The topic of this paper is how CNN and BBC, two of the largest media companies in the world, presented Islam in the Palestinian civil war during the years 2006-2007. Articles that CNN and BBC published on the Palestinian civil war have been analyzed in order to answer this question. The purpose is to see if Islam is portrayed in an Islamophobic way by CNN and BBC and if it is possible to find discursive tracks from Clash of Civilizations-theory in the analyzed articles. The findings indicate that there are elements of Islamophobia and discursive tracks of Clash of Civilizations when it comes to presenting islam during the Palestinian civil war. Another conclusion is also that CNN and BBC presented islam in different ways during the civil war.

The BBC Archive is one of the world’s largest multimedia archives, held in 27 locations across the UK. The Archive contains over 2 million items of TV and video, 300,000 hours of audio, 6 million still photographs, over 4 million items of sheet music, and over half-a-million documents and records. It is a working media library, fulfilling some 4,000 loans per week, as well as preserving content as part of the UK’s national cultural heritage. A team of cataloguers and media managers classify a selection of current content, as well as enhancing cataloguing and classification of legacy content. There are two major classification schemes used in the Archive, both numerical, and one based on UDC. Lonclass, based on UDC, was developed first, then Telclass, which is used by the Natural History Unit in Bristol. In addition, there are many and various controlled vocabularies that have been developed to tag content in the different nations (Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland) and the English regions.

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Thesis--Florence--European university institute, 1990.

In the 1980s the future of public service broadcasting in Britain was called into doubt. Technological developments in cable, satellite and digital technologies were, it was argued, poised to end the condition known as 'spectrum scarcity'; while the emergence of a neo-liberal Conservative government, pledged to rolling back the frontiers of the state', was of the opinion that the current system of public service broadcasting provision was no longer necessary given the number of broadcasting channels now available; broadcasting, in its view, would increasingly be able to mirror the publishing industry in its structure and future regulation. Critics however, were loathe to accept the argument that technological considerations alone ought to drive broadcasting policy; and two key questions emerged. Firstly, how was public service broadcasting to be defended in a climate increasingly hostile to public service ideals and institutions in general; and secondly, and as a result of the first question, how was public service broadcasting to be understood? This thesis seeks to answer both these questions and argues that in the process of clarifying the nature of public service broadcasting in the past, that solutions for its defence in the future will be found. Public service broadcasting, was not, it will be argued, simply about institutions like the BBC, but evidence of a much broader and widely shared (across the political divides) understanding of the proper role of broadcasting in a democratic society (at least until the 1980s). In short, public service broadcasting in the past was never simply a response to a set of technological conditions; instead it was forged from a set of political, economic, Administrative and cultural ideas about the nature of society and broadcasting's role in it; and hence its ability to respond to the new conditions of the 1990s and beyond.

This study addresses the issue of overseas news production of foreign news media when they enter the market of the Mainland China. By making an in-depth investigation of BBC’s and the FT’s operations in China and comparing the news texts of the two news media’s Chinese online portals with that of their British online portals, differences in terms of narratives, semantics, plot emphasis, and ideologies are identified and analysed, thus revealing the cross-cultural behaviour patterns of the two prominent British news media in terms of balancing between British journalistic ideology and Chinese regulations, western journalistic style and Chinese readers’ tastes, and between moral standards and commercial profit. The four online portals are compared through three Chinese news events that took place in the year 2012: the downfall of Chinese high ranking official Bo Xilai; the large-scale anti-Japan protests in the summer of 2012; and Chinese writer Mo Yan winning the Nobel Prize for Literature. The three news events covered the fields of politics, economy, society and culture. The investigating methods include quantitative analysis and framing analysis of the news reports on the three news events produced by the four online portals, translation study of the translated news reports of the four online portals and semi-structured interviews with journalists and editors of BBC Chinese and the FT. The central argument is that BBC and the FT act differently in China and in the UK so as to cater to local media markets on many aspects including journalistic practice, coverage of local news, and media policy. Such changes in some cases do not remain consistent with their claims to represent the same news media. Consequently, the Chinese branches of the two prominent British news media become neither a British journalistic ideology carrier nor a copycat of a Chinese native news producer but rather a mixture of both cultures.

In 1985, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher declared publicity to be the ‘oxygen’ of terrorism. Speaking from within a climate of domestic terrorism, such a statement draws into question the nature of contemporary media coverage. The British Broadcasting Corporation, existing as a public sector broadcaster, occupies a unique position in the context of 20th and 21st century mass media. The BBC is central to the creation and direction of national and international news agendas, in the formation of worldwide public opinion, and the brand name and reputation hold connotations of honesty, accuracy and impartiality. It can therefore be positioned as a ‘a microcosm of some larger system or a whole society' (Gomm et al., 2000, p.99). Yet, the historical visual output of the organisation in relation to domestic terrorism emanating from the environment of the Troubles — a significant period in social, cultural, political, and media history — has never been subject to rigorous academic scrutiny. Grounded in the field of media and cultural studies, and drawing upon extensive archival research, this thesis investigates the representation of domestic terror by the BBC in news and documentary format over the three-decade period of 1968-1998 through two interpretive modes of textual analysis: content analysis and semiotics. Throughout, the representation of events is contextualised in relation to media theory, with the words and pictures broadcast by the BBC analysed. The framing of acts of terror as image events is considered, as well as the visual aesthetic, codes, and values, of news reports. Ultimately, this work argues that BBC coverage of the Troubles has clear and identifiable patterns and symbols. Initial outbreaks of violence, where no corresponding representational referents existed, trended towards the vivid and graphic. Gradually, however, there was an overt movement away from this form; with the notable exception of moments where a method of perception created a disjuncture to established means, coverage was dominated by generic media templates, the rhetoric of euphemism, a concerted lack of contextualisation, and empty symbolism of the absent image.

In this thesis, I seek to understand what shaped the development of television, tracing the technology back to its earliest roots. In existing literature, the history of television in its formative years (before World War II), has largely been presented in technologically deterministic terms, culminating in the ‘goal’ of adding ‘sight to sound’ – producing a wireless set with pictures. Most of the existing literature focuses on ‘hero’ figures such as British inventor John Logie Baird and his electro-mechanical television systems, or on corporate narratives such as that of RCA in the United States in developing all-electronic television. In contrast to such an approach, I will concentrate on the transnational networks linking individuals and companies, and on the common external factors affecting all of them. Some networks could operate simultaneously as rivals and collaborators, as was the case with companies such as Marconi-EMI in Britain and RCA in the United States. Senior managers and researchers such as Isaac Shoenberg at Marconi-EMI and Vladimir Zworykin at RCA played significant roles, but so too did relatively obscure figures such as Russian scientist Boris Rosing and British engineer Alan A Campbell Swinton. I will draw on newly available sources from Russia and the USSR, on over-looked sources in Britain and the United States, and on replicative technology to re-examine the story. The new material, coupled with the transnational networks approach, enables fresh insights to be gained on issues of simultaneity of invention and on contingency in the development and initial deployments of the technology. By using these fresh primary sources, and by re-interpreting some aspects of the numerous existing secondary sources, I will show that the ‘wireless with pictures’ model was not inevitable, that electro-mechanical television need not have been a technical cul-de-sac, and that in Britain at least, it was the political desire to maintain and extend the monopoly of the BBC, which effectively funnelled the technology into the model so familiar to us today.

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No description available.