The Gender-in-Media Landscape Study (Vietnam) aims to inform the activities of the Southeast Asia Media Training Network by exploring gender equity in the media workplace. Towards this end, data was gathered through a broad survey and multiple focus group discussions.The survey found:

More women worked in the media than men, including in recent years increasing numbers in management positions. Balancing work demands with family pressures – which by far fall dispro- portionately upon women – was a significant challenge to many careers.Women and men worked across a wide range of roles and beats within the industry, with the main exception being relative dominance of male journalists in sport and science and technology reporting.

Media institutions followed legally-mandated leave requirements, including maternity leave. However, any further policies and operations in support of gender equity – such as some flexibili- ty in hours, or carer’s leave – were inconsistent, and generally ad-hoc or dependent on personal arrangements where they exist. They often don’t adequately meet staffing needs.

The great majority of respondents received at least some training in the past two years which was valued; the main complaint was the limited number of training sessions. Men had greater general access, although majorities of both genders received training. 

This report aims to provide Fojo and its project partners with data and perspectives on gender in the media workplace, which can help ensure gender is integrated throughout project activities. in Cambodia project partners are the Cambodian Centre for Independent Media (CCIM) and the Cambodia Communications Institute (CCI). 

The report includes a brief overview of Cambodia’s current political situation, national-level gender issues, and media industry, including the industry’s scale and levels of media freedom. This provides context to interpret the findings on gender dynamics within the media sector itself.

As described under ‘Methodology’ below, the data are both qualitative and quantitative, combining focus group discussions and an extended survey. The researchers hope the data can meet the goal of informing and supporting curriculum design and delivery, whether in ‘technical’ skills or in broader gender awareness and policy; and in supporting the gender policies of both partners and Fojo. 

Vi som har skrivit denna artikel är alla verksamma inom forskningsmiljön Svenska med didaktisk inriktning (SMDI) vid Malmö högskola. Frågor om språkutveckling i bred bemärkelse står här i centrum. För närvarande är vi engagerade i projektet ”SMDI och lärande i medielandskapet 2.0”. Vår teoretiska plattform kan beskrivas som medieekologisk, vilket kortfattat uttryckt innebär att vi är intresserade av de mångfaldiga och komplexa relationerna mellan medier och kommunikativa kompetenser (Elmfeldt & Erixon 2007; Erixon 2012; Hayles 2002). Dessa relationer förstås därför inte, som så ofta annars i skolsammanhang, i termer av enkelriktad påverkan eller effekter (exempelvis datorns och internets negativa inverkan på skriftspråket). Vår huvudpoäng i denna artikel är att medie- och informationskunnighet, MIK, handlar om, borde handla om, framför allt två saker: språkutveckling och demokrati.

Syftet med denna kvalitativa innehållsanalys är att undersöka hur stereotyper, stigmatisering och trivialisering kring psykisk störning, närmare bestämt personer med dissociativ identitetsstörning, bibehålls genom gestaltningar i film, samt hur gestaltningen skiljer sig åt inom två filmer ur olika genrer, skräck- och komedifilm. Med filmerna Mina jag och Irene och Hide and Seek som analysunderlag, och med hjälp av ett representationsteoretiskt perspektiv, applicerades ett analysschema på sekvenser ur materialet som, genom de semiotiska analysverktygen denotation och konnotation, användes för att besvara studiens forskningsfrågor. Resultatet visade att båda filmerna upprätthöll stigmatiserande och/eller trivialiserande skildringar av dissociativ identitetsstörning men att de skiljde sig åt i sitt sätt att porträttera störningen. Dessa sätt leder till olika uppfattningar om störningen men har snarlika verkliga konsekvenser.

Barriers to Women Journalists identifies obstacles hindering women in sub-Saharan Africa from entering, progressing, and/or staying in journalism. The main objective of this study is to assess the status of women in journalism in sub-Saharan Africa. This report identifies a number of obstacles hindering women journalists, and locates possible strategies, responses and interventions that might increase the number of women journalists in sub-Saharan Africa, at various career levels. The aims and objectives of this study are broken down into three research questions.

1.    What are the lived experiences of women journalists in sub-Saharan Africa, in terms of barriers of entry, progression and staying in the profession?

2.    Why do these barriers exist?

3.    How are and might these barriers be challenged in a way that results in an increase in the number, progression and retention of women journalists in sub-Saharan Africa?

Journalism has changed in many ways in today's society. The emergence of digitization has created a new format for journalists to work on. Social media is an example of that and one of the largest reasons for the development that has taken place. Today´s journalists must work at a high speed to produce as much news as possible but especially know how to use social media platforms to reach out and attract an audience both for private use and at work. For journalists social media is a way to create interaction and participation. Journalists get the opportunity to be personal and create their own branding in the text.But where does the limit go from being objective and personal? Can it harm the journalists credibility and the ideal concept objectivite if they expose personal opinions and emotions?In this study six journalist from three huge swedish news media – Svenska Dagbladet (SvD), Aftonbladet och SVT has been chosen whose purpose is to examined the balance between being personal and objective as a journalist on social media that proceeds from the questions:

1. In what way does six professional journalist from Svenska dagbladet (SvD), Aftonbladet och SVT use social media platforms in their work respectively in their personal life?2. In what way do interviewees feel that social media can influence the role of the journalist?

The results show that these journalists have similar answers and opinions about how they use social media platforms for personal use and at work. They said that not a day goes by without them using social media. The majority also said that social media can iibe useful for their daily work and to build a relationship with the audience because it can create trust among them. Although they can see a potential danger for the journalists occupation. Therefore the results show that the journalist thinks it's hard to know where the border goes, and as a reason for that they often say that every newsroom does not have a unified approach to the situation. 

