How to humiliate and shame: a reporter's guide to the power of the mugshot

The judicial photograph – the “mugshot” – is a ubiquitous and instantly recognisable form, appearing in the news media, on the internet, on book covers, law enforcement noticeboards and in many other mediums. This essay attempts to situate the mugshot in a historical and theoretical context to explain the explicit and implicit meaning of the genre as it has developed, focussing in particular on their use in the UK media in late modernity. The analysis is based on the author's reflexive practice as a journalist covering crime in the national news media for 30 years and who has used mugshots to illustrate stories for their explicit and specific content. The author argues that the visual limitations of the standardised “head and shoulders” format of the mugshot make it a robust subject for analysing the changing meaning of images over time. With little variation in the image format, arguments for certain accreted layers of signification are easier to make. Within a few years of the first appearance of the mugshot form in the mid-19th century, it was adopted and adapted as a research tool by scientists and criminologists. While the positivist scientists claimed empirical objectivity we can now see that mugshots played a part in the construction of subjective notions of “the other”, “the lesser” or “sub-human” on the grounds of class, race and religion. These dehumanising ideas later informed the theorists and bureaucrats of National Socialist ideology from the 1920s to 1940s. The author concludes that once again the mugshot has become, in certain parts of the media, a signifier widely used to exclude or deride certain groups. In late modernity, the part of the media that most use mugshots – the tabloid press and increasingly tabloid TV – is part of a neo-liberal process that, in a conscious commercial appeal to the paying audience, seeks to separate rather than unify wider society.     

Translating Le Dœuff's analytics: On Le Dœuff's Anglo‐Australian interception

This article proposes an interdisciplinary approach to studying the dynamics that condition the evolution of various path dependencies of media systems, comprised of specific industry institutions, their formations, the markets they create, usage practices, audience constellations and textual formations. The interdisciplinary approach involves the integration of the semiotics of culture approach (Lotman) with the evolutionary economics approach. As the former studies the dynamics of inter-semiotic translations to interpret the evolution of media's new textual forms and the latter focuses on phenomena such as resource constraints or industry exchange relationships, then in aggregation, they may help to interpret the manifold dynamics that might contribute both to the formation of diachronic continuities as well as discontinuities in a culture. The empirical case that the article focuses on is the early evolution of the mobile web, its path dependence on the preceding media, especially desktop web, and its potential divergence from this “parent platform”, its gradual emancipation as an autonomous media domain     

The unintended consequences of campaigns designed to challenge stigmatising representations of mental illness in the media

The media is widely recognised as contributing to stigma associated with mental illness by portraying it in connection with violence and/or undesirable traits. In response, campaigns directed at policing language use, imagery and story content in the media have been implemented. But these interventions can themselves perpetuate stereotypes and assumptions that ultimately run counter to the original intent of challenging stigma. By way of illustration this paper analyses an Australian campaign that I argue invites people to see stigma in innocuous uses of ordinary language and imagery, effectively associating mental illness with that which it seeks to challenge. The grounds for its criticism and praise of stories about mental illness are also often tenuous and based on a limited approach to determining the impact of story content. The pitfalls of this type of campaign can be avoided by taking heed of the shifts in thinking advocated by postpsychiatry and the deconstructionist strategies employed by activists in the mental health field.     

How preferences,information and institutions interactively drive agenda‐setting: Questions in the Belgian parliament, 1993–2000

In this article an integrated framework of agenda‐setting is proposed that incorporates the two main accounts of agenda‐setting: the information‐processing approach by Comparative Agenda Project scholars and the preference‐centred account advanced by Comparative Manifestoes Project scholars. The study claims that attention allocation is determined at the same time by preferences, information and institutions, and that attention allocation is affected by the interactions between these three factors. An empirical test is conducted that draws upon a dataset of parliamentary questions/interpellations in Belgium in the period 1993–2000. It is found that attention in parliament is indeed driven by preceding party manifestos (preferences), by available information (media coverage) and by institutional position (government or opposition party). The evidence establishes that agenda‐setting is also affected by the interactions between preferences, information and institutions. Actors, given their preferences, treat information in a biased fashion, and institutions moderate information's role.     

