Colin Sparks Knihy

Coverage of the Clinton-Lewinsky saga followed in a long trail of media exposures of the more personal details of the lives of public figures. Many commentators have seen stories like this, and TV shows like Jerry Springer's, as evidence of a decline in the standards of the mass media. This increasing interest in private lives and the falling off of coverage of serious news is often described as Otabloidization.O The essays in this book are the first serious scholarly studies of what is going on and what its implications are. Reality, it turns out, is much more complex than some of the laments suggest. As the contributors show, this is not just a U.S. problem but is repeated in country after country, and it is not certain that the media anywhere are getting more tabloid. What is more, there is no consensus about whether tabloidization is just Odumbing downO or whether it is a necessary tactic for the mass media to engage with new audiences who do not have the news habit. Tabloid Tales will be of interest to students and scholars in journalism, mass communication, political science, and cultural and media studies.

In counterpoint to conventional examinations of images of journalism which tend to concentrate on its informational role in the political process, this book provides a lively analysis of journalism in its other guise - as entertainment. In a series of interrelated studies, the authors examine the theoretical problems in assessing popular journalism and consider common examples of its manifestations - its relationship to media stars, the coverage of sport, and the presentation of news in a `popular' form.

Colin Sparks provides a challenging reassessment of the impact of the collapse of communism on the media systems of Eastern Europe. He analyzes both the changes themselves and their implications for the ways in which we think about the mass media, while also demonstrating that most of the orthodox accounts of the end of communism are seriously flawed. There are much greater continuities between the old system and the new than are captured by the theories that argue that there has been a radical and fundamental change. Instead of marking the end of critical inquiry or the end of history, as some have suggested, Sparks argues that the collapse of the communist systems demonstrates how very limited and frequently incorrect the

This book gives a comprehensive and critical account of the theoretical changes in communication studies from the early theories of development communication through to the contemporary critiques of globalization. It looks at the ways in which the media can be used to effect change and development, and traces the evolution of thinking from attempts to spread ′modernity′ by way of using the media through to alternative perspectives based on encouraging participation in development communication. It explores the theory of media imperialism, the criticisms that it provoked, and its replacement as the dominant theory of international communication by globalization.