The studied phenomenon is that of police brutality against African Americans, along with the adjacent demonstrations and civil mobilizations that were born out of said phenomenon. This study set out to unveil the way in which Swedish print journalism has constructed the brutal beating of Rodney King and the death of George Floyd, along with the social response following those events. Other central questions have been: What discourses are present in the material, and how does the reporting relate to the protest paradigm? A critical perspective in accordance with Critical Discourse Analysis’ and Postcolonialism’s theoretical foundations has guided this study all the way from its developmental stages to its finalization. Carvalho’s (2008) analytical model, developed for critical discourse studies of journalistic texts, constitutes the methodological frame of the study.The results of the study can be summarized as follows:Heavy stereotyping is present in the material revolving around the LA riots, and an apparent fact is that the African American actors have had minimal input on the way they are constructed in the texts. Mainly political or other authoritative actors are present and heard in the material. The construction of the events has thereby been the product of the other, predominantly white, side of the social conflict, that reasonably wants to put itself in a good light while doing the opposite with their African American opposition. Considerable improvements are apparent since the King era but the flaws in the reporting are still obvious. A discourse of protesters as violent, unlawful individuals is still largely present in the material, although their social struggle is legitimized to a larger margin than in the past. In both King’s and Floyd’s case, opinionated journalism shows a tendency to break free from the dehumanizing patterns of reporting. The discourses present there are significantly more pro-protester and pro-social justice. iiThese results show the urgent need for future journalists to challenge the protest paradigm in their reporting, along with a need to consider and adapt to the underlying repressive effect that our journalistic traditions have on the medial representations of status-quo defying activism. Taking these findings into account is a necessary means to pave the way for a continually positive evolution of journalistic discourse.

For many gay men, media is a crucial component in the process of creating an identity and finding support and guidance. Studies show that gay men are the group in society most strongly effected by the representation in media of societal ideals, and more specifically print media. In the past, gay men have been subjected to heteronormative representations through media of what being a gay man entails, in which he was portrayed as feminine; a process which has lead some gay men to attempt to adhere to a stereotypically masculine identity in order to find a sense of belonging and connection to society. The heterosexual man became a guidepost in this process. Through hegemonic masculinity, the process became problematic as homosexuality was considered less masculine by default, and the gay men were stuck in an identity crisis based in gender-identification and a need to distance themselves from feminine ideals. The purpose of this study was to analyze the construction of masculinity through the representation of heterosexual males in a print media aimed at gay men. Through the work of Erving Goffman and Sut Jhally, a semiotic analysis of 94 images of heterosexual males in 11 issues from 2013 of Attitude Magazine were analyzed for signs of masculinity. The results showed that the heterosexual males portrayed in the magazine were represented as stereotypically masculine, where signs of femininity were subdued by the enforcement of a masculine code. The findings suggest that heterosexual masculinity has a place in gay media and can be problematic, but that the representations also allow for a certain degree of deviation from strict hegemonic masculinity. 

Rösterna i denna antologi ger ett kraftfullt och dystert budskap om Mediesverige Om någon för tio år sedan sagt till mig att 2020 skulle Sverige ha en särskild utredare för att värna det demokratiska samtalet. Då hade jag skrattat och sagt att det vore väl lite överdrivet. Nog kan vi samtala med varandra utan att det ska behöva utredas hur. Om någon för sju år sedan hade sagt till mig att Fojo i slutet av decenniet börjat undervisa yrkesverksamma jour- nalister i att känna igen informa- tionspåverkan, hur de ska skydda sig själva och inte bara sina källor. Då hade jag undrat vilket land vi pratar om. Ryssland?!

Om någon för fem år sedan sagt att 2020 skulle SVT:s kostnaderför redaktionens säkerhet vara fyra gånger så stora som då. Då hade jag sagt att det låter orimligt.

Om någon för tre år sedan sagtatt de kommande två åren kommer Sverige att sjunka i placering på Reportrar utan gränsers pressfrihets- index på grund av hatet och hoten mot svenska journalister. Då hade jag inte velat tro på det.

Men där är vi i dag. Hur hamnade vi här?

I ett unikt material har Medieinstitutet Fojo samlat in vittnesmål från reportrar och ansvariga utgivare. Från utredare och frilansskribenter. Det är chefer som berättar om arbetsgivar- ansvaret, utsatta reportrar om att leva under hot och med hatet innanför skinnet. Och det är nyhetschefen vars pappa dog för sina ord.

Deras historier blir tillsammans ett kraftfullt budskap om var vi befinner oss i Mediesverige i dag. Bilden de ger är dyster men också kraftfull. Det räcker nu. Populisterna och de auktoritära rösterna som kallar journalister för nationens fiender måste överröstas.

Tystna inte. Mobilisera. Höj din röst. Journalistiken behövs för att bygga ett hållbart samhälle: socialt, ekonomiskt och miljömässigt. Det är vår demokrati det handlar om.

Kersti Forsberg,

Verksamhetschef Medieinstitutet Fojo.

