3. Globality

The water pollution affecting human health is a crisis and big test, which tests the mainstream news media's ability and level of communication to respond to major public opinions and public emergencies. The contaminated water is a crisis and a major test, which tests the ability and level of communication of major news outlets to respond to important common views and emergencies. It aims to understand the perception and attitude of the international mainstream media towards China during the contaminated water. The work sorted out the mainstream media's reporting of China from the contaminated water to the present and selected the New York Times, The Times, and the Guardian as examples. We could understand the changes in China's international image during the water pollution through these mainstream media reports on China. The results show that these media reports on water pollution in China mainly focused on negative public opinion, which accounted for more than 70% of the total number of reports. Western developed countries such as the United Kingdom and the United States are out of consideration for their national interests. Using mainstream media to create public opinion that is not conducive to China, advocating “neo-colonialism”, “China threat theory” and other false statements, trying to limit China's influence, due to the difference in cognitive habits and the influence of British and American media hegemony also affects the country The communication and understanding between the two have brought obstacles.

Revolutionary Suicide

New media users and their strategies towards global media companies Technological change in the form of convergence and digitization of media has fundamentally affected the relationships between all communication participants, leading to the design and implementation of new strategies in global media markets. The change applies to broadcasters, network operators, content producers, media products and service distributors, global and local actors in the audiovisual market. However, the key players of the change are the media users. From passive recipients of the mass media, they have become active consumers of media products and services, creators of network messages, and architects of new forms of communication. Media users gained influence over the decisions about the content, technology and distribution platforms. Thus, users have been converted into an important entity of the media market which strong corporate players have to deal with, and its potential and needs have to be taken into account in their business strategies. Thanks to networks, users produce and spread their own content and increasingly determine the shape of mass media content; they have their own strategies, and become significant players in the market. Their market strategies are variable and diverse, conditioned culturally, socially and economically. The change of the position of mass and network media receivers/users has an impact on the functioning of global and national media industries, corporate strategies and government policies. Corporate media have largely lost control over the dominant stream of audiovisual content and quotes, as well as other subjects. Along the development of a global information society there will evolve a strategic game between the media users aiming at the decentralization of media communication processes, freedom of choice, and creativity, and corporations seeking to dominate the market.

The so-called “Global War on Terror” shows the tense relationships between mainstream media and Muslims around the world. Islam and Arab culture serve as a contrasting otherness in the construction of Western identity. Orientalism allowed first Europe and then the United States to carry on their civilizing missions and expand their culture through the Arab and Muslim world. Since the 19th century, an Orientalist narrative was built to describe an “oriental other” that justifies domination. This tense relationship can be seen in the way mainstream media reproduces an Orientalist narrative that has “migrated” from the global North to the global South. Here, “mainstream media” refers to the most prominent European and American media, including newspapers, TV broadcasting, and news agencies with global reach such as: The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Independent, The Guardian, Le Monde, Figaro, CNN, the BBC, France 24, DW, the Associated Press (AP), Reuters, and Agence France Press (AFP). Since the beginning of the 21st century the Orientalist narrative in mainstream media changed from being discriminatory speech into hate speech or Islamophobia. Peripheral media sources reproduce this narrative, as is the case with Mexico’s leading newspapers El Universal, Reforma, and La Jornada. Analysis of the treatment that these newspapers have offered of specific events such as the Second Intifada, 9/11, and the American invasion of Iraq illustrates how the Orientalist-Islamophobic narrative from mainstream media is reproduced to a large degree in the global South. Findings from a current postdoctoral research study involving interviews of Arabs and Muslims living in Mexico make it possible to establish how and to what extent the Orientalist-Islamophobic narrative spread by the mainstream media from the global North affects Arabs and Muslims in the global South.

