This chapter covers the media, race, and politics. It begins by introducing the key concepts of priming, framing, and agenda-setting. It then offers a history of the use of race in electoral campaigns highlighting the difference between racially explicit and racially implicit frames on crime, welfare, and other policy areas. That history includes the progression from a Republican ‘Southern Strategy” focused primarily on race and African Americans to one increasingly focused on immigration and religion in recent years. The chapter then turns to different assessments of the impact of these campaigns. Excerpts cover media conglomeration and the debate over whether the media has a liberal bias and/or an anti-minority bias.

Increasing educational standards in the workforce have increased the use of experts throughout the economy, leading to processes that more closely resemble bureaucracies and stakeholder policymaking, with an increasing emphasis on culturally liberal values such as diversity, representation, and social responsibility. The guiding industries and workforces of the scientific and technology sectors have enabled a technocratic ethos in government and industry. Public opposition to technocracy and skepticism of meritocracy is growing among voters, allowing conservatism to brand itself as an opposition movement to the extension of government reach and the associated prevalence of “politically correct” messages and practices across educational institutions and in the workplace. The polarized American brand of politics now pervades internal debates across organizational sectors, enlarging the scope of activist politics beyond campaigns and government, especially where educational and cultural divides are strongest. The distinct styles of the culture war’s two conflicting sides have become more dissimilar at the national, state, and local levels, even in ostensibly apolitical arenas.

This chapter traces the development of the Donbas media landscape after the emergence of the ‘People’s Republics’ of Donetsk and Luhansk (DNR and LNR) in 2014. It focuses on the DNR/LNR authorities’ efforts to first break down and then rebuild local media. These efforts consisted of two phases: one of destruction and one of reconstruction. The destruction phase involved tearing down the existing media structure and pressuring journalists into either leaving Donbas or cooperating with the new authorities. The reconstruction phase involved setting up new media channels or repurposing existing ones, as well as implementing new legislation to impose censorship and promote certain desired narratives. The ministries of information of the two ‘Republics’ promoted local media production and set limits to what was allowed to be published by implementing accreditation procedures and keeping track of journalists working in the region. This formalisation occurred through a system of laws, decrees, edicts, and other regulations.

This chapter presents the importance of productivity in the growth of the cultural sector. We describe the concept of productivity lag, as explained by Baumol and Bowen, followed by a more formal algebraic analysis of the effects of productivity lag. In addition to a theoretical approach, we provide historical evidence on the productivity lag and its consequences. We also turn to a discussion of the forces that countervail productivity lag. Finally, we outline evidence that growth of the earnings gap has been forestalled by artistic innovation and an increasing artistic deficit.

This chapter seeks to understand how media and digital technologies influence art demand and supply. Particularly, we shed light on the impact of the mass media on cultural consumption and live attendance. We describe the emergence of virtual museums and, more broadly, digital cultural heritage. We also evaluate whether video games may influence art consumption and discuss the cultural importance of video games. Finally, we cover the consumption of music and how it relates to the rapidly changing and evolving music industry.

Culture and language are crucial elements of the information realm to interpret and represent contemporary armed conflict in the cognitive realm. They set the tone for how different audiences perceive mediated conflict events, which engineers observers’ opinions, perceptions and responses to the physical realm event. Language and culture have been instrumentalised by Western countries to facilitate conflict and warfare, creating unneccessary wars of choice through creating simple binary stories of ’Us’ versus the ’Other’ that attempt to convince the audience of the moral and ethical superiority of ’Us’ over the ’Other’. The result has been the Endless Wars and the rapidly expanding New Cold War.

The reason and motivation behind researching and writing the book is presented, along with a description of the individual chapter content. A series of research questions are posed, with the intended purpose and role of bringing together the diverse content and analysis that is presented across the chapters.

The well-established concept of expressive voting concludes that the public policy preferences people express are likely to differ from their instrumental preferences, but the literature on expressive voting has not developed clear conclusions about how people form their expressive preferences. An extensive literature on preference formation helps to answer this question. Because there are no instrumental consequences from the political preferences citizens hold, the utility they get from those preferences comes solely from their having and expressing them. People have a status quo bias, and are prone to value the preferences they have because of the endowment effect. People adopt preferences to minimize cognitive dissonance, and often yield to peer pressure when choosing the public policy preferences they express. There is a bandwagon effect, and people’s policy preferences are affected by the mass media. This chapter goes beyond just saying that expressive preferences differ from instrumental preferences by explaining why they differ.