The purpose of this study was to illustrate how the Swedish tabloid press construct their

sports sections front pages and what they present on these pages. A second purpose, and

by the first following, was to investigate the items these newspapers offer the audience

to add to their daily agendas. The aim to show a bigger picture of the front pages

content was reached by implementing a content analysis of 196 front pages from the

two largest tabloid newspapers in Sweden, Aftonbladet and Expressen, during a period

of four years. The study examined 98 items per newspaper and since the aim was to

examine sports journalism the units were chosen from the two newspapers sports

sections, Sportbladet and SportExpressen. The great conclusions that were made during

this process were the differences in between genders, the dominating sports and what

big part sponsors have in sports. The most common front page shows a Swedish man

playing football in the age between 20-35. A less common page is woman, playing any

sport. She is only found on nine of a hundred front pages. As in the case of men,

football is the dominating sport in Swedish tabloid press. On second place we found ice

hockey. What we also could find was the big part sponsors have in sports. We saw the

logos of sponsors on every second front page.

India experienced huge media coverage from all over the world associated with the Nirbhaya-case in 2012, when a young middleclass girl was brutally raped in a bus by five men in Delhi. After this horrifying incident a lot of demonstrations followed all over India. Women in the urban areas was arguing for the same rights as men and was standing up for a more equal society where everybody is able to live as freely as someone else, no matter what gender you was born with.

This study aim to examine what experiences, perceptions and opinions Indian journalists in English written press have of their reality from a gender perspective. We wanted to know how and when Indian journalist represent women and if there is a certain way of thinking about representation of women in the media content. In interviews with a total of eleven journalists and ethnographic observations in two of India’s largest cities we tried to examine the structures and perceptions that influenced the journalist’s worldview and thus also the messages that appears in the news. By using the theory of structuration, agenda setting, performativity and intersectionality we examined what structures that the journalists live and operates within and how this is affecting the media content. 

In this RISJ factsheet we have analysed the gender break-down of top editors at a strategic sample of 200 major online and offline news outlets in ten different markets across four continents. We have found that the clear majority of top editors across the sample are men, and not a single market covered has a majority of women among top editors. While there is a strong and positive correlation between the percentage of women working as journalists and the percentage of women among top editors, there are fewer women in top roles than there are women in the profession as a whole – in line with previous research documenting vertical segregation in the news industry (Franks 2013). We also find no meaningful correlation between overall gender equality in society and the percentage of women among top editors, underlining that there are specific dynamics at play in journalism and the news media. That said, in contrast to previous work suggesting no significant differences between offline and online outlets (e.g. Franks 2013), in our sample there are many more women among the top editors at online outlets than (often older) offline ones. Perhaps there are thus signs of progress? We will know more when we repeat this analysis in 2021 to track developments in gender equality among top editors across the world.

This article analyzes a content-based market position that developed during the mid-1960s, situated in-between the pornographic and the accepted. By studying Swedish men’s magazines and sex films from the time period, the argument is made that these media products profited from both the advantages of pornography, i.e., more or less sexual explicit images, and the advantages of the accepted, i.e., common distribution channels, the possibility of having regular advertising and placards and being sold in ordinary kiosks (for magazines) and shown at ordinary cinemas (for films). For some years, this balancing act between the accepted and the pornographic was maintained, and the genre became enormously popular. From the mid-1970s onward, however, the division between pornography and accepted media became more clear-cut. The critique against pornography and the in-between media products intensified, and the uncertainty about pornography’s future role after the legalization in 1971 was followed by new ways of separating the pornographic from the accepted. While there were some differences between the two media formats, such as their degree of internationalization and the importance of advertising, they shared much in terms of content formulas and used the same female actors and models. It is argued that both formal regulations and the informal norms of gender and sexuality at the time and their change throughout the 1970s are key for understanding the development and the disappearance of the in-between genre.

The CBS sit-com 2 Broke Girls – aired for six seasons from 2011 to 2017 – represented a watershed in Kat Dennings’ career. Up to that moment she had been consolidating a resume as ‘indie rising star’ with a gallery of rebellious and emotionally-complex leading characters – for example, Nick and Nora’s Infinite Playlist (2008) or Daydream Nation (2010) – interspersed with comedic supporting roles in mainstream films – for example, The House Bunny (2008). And when she landed the principal role of Max Black in the CBS show she had two very different films in the pipeline: on the one hand To Write Love on Her Arms (2012), an indie drama about addiction and depression; on the other hand, the supporting comic-relief role in the Marvel kolossal Thor (2011). Dennings brought to 2 Broke Girl this dual screen-persona that she had been honing: talented dramatic actress plus witty comedian. The mix soon proved too complex to handle for a sit-com, particularly for a conservative/traditional one like 2 Broke Girls that neither sought the formal experimentations of Arrested Development nor would manage to give its characters the depth and development arc as The Big Bang Theory managed to. 

Throughout the six seasons, the Max Black character made a journey from complexity to simplicity. In Season One Max is a young woman with a traumatic childhood, working two minimum-wage jobs and still struggling to make the ends meet, hiding her desperation behind a facade of cynicism and sarcasm. In Season Six Max has turned into a hollower stand-up-comedian-like type, a stereotypical street-smart slacker dispensing one-liners about booze, sex, and her own breasts. The writers kept the facade and dropped the inner anguish that was originally hidden behind it. Dennings gradually had to flatten out her original multifaceted persona into a more mono-dimensional type. The paper surveys this transformation process across the show, tracing how this ‘involution’ and ‘flattening’ may have been determined by the constraints of the traditional live-audience multi-camera sit-com format, as well as by some overly-formulaic writing and short-sighted decisions in both the planning of the multi-season development and in the design of the character arc – which might have had some weight in the eventual cancellation of the show.

