Deciding What's News: A Study of CBS Evening News, NBC Nightly News, Newsweek, and Time

Book Review: Folk Devils and Moral Panics: The Creation of the Mods and Rockers

Short of something libelous, we can print pretty much anything we choose in this space. Of course, if we write something outrageous, inflammatory, idiotic, or just plain dull we will have to take the consequences. Or will we? We could simply declare that we were morally and emotionally bankrupt at the time we wrote the column and walk away from it as though it were never written. Or perhaps the author--the fellow peering at you from the upper right hand corner--could say he was genetically predisposed to be inflammatory, thus rendering him immune from accountability. The framers of the Bill of Rights didn't create a corresponding Bill of Responsibilities. Perhaps they should have. It seems as if they had a better sense than people do now that rights inherently bring responsibilities. You could even say that the person with the most rights has the most responsibility. The astonishing surge in personal bankruptcies in the last several years--a surge occurring amidst one of the most prosperous periods in the country's history--is a perfect example of the dominance of rights over responsibility. Bankruptcy laws, for individuals or businesses, were never intended to become just another financial planning tool. The original laws arose to ease the distress of various financial panics and economic depressions of the last century. This month's cover story (p.30), written by Executive Editor Steve Cocheo, who has been covering bankruptcy for us for 18 years, explains how the bankruptcy law revisions in 1978 and 1986 significantly altered the creditor/debtor balance. The article explores in particular the proposed remedies of the Federal Bankruptcy Commission, whose final report is due out in October. Much to lenders' chagrin, the current proposals relating to consumers, if anything, give more weight to debtors. This state of affairs results in part from the gradual diminishing of the concept of personal responsibility--i.e. making a decision and abiding by the results, good or ill. This decline is apparent not only among individuals as debtors, but also individuals as lenders. Institutions themselves have no moral precepts, only the people who organize and run them do. The same "dumbing down" of responsibility on the debtor side of the equation has corrupted the creditor side as well. So while many individuals have obscured the sense of obligation resulting from borrowing money, preferring to think of credit as a right and a means to a particular lifestyle, so have individuals on the lending side obscured their sense of responsible extension of credit. …

Is Anyone Responsible

The transition from fast spontaneous urbanisation in southern Europe, with popular squatting as a form of civil disobedience, to ‘new social movements’ (NSMs) for democratic globalisation in cities...

Urban Social Movements in ‘Weak’ Civil Societies: The Right to the City and Cosmopolitan Activism in Southern Europe

The Business of Media: Corporate Media and the Public Interest. David Croteau and William Hoynes. Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge Press, 2001.302 pp. $25.95 pbk. In The Business of Media, sociology professors David Croteau and William Hoynes pose a simple but well-supported formula to explain how media companies have expanded their business interests and social influence the past two decades: technology + politics = deregulation. Media deregulation, further fueled by the Telecommunications Act of 1996, permitted-even encouraged-the wave of mergers and buyouts in the late 1990s. The authors trace how new technology has not only made the media more pervasive, simply in terms of the amount of media content, but also has allowed media companies to capitalize on new ways of presenting and packaging media products. However, in pursuing its business interests, the authors assert, the media industry is falling woefully short of meeting the social and political needs of citizens in a democracy. The media sell content to the public, but the more cherished media market is advertisers, who buy access to media audiences. This more lucrative market requires media to cater to advertisers in ways that impact content and direct attention to corporate interests. The authors assert this structure challenges the belief that the unregulated market model responds adequately to public needs. Readers are asked to consider media more broadly and use a public sphere model as a basis for comparison. Juxtaposed, the market model conceives media as private companies that define public interest by what is popular, treating audiences as consumers, and measuring success by profit margins; regulation interferes with market forces, and accountability is to owners and shareholders. The public sphere model envisions media as democratic resources, promoting active citizenship with diverse content, even if not popular; regulation is useful for protecting public interest, and accountability is to the public and government, who measure success by the extent to which media serve public interest. The authors chronicle the growth of media companies, showing how growth has been encouraged by national media policies rooted in market logic. They write the Telecommunications Act of 1996, promoted as emphasizing more business competition, actually helped consolidate the power of media conglomerates and greatly diminished the prospects of the Internet remaining a free, diverse, democratic medium. Operating largely unregulated, media companies have become integrated horizontally (owning many types of media products: broadcast, film, newspapers, books, and Internet) and vertically (owning means to produce, distribute, promote, and sell their products). The authors contend that the handful of fully integrated global media conglomerates are hard to regulate through antitrust laws because the late-twentiethcentury wave of mergers teamed companies that had not been direct competitors. The result has been the growth of integrated companies that own all the production and distribution pieces in the media pie. …

The Business of Media: Corporate Media and the Public Interest

This article examines how journalistic framing of the democratic globalization movement evolved in the five years after its 1999 emergence in Seattle. It takes a longitudinal approach to analyzing social movement coverage by looking for changes in news reporting over time. Protests against the World Trade Organization put this movement on The New York Times’ map, with ‘Seattle’ enduring as a symbolic reference connoting the threat of civic disorder. We found signs of both resilience and change in the newspaper's coverage, which demonstrates complex interactions between reporters, activist groups and real-world events. Delegitimizing language was constant over time, evoking the protest paradigm and riot, confrontation and circus frames as templates. However, this analysis also found evidence of frame dynamism, suggestive of a possible evolving sympathy through which movement members improve access to reporters and get their issues across to the public. Journalists increasingly used movement members as sour...

Christopher Paine

Papers

From Seattle 1999 to New York 2004: A Longitudinal Analysis of Journalistic Framing of the Movement for Democratic Globalization