Anthropology as Cultural Critique: An Experimental Moment in the Human Sciences by George E. Marcus; Michael M. J. Fischer

Deciding What's News: A Study of CBS Evening News, NBC Nightly News, Newsweek and Time, Herbert Gans. Vintage Books, New York (1980), 393 pp., $5.95

(1988). Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal about the Mind. The Journal of Higher Education: Vol. 59, No. 6, pp. 698-699.

Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal about the Mind

Media, Market, and Democracy in China: Between the Party Line and the Bottom Line. Yuezhi Zhao. Urbana and Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1998. 255 pp. $44.95 hbk. $19.95 pbk. Since the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union around the early 1990s and amid its continuing reform and openness even after the heavy-handed crackdown on the 1989 Tiananmen Square prodemocracy movement, both the academic and journalistic communities have been searching for new concepts and ways of making sense of the structure and processes of mass media in China, the last stronghold of communist ideology and the world's fast emerging economic power. By all measures and through various accounts, China's changing media landscape within the larger socio-political context continues to defy conventional wisdom and contemporary conceptual fixation. With a variety of approaches, numerous articles and books have attempted to determine, either quantitatively or qualitatively, how the Chinese media system strives to strike an uneasy balance between the unyielding political control dictated by the necessity of state domination in an authoritarian system on the one hand and the unrelenting momentum unleashed by the market forces on the other hand. This book by Yuezhi Zhao, a native of China and an assistant professor of communication at the University of California at San Diego, represents an insightful and challenging addition to a significant body of literature on China research in social sciences in general and in mass communication/ journalism in particular. It presents a skillful synergy of what is and what should be in the Chinese media system in both the political and economic sense. For anyone who follows the spirit and practices of Chinese journalism, the book makes a fascinating, and to some extent provocative, reading of the tension, negotiation, and accommodation of the willing bedfellows between the highly politicized Communist Party and the increasingly commercialized mass media in China. Its approach is a combination of historical description and critical analysis of the form and content of the Chinese media system over time and across space. Relying heavily on such publications as books, academic journals, and trade magazines, however, the author provides little original or systematic data. The book is nevertheless full of useful anecdotes and circumstantial evidence culled from Chinese sources not readily available to mass communication researchers outside China. They are helpful in story telling, but are insufficient in theory building, especially when the book argues for a new mass communication model in China. …

Media, Market, and Democracy in China: Between the Party Line and the Bottom Line

Stephen Jay Gould / Harmony Books, $25, pp 244 ISBN 0 517 70394 7

The median is not the message, and neither, says evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould, is the mean or the maximum. To avoid erroneous conclusions about a “biological system”–be it baseball, life on earth, or cancer—you must examine the total variation within a system, the “full house” of all cases, and not merely one narrow aspect of it. Gould challenges two widely accepted claims. Firstly, that the decline this century of very …

Full House: The Spread of Excellence from Plato to Darwin.

Doing Things with Words in Chinese Politics: Five Studies.

Humorist Dave Barry (1997) has likened sports reporting to "try[ing] to get intelligible statements from large mumbling naked men surrounded by approximately the population of Sweden." As with much humor, the hyperbole rests on an underlying truth - in this case, a keen observation about the place of sports in the hierarchy of U.S. journalism. Traditionally, the sports department has been considered the kindergarten of the newsroom, and sports coverage an enterprise of a lower order. In recent decades, however, the notion of sports as frivolous and marginal to important human affairs has become hard to sustain. Many sports stories are no longer just sports stories; they may be labor, legal, or lifestyle stories as well. Major sports are big business and, when it comes to public investments in sports facilities, also public business. Sports have become an arena for scrutinizing larger social problems, including racial tensions and gender inequities. As Los Angeles Times media critic David Shaw (1989) observed a decade ago: "Clearly, big-time sports is increasingly moving from the sports page to the front page- and to the business, entertainment and life style pages as well ... newspaper editors, long accustomed to thinking of sports as the toy department of journalism - a veritable sandbox of scores and statistics - are struggling to figure out how best to cover this change." The roster of sports-related stories accorded broad attention in the mass media - in some cases, on the front pages of even the most serious newspapers -- seems to grow longer by the year. In the late 1990s, you did not have to follow heavyweight boxing to learn about Mike Tyson taking a bite out of Evander Hollyfield's ear, or men's basketball to know about Latrell Sprewell choking his coach, or even baseball to hear of Cal Ripkin's bad back. Neither did you need to be a golf aficionado to recognize the name Tiger Woods, the first player of color to win the Masters tournament, or to know about Casey Martin, with his withered leg, going to court for the right to ride a golf cart. Whether or not you paid attention, certain issues and events in sports, be they advances in women's athletic participation and prominence or culminating battles of the pro football and baseball seasons, would likely infiltrate your consciousness. Furthermore, these stories radiated and resonated with significance beyond sport; their subtexts were barely, if at all, veiled. Tyson had violated the decorum of the ring. Sprewell had violated a hierarchy of authority. Ripken, the "iron man," was soldiering on through his pain. Woods had achieved a stunning racial breakthrough. Martin was bringing the Americans with Disabilities Act to a novel arena. The growing popularity and commercial viability of women's basketball, with two professional leagues, illustrated how far the cause of gender equity had come. A Green Bay Packers Superbowl victory became instant legend, signifying the return of a once-- storied team - until the next year, when the underdog Denver Broncos rose up. The Florida Marlins' World Series win exemplified the upstart success that money could buy in baseball. Constructed by print and broadcast media as news subjects with multiple levels of meaning, such stories buttress the central premise of a growing body of scholarship in anthropology, sociology, political and social history, and media studies that more - much more - is going on in sports than fun and games. The sheer obviousness of this tenet makes it subject to easy dismissal, which we believe is a mistake and a missed opportunity. The prominence of mass media in the modern sporting experience is a key aspect of a burgeoning literature on the cultural meanings and representations of sport (e.g., Wenner, 1989; Barnett, 1990; Whannel, 1992; Creedon, 1994; Baughman, 1995; Rowe, 1995; Real, 1989, 1996; Baker and Boyd, 1997), and this monograph represents a contribution to these evolving discussions. …

Stories of Sport and the Moral Order: Unraveling the Cultural Construction of Tiger Woods

Analyzing news stories, commentaries, and readers’ discussions of a sensational serial murder case on China's two most popular commercial online portals, this study examines how the Internet's medi...

News and Ideological Exegesis in Chinese Online Media: A Case Study of Crime Coverage and Reader Discussion on Two Commercial Portals

Research access to mainland China, once severely circumscribed, has expanded tremendously during the post-Mao reform period, with important implications for the study of Chinese mass communication. Fieldwork possibilities mean that scholars are privy to a great deal more of the media circuit – not only to voluminous content that can be systematically sampled, but also to structures, contexts, practices, processes, places, and people involved in production and reception. Drawing on experiences in the field, this article discusses challenges and rewards of studying Chinese journalism from within.

On location: reflections on fieldwork in Chinese journalism studies

(2001). Epilogue: The Future of Exchange between Local Culture and Global Trends. Culture, Sport, Society: Vol. 4, No. 2, pp. 237-254.

Judy Polumbaum

Papers

Doing Things with Words in Chinese Politics: Five Studies.

Stories of Sport and the Moral Order: Unraveling the Cultural Construction of Tiger Woods

News and Ideological Exegesis in Chinese Online Media: A Case Study of Crime Coverage and Reader Discussion on Two Commercial Portals

On location: reflections on fieldwork in Chinese journalism studies

Epilogue: The Future of Exchange between Local Culture and Global Trends