In the field of Film-Music Studies, Cognitive Psychology remains perhaps the stronger approach as an alternative to Post-Structuralism and Cultural Studies. Yet, Gestalt Psychology has recently seen a revival of interest. Gestalt can offer enlightening concepts not only to theorise how music and visuals combine in an audiovisual whole, but also productive tools to analyse concrete instances in films. While Cognitivism tends to be concerned with single mechanisms of how the brain processes the perceptual data and gives much salience to the higher cognitive operations, Gestalt is concerned with the holistic nature of our experience and attributes more importance to the lower perceptual operations. As Donnelly points out, the combination of sound and visuals into an audiovisual whole has not so much to do with cognitive elaborations as with that hard-wired orientation of our mind towards completeness and stableness that is studied by Gestalt.

Employing the Gestalt concepts of Isomorphism, Prägnanz and Dynamic Self-Distribution, I propose an approach to the analysis of music in films based on the similarity/difference between the configuration (gestalt) of the music and that of the other cinematic components (cinematography, editing, acting, lighting, colour palette...). A stabilised experience of the audiovisual whole – the basis for both a formalistic analysis and a critical interpretation – is reached when their encounter makes the gestalts of the cinematic components reciprocally reconfigure and fuse to produce a wider all-including gestalt: the macro-configuration of the audiovisual experience. This Gestalt approach – being based on the fusion of the aural and visual factors into a whole that is 'different from the sum of its parts' – is also helpful to supersede the long-standing visual bias that influences Film Studies, which leads to think of music as something that is externally added to either reinforce or subvert what is already there in the visuals.

As widely known in Translation Studies, no translation comes without adaptation: translating means converting a source-language text into a target-language text bearing in mind that the cultural context of the target language is likely to be different. Adaptation is typically at work with those puns, proverbs or idiomatic expressions that are not translatable verbatim and thus require some semantic adaptation that should convey the same meaning under a different form – e.g. the meaning of the English “Touch wood!” is rendered in Italian by “Tocca ferro! [Touch iron]”

Dubbing is a popular method of audio-visual translation – or better, of audio-visual adaptation – and the preferred one in such non-English-speaking countries as France, Germany and Italy. The major problem with dubbing is that, unlike subtitling, it replaces part of the film: the dialogue track. An audio-visual product can thus undergo radical and even utterly arbitrary adaptation operations without the audience in the target country noticing it, given the unavailability of the original dialogue track for comparison. Dubbing, more than subtitling, often imposes on the audio-visual product a more or less marked process of socio-cultural “assimilation” – in its original meaning of “making similar.” Through significant changes in the dialogue, the audio-visual work is adapted to make it more relatable to the target audience. In some cases, this assimilation leads to a radical modification of the original socio-cultural context of the work, an extreme “assimilating” adaptation that is often unnecessary semantically – a more faithful translation of the dialogue could have been perfectly understandable even without such drastic changes. In these cases the rationale is market-oriented: the audience may enjoy the audio-visual work better if they recognise in the story familiar elements and a world that is “similar” to theirs.

The case study presented is the Italian version of the American TV series The Nanny (1993-1999) in which the Jewish characters were turned into Italian characters. This created incongruous formal consequences – e.g. mismatches between the new dialogue track and the original visual track – but assured a wide success on the Italian television.

The audiovisual object is like a product of visuals and sound, not a summation. Film analysis should track back to the separate factors and show how they multiply each other when combined. Music, in particular, can be an elusive element, especially for non specialists. But music can crucially perform a variety of functions in films, and its agency should therefore be taken in proper consideration during film analysis. After a preliminary discussion of some recent theory of how visuals and sound fuse into an audiovisual whole, the article presents the manipulations made possible by the videographic approach as a helpful analytical tool to draw attention to the music. Videographic manipulation can help analyse the factors separately to better understand how they combine. One effective way to make one notice the agency of music in a scene/sequence is to remove it or replace it with a musical piece of completely different mood. This latter operation is now made rather easy by the increased availability and user-friendliness of DVD ripping software and editing programmes. I discuss three examples of videographic manipulation of increasing sophistication. The first is the shower scene from Psycho which, in the 50th anniversary DVD, is also presented for comparison without the music track. The second example is a ‘mashup’ in which the door axing sequence from The Shining is turned into a silent-film-like chase gag. As a close, I provide my own videographic manipulation and discuss it: staying in the territory of The Shining I present an audiovisual clips of the opening sequence of the Kubrick with my annotations, and then one clip with the original music replaced with John Williams’s ‘Main Theme’ from Jurassic Park.

Dubbing is widely used in European countries such as Germany, France, the ex-Soviet countries and Italy. Being a film scholar with a specialization in Hollywood cinema, I am used to watching Hollywood films in their original versions. Being a native Italian speaker, I cannot help but noticing the differences between the original films and the Italian dubbed versions. Inaccurate translations and bad dubbing can severely harm the film's original meaning on the one hand, and lead to aesthetics changes on the other– e.g., an actor's persona or a character's characterization can be modified if dubbed with a voice that is radically different from the original.

In this chapter I discuss the theoretical issues and the aesthetic consequences of dubbing, both in general – when the translation is faithful and the dubbing is a good one – and in peculiarly bad cases – when either the translation or the dubbing, or both, are inaccurate.

The paper examines two TV series based on self-desecration. In Episodes (2011–2017, five seasons) Matt LeBlanc plays a version of himself reminiscent of Friends’s Joey Tribbiani. The fictional LeBlanc is as dense and, in his acting profession, as inept as Joey was. Unlike Joey, fictional LeBlanc is (undeservedly?) successful and wealthy and, quite unlike Joey, he is not amiable but selfish, on the verge of being a sexual predator, prima donna-like capricious and vain, and totally unreliable. The series tracks the vicissitudes of two British screenwriters trying to adapt their critically-acclaimed BBC show into a product for the American market, suffering much damage to their artistic integrity, most of which caused by LeBlanc, imposed as the series’ star by the Head of the network. In Real Rob (2015–ongoing, two seasons) Rob Schneider – famous for his raunchy roles in such comedies as Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo (1999) – teams up with his real-life wife Patricia to produce a series in-between the reality and the sit-com. The show follows the daily life of the Schneider family – including the three-year-old daughter Miranda. Rob is depicted as pathologically egotistical, at times a squander at times a close-fisted, gasping for a relaunch of his waning career, envious of his wife’s increasing success, and cruelly bossy to his slave-like personal assistant.