This chapter considers the myth of the perfect body image and the critical role played by the mass media in influencing people's self-image and informing ideals of what is considered beautiful or attractive. The way in which body image is affected by psychosocial factors is analyzed. Many theories and much scientific research about this topic are introduced, followed by an overview of body dysmorphic disorder, and a broad summary of vigorexia (bigorexia), a new and increasingly common disorder, along with several theories and scientific research. Finally, the way in which these two diseases correlate with the myth of the perfect body image is analyzed.

Don DeLillo's work is known for addressing certain topics in depth; among these are television and consumerism. Most articles focus their attention on White Noise; however, if one reads pretty much any work by DeLillo, mass media – newspapers, radio, television, film, the internet, in addition to the mass consumption and information overload that comes with them – will be present either as a major thematic concern or a steady, omniscient buzz in the background. For the handful of texts in which it is not, particularly those of the twenty-first century, their characters often retreat to almost uninhabited and occasionally downright inhospitable settings, making the near absence of technology all the more palpable. Written before the release of The Silence (2020), this chapter demonstrates how DeLillo’s body of work – from Americana (1970) to Zero K (2016) – documents how mass media since the mid-twentieth century has helped shape individual identity, culture, and history in the USA, as well as anticipating some of the dangers mass media man poses to contemporary society.

In this Introduction, we meet two fixer–reporter teams who cover the same event – a terrorism attack in Istanbul – in very different ways. Fixers are news contributors who assist foreign reporters by arranging, translating, and otherwise mediating between them and local news sources. Depending on a fixer’s background, aspirations, and relationship with their client reporter, they can shape the news in significant ways. To understand how and why fixers shape the news, attention to political, historical, and biographical contexts of newsmaking is essential. The Introduction goes on to explain that the fixer and reporter characters who appear in this book are composite characters created from data collected through ethnographic research.

All of the historicising of literary modernism in recent decades has brought scholars of literature to a point where the application of a simple test is warranted. We should ask, that is, whether the historical phenomena that made literary modernism what it was also extensively shaped the majority of literary practice delivered in a realist mode. The ‘modernismists’ amongst us must face an uncomfortable possibility: if modernism’s major causes can be found shaping the rest of the literary production of the period which we associate with modernism – that is, those works not commonly deemed modernist – then any intrinsic justification for categorising certain works as ‘modernist’ has disappeared. This chapter looks in detail at the impact of one of the established causes of literary modernism – the shift from individualism to collectivism in European politics during the late nineteenth century – on realist writing, to test the easy assumption that literary modernism was unique in being influenced by collectivist politics. It shows that the distinctiveness, self-consciousness, and sensitivity to the surrounding world that is conventionally ascribed to modernism is, at least, overstated.

In the years 1900–20, polar exploration and high-altitude mountaineering became entrenched as features of British newspapers and the pictorial press. Meeting and propagating the appetites of an emerging audience of ‘armchair’ explorers, such publications exploited the opportunities afforded by new printing technologies to offer eye-catching typography and photographic images that conveyed the scale of Alpine adventure, and put the wastes of polar snows into the hands of the reader. Meanwhile, reporting on labour disputes connected to the British mining industry offered the yin to exploration’s icy yang: the chance to convey the greys and blacks of mines and miners through the liberal application of ink. This relationship between the black/white of the mines/snows and the black/white of the page can be seen triangulated by a further force: literary modernism’s development of a kind of spatialised moral economy. This chapter considers the tensions between a press in transition, an armchair audience in the waning days of exploration, and a body of literary work that made the most of the greyscale and the vertical axis in offering to the reader a moral and emotional landscape.

Over the course of his career, Mailer demonstrated a deep concern regarding the problem of totalitarianism, particularly its manifestation in American society. It was his belief that totalitarianism was not only a political and social threat enacted against the freedom of the individual, but that it had also made inroads into every aspect of society, from architecture to technology. This chapter provides an overview of Mailer’s definitions of totalitarianism in society, as well as his views of its consequences – which he believed manifested not just socially and politically, but also psychologically and physically.