study but a look at a media landscape in flux. In his introduction Hogarth shifts the reader's expectations. He redefines the genre and coins "factual television," a category in which he includes all forms of nonfiction commercial programming. A Canadian scholar, he writes from a largely transnational perspective about the major trends that impact television programming markets today-digital technologies, corporate conglomeration, media convergence, and global hypercommercialism-and considers how factual television producers, distributors, and audiences are responding to and shaping these developments. His main point is that the surge of nonfiction programming in the global media market requires reconsideration of our idea of a documentary. He anticipates the social repercussions of actuality-based content that is digitally created and globally commodified. Hogarth's redefined documentary is no longer rooted in a national, public service identity. Drawing from largely Canadian statistics, he demonstrates that funding for the classic, long-form documentary dropped markedly during the 1990s. This was concurrent with the corporate media buyouts that consolidated global nonfiction-bascd networks within the corporate media giants and the rise of commercial documentary offerings by their media distribution outlets-e.g., the Discovery Channel and the History Channel. He worries that while nonfiction programming formats evoke the tradition of independent, journalistic documentary, the corporate priorities stress successful marketing, not integrity, in representing reality and facts. Hogarth attributes these changes in part to the competitive demands of the global marketplace that have spurred a buying-spree by distributors who want to acquire nonfiction format programming because it is relatively inexpensive and sufficiently popular with viewers. He argues that this trend raises several ethical concerns. He notes that the proliferation of global cultural products evoke fears that cultural distinctions arc evaporating into a homogenous global brew where facts, historical truth, and images float without anchors to actual events, authentic images, and locations. He believes this dislocation disturbs cultural integrity and blurs borders between fact and fiction. The foreigner as a producer model leads to interpretation of local realities from an outsider's perspective and reduces the authenticity and diversity of home-grown perspectives. He cynically describes practices like those of the corporate factual television giant Discovery Network International (DNI). Its executives claim that in exporting their branded programming worldwide they strive to be relevant to local audiences by providing programming templates to accommodate customized, local content-a process known as globalizarion. He doubts that these tidy templates provide an adequate forum for local perspectives. …

Realer Than Reel: Global Directions in Documentary

but the reasons for their publication and the interest in them had changed over the years. During the colonial era, captivity narratives such as that by Mary Rowlandson described the hand of God acting in people's lives, particularly in their survival and rescue from imprisonment or captivity at the hands of a brutal enemy. By the time of the American Revolution, however, the focus had shifted to issues of liberty and freedom. By this time, \"both liberty and its antithesis, slavery, were central to political discourse\" (p. 2) and popular publications reflected this fact. Liberty and freedom now constituted \"the nation's founding myth and most cherished ideal\" (p. 2) and Americans had \"embraced the notion of self-determination as the defining tenet of liberty.\" (p. 2). But Americans also spent much of this early period debating just what freedom and liberty meant. And it is in this debate that captivity narratives played an important role because they presented a graphic vision of the loss of freedom and efforts to regain it on the part of various individuals. The seventeen captivity narratives presented in Liberty s CapLiberty's Captives: Narratives of Confinement in the Print Culture of the Early Republic

Liberty's Captives: Narratives of Confinement in the Print Culture of the Early Republic Edited by Daniel E. Williams Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2006, 322 pp

Carol Sue Humphrey

Papers

The Good Citizen: A History of American Civic Life

Benjamin Franklin: Writings.

Realer Than Reel: Global Directions in Documentary

Liberty's Captives: Narratives of Confinement in the Print Culture of the Early Republic Edited by Daniel E. Williams Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2006, 322 pp

To Win the Peace: British Propaganda in the United States during World War II