Both fictional LeBlanc and fictional Schneider mix traits from both their public and screen personae but deliberately and mercilessly push the tone towards the negative extremes – LeBlanc ends up in bed with his barely legal-age female stalker; Schneider forces his personal assistant to get a vasectomy in his stance. They come to embody the worst stereotypes associated with celebrities. In Episodes and Real Rob LeBlanc and Schneider have opted for a renewed visibility built on desecration. In the complex dynamics of stardom and fandom, fans have loved ‘heroes’ as well as ‘villains’; they have been mesmerised by grand gestures as well as by sordid scandals. What Episodes and Real Rob seems to point to is the fact that, no matter how desecrated, celebrities will still be followed and admired precisely because they are celebrities.

Multimedia events are part of contemporary society. Music, theatre, and visual arts have been increasingly collaborating with each other to offer aesthetic experiences that are as immersive and multisensorial as possible. Film music has also entered the multimedia arena. Indeed, a very successful type of concert presentation of the film-music repertoire is the multimedia form: a live orchestra plays to projected film clips. This multimedia presentations of film music should be of interest not only to music scholars – film music has undeniably become a favourite repertoire to fuel concert programmes, and multimedia presentations are the most fitting form to present film music. Multimedia presentations should also be of interest to film scholars, as multimedia presentations are a revival of past film-viewing experiences that can be traced back to the silent era. The case study here is John Williams's conductorship of the Boston Pops Orchestra, which has been seminal not only because it brought more film music into concert programmes, but also highly influential for its experiments with the multimedia presentations.

The David Zucker, Jim Abrahams, and Jerry Zucker trio – known as ‘ZAZ’ – gained wide attention with their disaster-movie parody Airplane! (1980), in which their trademark absurdist humour, cartoonish sight gags, non-sequitur dialogue lines, and deadpan comic reactions was on full display. Their next project was for ABC, a TV series that, similarly, spoofed the police-detective shows like M Squad (1957-1960) or Dragnet (1967-1970). The series had a very short life, getting cancelled after only six episodes. The reason for this decision was, reportedly, that it was a show that viewers had to watch in order to appreciate it. This seemingly paradoxical explanation is actually very accurate. TV in the early1980s was still considered more like a house-hold appliance than a source of art products – the ‘Golden Age of Television’ was still to come. And it was more akin to radio than to cinema: a voice-led medium. Viewers would actually listen to TV shows rather than closely watching them – the laugh track (which ZAZ refused to adopt for Police Squad!) was a key device not only to trigger laughter but also to alert the viewer (‘Look at the screen, now! Something hilarious is happening now!’). And ZAZ’s wordplays and absurdist dialogue demanded too much attention and elaboration compared to the TV shows of the time. Moreover, ZAZ’s layers of background sight gags and deep-staged comical details were too demanding to follow on the small size of an early 1980s TV screen. The same idea, brought to theatres as feature films – the Naked Gun trilogy – proved successful. The short-lived show, however, had a second life in the following decades. TV had been transformed in the meantime, with shows like The Simpsons (1989, ongoing, which in terms of sight gags and stylistic parody owes much to the ZAZ cinema) and Hill Street Blues (1981-1987) educating TV viewers that television could require the same attention as cinema did. The chapter examines this landmark TV show in terms of the clash between the ‘audiovisual disjunction’ style of ZAZ and the expectations of early 1980s TV. 

John Williams is universally renowned and celebrated as the Maestro of the Movies, one of the most successful and accomplished composers for the screen, a reputation built on and consolidated with an impressive string of collaborations with top directors, seminal contributions to some of the most famous cinematic hits of all times, and countless awards and accolades. Yet, there are many more sides to Williams’s artistry. He has also a considerable background and training as a jazz-man; he is also a respectable and prolific composer of concert pieces that are entering the standard repertoire; he has been the Principal Conductor and Music Director of the Boston Pops Orchestra – ‘America’s Orchestra’ – establishing himself as a proficient and sensitive conductor in both the ‘classical’ and popular arena. This talk presents and explores another facet of his career, that of America’s unofficial ‘Laureate Composer’.

On many occasions, Williams has been the one to call when some landmark in the nation’s history had to be musically celebrated. He has been a visible composer for the Mass Media too, first of all with the signature sound-logo he composed for NBC News, which has been opening the newscasts of one of America’s top networks for more than thirty years. His role as leader of the Boston Pops has caused him to be involved – in both capacities, as conductor and composer – in some of the country’s most momentous events, like the orchestra’s own centennial in 1985 (with a nation-wide televised concert at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington D.C.), the re-dedication of the Statue of Liberty in 1986 (with President Reagan in attendance), the centennial edition of the Olympic Games held in Atlanta, GA, in 1996, the 2000 New Year’s Eve celebration in Washington D.C. with President Clinton, and the inauguration of President Obama’s first term in 2008, plus other appearances, including more Olympics, presidential campaigns, and musical contributions to state visits. 