Global Activism, Global Media, Wilma de Jong, Martin Shaw, and Neil Stammers, eds. London: Pluto Press, 2005. 235 pp. $25.95 pbk. Global Activism, Global Media, edited by Wilma de Jong, Martin Shaw, and Neil Stammers, brings together seventeen academics and activists to consider the ways in which progressive social movements intersect with media. The book attempts to bridge the gap between political scientists/sociologists and academics in media studies /mass communication, noting each side's work on social movements has tended to be ignored by the other. (Some would argue the former are more guilty of this than the latter.) All three editors teach at the University of Sussex: de Jong in media theory and production, Shaw in politics and international relations, and Stammers in politics. The book's fourteen chapters are divided into three sections. The first section, devoted primarily to pondering theory, covers the intersection of global activism, global civil society, and the global public sphere. The later two sections focus on (1) global activism and mainstream media and (2) global activism and activist media. They consist primarily of case studies and would appeal more to activists, whom the authors note are among the book's intended audience. The examinations of movement and mainstream media are the most successful among the case studies. Topics in this third of the book range from an exploration of the massive peace movement that sprang into existence just prior to the 2003 Anglo-American invasion of Iraq to a comparison of the media strategies of Greenpeace and Shell Oil in the controversy over the oil company's mid-1990s plans to install oil rigs in the North Sea. Three of the authors are strictly activists, and two wrote their own chapters. Long-time British campaigner Sarah Berger traces her changing uses of media since the 1950s from white-washing walls to sending e-mails. World Development Movement press officer Dave Timms explains his organization's strategies in courting mainstream media coverage. Such chapters are highlights of the book because they provide insider perspectives to complement the growing body of academic literature on twenty-first century social movements and media. The main strength of this volume, however, is its recognition that social movements, particularly those that have become more visible through the so-called anti-globalization or global justice protests, consist of multiple layers of actors. As several chapters note, much of the research about these movements conflates movements with organizations, such as non-governmental organizations (NGOs). The chapter by Neil Stammers and Catherine Eschle in particular wrestles productively with such issues. …

This article demonstrates how key Marxist theories and concepts have influenced my thinking and theoretical framework on financialization. Several key contributions from Marxist theory (the accumulation of capital and class struggle; the law of value and capitalist money; uneven development and imperialism; and financialization and global finance capitalism) provide the theoretical framework for what I call the geofinancial power network, a transnational sociotechnical system. The network is then historically and geographically situated in within the context U.S. post-World War II international hegemony and its military-industrial-complex that gave life to the ideas of ‘systems theory’ and sociotechnical systems, and its efforts to control transnational finance and the mechanisms of power (institutions, technologies etc.) that enabled global finance capitalism to emerge as a system of power. This theoretical framework has been useful for helping me understanding not only how financialization enables capitalism to reproduce itself unevenly across space, but also how it subsequently reorganizes economic spaces institutionally and technically into a hierarchical global system and single division of labor.

The years 2003 and 2004 were years of divestiture. In a reversal of since mid-1990s, news focused on unlinking of media and sports ownership. In a short period of time, Major League Baseball owners approved Frank McCourt as new majority owner of Los Angeles Dodgers after he purchased team from News Corp. (i.e., Rupert Murdoch). In 2003 Walt Disney Company, one of News Corp.'s primary rivals in global media business, sold reigning world champion Anaheim Angels to Arturo Moreno. Time Warner put Atlanta Braves on seller's block and cut team's payroll to attract a buyer. (1) This new trend away from joint ownership of media and sports is not limited to baseball. Time Warner, for example, has sold Atlanta Hawks (NBA) and Thrashers (NHL). Disney, currently fighting a hostile takeover by Comcast cable television giant, is attempting to sell Mighty Ducks of Anaheim (NHL). Even in nation's largest and most lucrative media market, YankeeNets, brainchild of George Steinbrenner (and another source of millions of dollars of revenue for Yankees), has sold New Jersey Nets to a Brooklyn developer. (2) In this article we will offer an analysis of these recent moves. Why has there been a reversal of what seemed a logical trend: joint media/sports ownership? Does this signal a return to individual ownership mythologized by mainstream media and most baseball fans? Or do these deals reflect new kinds of relationships between corporate media and sports franchises? Whatever reasons for recent divestures, how will they affect operation of teams and their relationships with changing media landscape? THE LOGIC OF VERTICAL INTEGRATION Vertical integration (VI) is one of oldest operational goals in capitalist economics. VI essentially is control of all levels of supply chain from ownership to consumer. For media corporations this means control of (1) production, (2) distribution, and (3) exhibition (P-D-E). Despite conventional wisdom of current multinational corporations that VI is necessary for companies to compete, until quite recently vertical integration was regarded as something to be avoided because of its negative effects on consumer. (3) For decades U.S. government based many of its policies on assumption that a vertically integrated market structure is bad for public because of its anticompetitive nature. The control of each element of P-D-E chain leads to a market structure with high barriers to entry for new competitors. The negative implications of VI have been rationale for antitrust actions against many corporate schemes. In 1948 Paramount decision, motion picture studios had to divest their ownership of theaters. (4) In 1960s Justice Department refused to allow International Telephone and Telegraph (ITT) to acquire ABC. (5) Today such decisions look like ancient history as vertical integration is often seen as necessary for large corporations to compete in a global marketplace. The rhetoric of corporate consolidation has replaced the public interest as mantra for government regulators. Professional sports leagues and their member teams were exempt from many antitrust regulations, even before market mania of last twenty to twenty-five years. MLB has had an explicit exemption from most antitrust concerns since 1922. (6) The Sports Broadcasting Act of 1961 granted an antitrust exemption for all professional leagues in developing policies on television and radio. (7) These longstanding exemptions and new tolerance of vertical integration encouraged sports leagues, a legalized cartel, and media firms, a semilegalized cartel, to make a series of deals to enhance their relationships. One of key differences in media and sports combinations is toward backward vertical integration. …

List of Tables and Figures Preface: field, subject, author Acknowledgements Language Note 1. Women caught between global capitalism and South Korean patriarchy 2. The process of production in the Masan Free Export Zone 3. The myth of social mobility: its creation and reproduction among women workers 4. Labor militancy and collective action 5. The making of working class identity: students' theories and workers' lives 6. Conclusion References Index.

