My Country,My Country,directed by Laura Poitras,produced by Jocelyn Glatzer and Laura Poitras Iraq in Fragments,directed by James Longley,produced by John Sinno and James Longley

A new form of “entertaining news,” accessed by most through television, has become a privileged domain of politics for the first time in countries “beyond the West” in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia. What are the political consequences of this development: What is the relationship between media and politics in these regions? We answer these questions through a case study of India, the world's largest democracy, where two decades of media expansion and liberalization have yielded the largest number of commercial television news outlets in the world. We show why prevailing theories of media privatization and commercialization cannot account for the distinctive architecture of media systems in places like India. In this article, we first provide an overview of the historical and contemporary dynamics of media liberalization in India and the challenges that this poses to existing models and typologies of the media-politics relationship. We then present a new typology of media systems and a theoretical framework for studying the relationship between television news and democratic politics in India, and by extension in the global South. In the concluding section, we reflect on the broader comparative insights of the essay and discuss directions for future research. We believe that our alternative comparative framework captures more meaningfully the diversity and complexity of emerging media systems and their relationships to democratic practice in these regions.     

Television,Power, and the Public in Russia,by Ellen Mickiewicz

In the fall of 1994 a nonpartisan and nonprofit voter information organization Project Vote Smart-designed and implemented an education project for "atrisk" voters in northern California. The Project Vote Smart (PVS) effort was a systematic attempt to provide typically nonvoting groups both information and incentive to participate in the November general election. The results presented here suggest that the receipt of PVS materials did not directly increase the likelihood of voting or election interest. However, the receipt of PVS materials did make voters feel better about the resources they had to bring to bear on electoral choices.     

关于建立中越老泰缅跨境旅游圈的构想

中国、越南、老挝、泰国、缅甸是大湄公河次区域合作(GMS)成员国,跨境民族众多,旅游资源十分丰富,加强这一区域的跨国旅游合作,既是我国参与国际合作题中应有之义,也是推进中国与东盟人文交流的重要内容。文章论述了这一旅游圈沿江、沿路旅游带开发的思路,提出提高认识,形成共识、合作共建沿江沿路旅游基础设施、加强跨境旅游合作机制、合作开辟跨境旅游热线、合作共建、简化出入境手续等推进措施。