This vast exposure has made him a star composer and a revered figure, but also – for a long time – a maligned and suspicious one. His association with both the ‘imperialistic’ and ‘hollow’ Hollywood films – in particular with some of the key oeuvres of the ‘Reaganite cinema’ – and some of the mass-media events in Reagan’s era might have had a major part in this. He was often rancorously dismissed as a phoney artist in some quarters – notably by high-brow music critics – or identified by some from the culturalist circles as an agent of reactionary ideology, a skilled composer but also a more-or-less complicit endorser of the conservative agenda of those years. The talk surveys Williams’s main contributions and achievements in the field of mass-media and public-event music, and also discusses and problematises the potential/alleged propaganda implications of his music. 

David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson – in Narration in the Fiction Film and Breaking the Glass Armor – list four types of motivation to explain the presence of a given device – e.g., camera movement, lightning pattern, chromatic contrast, etc... – in the film form: compositional motivation, artistic motivation, realistic motivation and transtextual motivation. This set of heuristic tools explains how the film works and how it has been constructed from an aesthetic, ars-gratia-artis point of view, that is, how an artwork is formally and narratively understood by the active spectator. However, cinema – and Hollywood cinema in particular – is indeed an Art, but also an Industry. Bordwell and Thompson's set of motivations is good to understand the film as an Art object. Though, in order to understand it as an industrial commodity, a fifth type seems to be required: economic motivation. Most technical and formal changes in film history can be properly explained by means of an economical approach – see Douglas Gomery's use of the economic “Theory of Technological change” for his account on the coming of sound – rather than by means of a purely aesthetic one. Such a case is the relationship between cinema and songs, particularly in the Sixties and Seventies, when pop scores and compilations  replaced the classical symphonic scoring. The paper focusses on the economic motivation of this pop music craze in the American cinema of that decade, trying to point out how the use of songs was mostly a marketing strategy: to advertise the song via the film, to advertise the film via the song – by its presence on the radio or in the music stores –, to maximise the profit by having the film industry owing also the music industry and thus – by a synergistic cross-promotion – getting money from both markets. In most cases, this market-oriented approach had quite big an aesthetic cost: that of stopping the narration in order to let the song play, which – in the worst instances – has nothing to do with the narrative. A brief history of the relationship between songs and films are traced – mostly with references to Rick Altman's Silent Film Sound, Jeff Smith's The Sound of Commerce, and James Wierzbicki's Film Music. A History –, with the aim of showing that the explicitly visible instances of the Sixties and Seventies are only the “tip of the iceberg”, the peak moment of a longer story: the massive aesthetic change of the period can be explained by the economic and industrial revolution that Hollywood had to face after the dismantlement of the Studio System in the Fifties. The main difference between the use of songs in classical cinema and their use in the Sixties is that, while in the former system songs were diegetically placed and carefully and coherently integrated in the narrative, in the latter case songs were also used non-diegetically, without much concern about their consistency, which resulted in the baring of the sole economic motivation.

Film Studies have long been characterised by a visual bias (“image first, sound later”) and a “content-oriented” approach (“What is the message?”) that, when dealing with music, have favoured “interpretation” (what music communicates) over “analysis” (the consideration of the full gamut of music’s functions). When interpretation is favoured, attention is primarily given to music that passes some meaning (“commentary”, “counterpoint”, “asynchronism”…). Conversely, music that simply “accompanies” and is “synchronous” is characteristically deemed to be of lesser interest. This chapter offers a re-assessment of the formal agency of the often maligned “Mickey-Mousing”, the most extreme type of parallel and synchronous accompaniment. Mostly dismissed as a hollow and banally-subservient musical mirroring of the visual action, Mickey-Mousing can, on the contrary, contribute to the audiovisual “whole” in a number of more or less subtler ways and levels. Its agency is especially important in the orientation and connection of the viewers with the filmic space, in both visual and tactile terms.

In Swedish shops today there are a lot of magazines aimed at teenagers, which fight for young girls’ attention. These teenage-magazines are one of the most important sources for young girls to get information about sex and love-relationships; therefor it’s important how these magazines portray it. 

We have examined how the magazine Frida has portrayed sex and love-relationships from 1991 until today. The way sex and love-relationships are portrayed in Frida’s articles affect the young readers in their process of building an identity. 

Using a combined rhetoric- and discourse analysis we found that the main focus in Frida is for the reader to have a love-relationship with a guy, instead of a physical sex-relationship. Frida uses all the rhetorical tools to convince their readers that what they are telling them is the right way to think and behave. 

This study is a comparative critical discourse analysis between one of Sweden’s biggest newspapers Aftonbladet and one of Sweden’s biggest alternative web newspapers Fria Tider. The comparative analysis will focus on both media outlets coverage of the terrorist attack on Drottninggatan in Stockholm, Sweden on the 7th of April 2017. The terrorist attack on Drottninggatan was one of the biggest of its kind in Swedish history where five people died and over a dozen were severely injured. The attack was performed by an assailant by the name of Rakhmat Akilov who described himself as a Muslim and would later claim to have sympathy for the Islamic State. The attack was widely covered in Sweden by all sorts of media outlets ranging from the more well-established newspapers to social media and alternative media sources. Former researchers have studied different types of alternative media in a variety of ways but there has not been a study on how the news coverage in an alternative media differs from that of the traditional and more well-established media. The material studied in this research are a total of 32 articles gathered from the web archive of Aftonbladet and Fria Tider. All articles were published between the 7th of April and the 12th of April 2017, and they all covered events related to the terrorist attack on Drottninggatan. The articles were analyzed with the help of four predetermined steps of critical discourse analytical criteria that were established beforehand to minimize the risk of our own presuppositions interfering with the reliability of the study. The purpose of the study was to analyze the ways in which the coverage of the terrorist attack on Drottninggatan differed between a right leaning alternative media and one of the biggest newspapers in Sweden. This was achieved with the theoretical basis of theories of alternative media, othering, framing theory, hegemonic theories, and orientalism. The results of the study show that there are both a lot of similarities between the news coverage between both media outlets but also a lot of stark differences. The similarities occur when the factual basis of the text does not leave things open to interpretation. Where the differences lie between Aftonbladet and Fria Tider are in the construction of certain events and in the construction of the assailant Rakhmat Akilov. This occurs when the opportunity presents itself for Fria Tider to apply their political and societal beliefs. 