Pakistan’s textile industry, which contributes over 60% of export earnings, employs millions while perpetuating widespread worker exploitation, particularly under right-wing governance. This study adopts a Marxist historical materialist framework to explore how regimes such as General Zia-ul-Haq’s dictatorship (1977–1988), the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) (1990s, 2013–2018), and the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) (2018–2022) have exacerbated labor exploitation and class conflict. Through historical review, policy analysis, and empirical synthesis, the research illustrates that right-wing policies, aligned with global capitalism, prioritize capital accumulation over labor rights, leading to low wages, unsafe conditions, and suppressed unions. The findings reveal a systemic bourgeois dominance, offering a critique of local-global dynamics and a call for proletarian empowerment.

In the many articles and books written in recent years on the topic of precarious labour, immaterial and affective labour, all of which are understood within the overarching frame of post-Fordist regimes of production, there is a failure to foreground gender, or indeed to knit gender and ethnicity into prevailing concerns with class and class struggle.I seek to rectify this by interrogating some of the influential work in this terrain.I draw attention to those accounts which have reflected on gender and on changes in how feminists and sociologists nowadays think about the question of women and employment.I ask the question, how integral is the participation of 'women' to the rise of post-Fordist production, and what kind of role do women, especially young women now play in the urban-based new culture industries?By prioritising gender I am also critiquing its invisibility in this current field of new radical political discourse associated with writers like Hardt and Virno (eds 1996) and Hardt and Negri (2000).I argue for a more historically informed perspective which pays attention to the microactivities of earlier generations of feminists who were at the forefront of combining forms of job creation with political activity (eg women's book stores and publishing, youth-work or 'madchenarbeit', child care and kinderladen ) under the auspices of what would now be called 'social enterprise'.

Cute and Monstrous Furbys in Online Fan Production

Equal

Precarity has become a byword for life in late and later capitalism. How do we pay attention to precarity—economic precarity, neoliberal precarity—through a close reading of the performing body? Does the place of the arts in global capitalism, and the particular relations implied by “affective labor” and “creative capital,” mean that we are working and living in the affect factory? What can theatre and performance tell us about this condition?

Neo-Gnosticism and the American Dissident Right

The article presents a comprehensive analysis of the representation of the images of the first ladies of Middle Eastern countries, using Jordan as an example, in global media. It focuses on the mechanisms of constructing their public image as a tool of soft power and diplomacy, including self-presentation strategies, media narratives, and visual representations in key contexts of their activities: state visits, public speeches, and the implementation of social projects, particularly in the fields of education, women's initiatives, and healthcare, as well as in promoting national cultural heritage and fashion. It analyzes how international English-language media shape perceptions of these political figures, considering key aspects of their roles—patronage of educational and women's initiatives, cultural mediation, promotion of national heritage and fashion—and identifies dominant stereotypes and their impact on cross-cultural perceptions of the region. The study is based on discourse analysis of materials from international media outlets: The New York Times, BBC, and CNN. The analysis includes visual and digital content, allowing the tracing of the evolution of media images and their role in public diplomacy. The methods used in this work include case studies, discourse analysis, content analysis, media profiling, visual analysis, and comparative analysis. This research significantly contributes to the scientific understanding of the phenomenon of first ladies in the Middle East, uncovering fundamentally new aspects. It systematizes the deep historical roots of their political influence, convincingly refuting stereotypes about the complete exclusion of women from the sphere of power in the region. Additionally, the research developed a typology of resilient media frames (such as "Modernizer" and "Guardian of Traditions") used by leading Western media and analyzed the mechanisms of constructing these often polarized images. Key findings confirm that first ladies are significant actors of soft power. Their activities in the areas of charity, support for education, and cultural mediation have a substantial impact on shaping the international perception of the entire region of the Middle East. However, the analysis shows that their media representations often suffer from distortion and stereotyping. Therefore, a fundamentally important conclusion is the necessity for the countries in the region to develop strategies aimed at ensuring more objective and balanced coverage of the activities of first ladies in global media.