Transgendering Mother's Day: blogging as citizens' media,reproductive rights and intimate citizenship

Citizenship is fast emerging as a central concern for transgender politics. This article approaches the topic of transgender citizenship by investigating empirically how the practice of blogging has served as a way of claiming, or practicing, intimate citizenship for transgendered people. Theorization of intimate citizenship helps us to further our understanding of the ways in which our most private decisions and practices are inextricably linked with public institutions, law and state policies. Significantly, this development is also tied up with other characteristically late modern technological advancements, ranging from new reproductive technologies to new Information and Communication Technologies. In the case of transgender politics, such interlacings become particularly perspicacious, not only due to modern discourses concerning diagnosis and treatment, but also because the presence of social media resources affords new possibilities for the sharing of personal and political narratives about ‘being transgendered’. In this article, I investigate an event in the Swedish blogosphere, namely the way in which the national celebration of Swedish Mother's Day became a site for the contestation of the current limitations of the reproductive legal rights for transgendered people, providing an opening for a more general debate on transgender reproductive rights.     

Representations of reproductive citizenship and vulnerability in media reports of offshore surrogacy

In his elaboration of the concept of ‘reproductive citizenship’, Turner (Turner B.S., 2001. The erosion of citizenship. The British journal of sociology, 52 (2), 189–209) suggested something of a homogeneous accumulation of cultural capital to those who make a reproductive contribution to contemporary western societies. The present article takes up this suggestion and proposes that whilst reproduction is indeed a hallmark of contemporary citizenship, the cultural capital arising from this is still differentiated by mode of reproduction, with reproductive heterosex remaining the norm against which other modes are compared. This norm, it is suggested, produces what is termed here ‘reproductive vulnerability’, namely vulnerability arising from being located outside of the norm. Through an analysis of media representations of Australian people who have undertaken offshore surrogacy arrangements in India, this article demonstrates how reproductive vulnerability is highlighted only to be dismissed through recourse to the construction of those who undertake reproductive travel as agentic citizens. The article concludes by considering what it would take for an ethics of reproductive travel to exist; one in which multiple, incommensurable vulnerabilities are taken into account, and the representation of which encourages, rather than inhibits, careful thought about the reproductive desires of all people.     

Media as Moderator of “the Sympathy Effect”

SUMMARY

How does public opinion respond when faced with the tragic death of a political candidate in the midst of an election campaign? The concept of the sympathy vote suggests that media coverage of the tragedy and the unification of public opinion carry the party of the deceased to victory on Election Day. Yet, the emotional dynamics of public opinion may not be so simple. This study argues that the relationship between emotion and candidate support hinges largely on behavioral expectations and media coverage. If messages violate expectations, media will focus on controversy leading to a dissipation of the sympathy effect in public opinion. This investigation elaborates on the mechanisms governing the relationship between campaigns and public opinion by emphasizing the significant link of media coverage in the process, and by defining boundaries of the concept of the sympathy vote for further theoretical consideration.     

中国特色传媒体制:历史沿革与发展完善

传媒体制是涉及政党、政府、社会与媒体关系的根本性制度安排。本文回顾了我国传媒体制建立、改革和发展的历史,分析不同时期我国传媒体制的特点,认为经过改革开放30多年的探索,我国传媒体制已形成包括领导体制、管理体制、职能体制、经营体制、社会体制等多层次、多方面的制度体系。本文提出,在新形势下推进传媒体制创新,必须着眼于掌握媒体这一执政资源,促进媒体繁荣发展,从我国传媒业的发展历程来把握传媒体制的发展方向,从改革开放特别是党的十六大以来我国传媒改革发展的经验中获得启示,不断深化对党管媒体的理解,丰富领导和管理媒体的途径、办法,大力拓展媒体发展空间,形成有利于激发媒体积极性创造性的体制环境。     

农民工媒介形象嬗变:从“边缘人”到“新市民”

运用再现理论对《人民日报》、《新民晚报》、《羊城晚报》的历史研究发现,媒体建构的农民工群体正在蜕去早期的形象,经历着从都市"边缘人"到成长中的"新市民"的时代嬗变。这对于正确认识真实的农民工群体,正确认识城市化过程中的客观表象及背后的社会心理变迁,揭示大众传媒助推农民工融入城市的作用具有重要意义。     

略论新闻媒体与法律服务行业的互动

近年来,我省新闻媒体法制报道出现了新的发展动向.部分法制报道逐步重视普法功能,突出向大众传播法律知识、提供法律服务.与此同时,随着司法改革后大众维权意识的逐年提高,我省法律服务行业对社会和百姓生活的影响越来越大.基于社会和大众的法律需求,本着"共生、双赢"的目标,新闻媒体与法律服务行业之间良好的互动关系正在形成.