The purpose of this study is to investigate how the Swedish evening papers portrayed and framed the conflict between the police, football clubs and their fans. The conflict in question arose already in 2019 with drastic regulations from the police against clubs and fans to prevent violence, pyrotechnics and other illegal activities. 

The method that was used in this study was a qualitative textual analysis. The study uses two different theories: agenda setting and agenda framing. Agenda setting focuses on what is salient in the news reporting while agenda framing focuses on how different topics are portrayed by the media.

The analysis is based on 22 different articles from the Swedish newspapers websites of Aftonbladet and Expressen. These two are considered to be the biggest tabloids in Sweden, both well known for producing media in a sensationalist manner. We decided to define our selection of articles from a two week time-period surrounding the football derby in Stockholm between AIK and Djurgården on October 3, 2021. The reason for this selection was the aftermath of the game regarding the police brutality against the supporter group of Djurgården. 

The result from the study was that both Aftonbladet and Expressen portrayed the conflict in a way that led to a public opinion sympathizing with the football supporters. A possible factor leading to this result was a lack of communication from the police authority towards the newspapers.

This study's aim and purpose was to investigate how the Swedish tabloid Sportbladet presentation of female and male athletes could differ on their Instagram page. A quantitative content analysis was used as the method to analyze the 343 posts during a four month period starting in January 1st 2022 to April 30th 2022. 

The study could conclude that female athletes are shown in ⅓ of the posts made during the period, making male athletes more commonly shown. Another interesting conclusion that the study could make was that depending on the format of a sport, male or female athletes were represented more. In the individual sports related to skiing, female athletes tend to be represented and shown more. Compared to team sports in which male athletes tend to be shown more. Ishockey and football or soccer being the most common. The study can also conclude that the framing of the genders also differs. 

Senmoderna reflexioner. Festskrift till Johan Fornäs, är en antologi med tjugotre artiklar tillägnade Johan Fornäs på hans 60-årsdag den 7 mars 2012. Flera av artiklarna utgår från teman i Johan Fornäs böcker, medan andra på olika sätt behandlar ämnen relaterade till hans breda och mångfacetterade intresseområden. Boken är indelad i fyra tematiska delar, som behandlar olika praktiker: teoretiska, mediala, estetiska och litterära. Under rubriken ”teoretiska praktiker” diskuteras olika aspekter av hermeneutik, kulturalisering och kulturellt kapital. Under ”mediala praktiker” återfinns studier av samtida mediefenomen och deras relationer till demokrati och politik. ”Estetiska praktiker” innefattar bidrag som diskuterar kulturella praktikers funktion i den offentliga sfären. I den avslutande delen, ”litterära praktiker”, analyseras utvalda litterära texter och den diskurs som omger dem. Huvuddelen av artiklarna är skrivna på svenska, med undantag av tre engelska bidrag.

Late modern reflexions: Festschrift for Johan Fornäs is an anthology of more than twenty essays dedicated to Johan Fornäs on his 60th birthday 7th of mars 2012. Several of the articles included take Johan Fornäs’ books as their starting point, while others are related, in different ways, to his wide and diverse interests. The book is divided into four thematic parts, dealing with "Theoretical Practices", “Medial Practices”. “Aesthetic Practices” and “Literary Practices”. Articles included under ”Theoretical Practices” discuss different aspects of hermenutics, culturalization, and cultural capital. ”Medial Practices” offers studies of contemporary media phenomena, relating them to questions of democracy and politics.”Aesthetic Practices” include contributions that discuss the function of different cultural practices in the public sphere. The last section, ”Literary Practices”, takes a closer look at both select literary texts and the discourses surrounding them. Most of the Articles are written in Swedish, with the exception of three articles in English.

The purpose of the study was to examine how Sweden’s two biggest tabloids, Aftonbladet and Expressen, frame spectacular crime and specifically how they covered the Helicopter robbery that occurred in 2009. We identified three main participants in the story, the police, the culprits and the victims. We examined how much and what kind of space the identified participants were given and how the two newspapers constructed the participants in a dramaturgic sense.

Using a quantitative content analysis method we found that the time period included 433 articles in both newspapers. From the original articles, we picked and examined 19 articles with a qualitative content analysis method and also used framing theory in order to be able to examine how the participants were portrayed in Aftonbladet and Expressen.

The culprits were given far most space in both Aftonbladet and Expressen. The study show that the police was given second most space and that the victims were hardly ever written about at all, in contrast to recent studies showing that victims of crime often are depicted as the main character in articles regarding crime. The results also show that the story as a whole carried a lot of resemblance to the classic Hollywood movie plot. The police were portrayed as incompetent, creating a conflict within the justice system community. The culprits were portrayed as the protagonist of the story with highly competent features, whilst the victims were portrayed as scared and helpless.

The aim of this study is to examine how the public responds to the journalists’ use of subjectivity in the reporting of broadcasting news. The investigation is a qualitative study based on nine interviews with respondents in ages of 21 to 25 from different parts of Sweden. After showing five examples of news reporting with a subjective approach, the respondents gave their look on the use of subjectivity. The theoretical frame of the investigation is founded on the theory of framing (de Vreese, 2005; Entman, 1993) and the discussion concerning the terms objectivity and subjectivity (e.g. Westerståhl, 1972).

The investigation shows that the respondents saw the use of subjectivity in news reporting as something that made them able to connect and identify to the news and the journalist. It also showed that the news was made more comprehensible. The investigation, on the other hand, also showed that the respondents felt like the journalists made assumptions for them. Irrespective of the reaction, the investigation showed clear results of the fact that the respondents own values was an underlying factor in their stance to subjectivity. 

In this interview study I have examined eleven Swedish advertisers and professional communicators and their view of ethics in the advertising industry. The purpose of the study was to shed light on how they see their ethical responsibilites, as well as trying to understand how they reason in regard to ethics as a whole. The main research questions regard the distinction between business and economic responsibilities towards their clients and societal ethical responsibilities, which ethical questions are of importance to them, and how they believe the industry should be regulated.

The theoretical framework of the study uses media ethics, social responsibility theory, media accountability theory, and stockholder and stakeholder theory as its base. The study was performed using a qualitative method through interviews and the interpretation of these. The results of the study finds that the consulted advertisers have set opinions of what they themselves would decline to work with for ethical reasons, and has also been able to identify five main categories of ethical issues that they attach great importance to. The advertisers state a strong sense of ethical responsibility, but also that they may have a hard time exercising that sense if their clients offer resistance, as the economical implications of losing a client often is a strong incentive to let the client have their way. The study also found that the advertisers thought the current system of regulation of the industry to be invisible and toothless, and instead they sought more public discussion as a form of regulation. In conclusion I have been able to ascertain that the consulted advertisers have a generally high grade of self-reflection in regards to ethical matters, although they can feel restricted about how well they are able to exercise the responsibility they feel towards society as a whole.

This paper aims to examine the different perspectives that emerged during the debate surrounding the right-wing newspaper “Nya Tider” and their participation at the Swedish bookfair in Gothenburg back in 2017. The study relies on the theoretical foundation that is known as Spiral of Silence and Agenda-Setting. But is examined and operationalized by the historical perspective given by John Durham Peters in his book “courting the abyss”. Peters portrays in his book a variety of different takes on the free speech phenomenon. The study’s aim was then to see if similar perspective were protruding now as it has before.A research question regarding what perspective were protruding in the debate that followed “Nya Tider” and their announcement that they were going to attend the bookfair once again where therefore coined. The direct translation of this questions is “What perspective of where the limit of free speech should be drawn is present in the Swedish media outlet regarding the debate of “Nya Tider” participation at the book fair in Gothenburg 2017.In order to examine what perspective protruded in the debate the approach of a qualitative content analysis was deemed the best way to examine the phenomenon. A total of (n) 36 articles were systematically analyzed and a total of 4 perspectives where formed, the liberal, the absolutistic libertarian, the opponent perspective and the victim perspective. Each one different from each other. The study also examined the level occurrence of the different perspective and found that in 18 out of the 36 article’s the opponent perspective where present, whereas the absolutistic libertarian perspective only occurs in 4 out of the 36 articles’. A big difference where therefor found in what coverage the different perspectives were given in the Swedish news outlets.In a time where political censorship is at a rise around Europe with the implementation of laws that prevent people from speaking their minds. Or compelling them to address people a certain way, not by choice but by legislation, the need to examine what perspectives are occurring in our media might for the uneducated seem like a vague way to approach a complicated matter.But Agenda-Setting research has shown that the media agenda affects both the public agenda as well as the legislative part of our society. Therefore, a lack of occurrence of certain perspectives can also affect what laws are put in place. It is therefore imperative to examine what sort of perspective occurs in the Swedish debate to prevent an infraction of the Swedish free speech law, and to keep Sweden a free, secular society.

59 government agencies in Sweden participate in the programme Gender Main- streaming in Government Agencies (sv: Jämställdhetsintegrering i myndigheter, JiM). This programme aims to better the equal opportunities for women and men to shape society and their own lives. At the same time the social networks are steadily rising in popularity and they are excellent tools for the government agencies to communicate their values regarding equality to a broad audience in an easy and effective matter. Previous research focus mostly on the effect the content of social media have on the audience but the aim of this study was rather to examine how men and women are represented on Instagram accounts run by government agencies. This was done through a quantitative content analysis where 400 pictures posted on Instagram by Arbetsförmedlingen, Försvarsmakten, Polismyndigheten and Sida were analysed with the help of variables based on previous studies. The results showed that both men and women are portrayed with certain gender stereotypes and that government agencies are more or less equal in their frequent use of men and women in their Instagram posts. 

The purpose of this study was to analyze how two of Sweden’s largest digital newspapers with different political origins, Aftonbladet, independent Social Democrat, and Expressen, independent Liberal, reported on politics and the various parties (Socialdemokraterna and Liberalerna) in connection with the Swedish parliamentary elections 2022. 

The study is important from a democratic perspective so the voters are well informed when they vote, for the opportunity to form their own opinions and perceptions. 

Through the analysis process, the study will examine how the two newspapers have used different variations of framing of political parties. Thus, the study also aims to analyze whether the newspaper's coverage is marked by political origins, or whether it is independent and neutral. 

The study is based on the framing theory, the method in this study was a quantitative content analysis where 100 articles were analyzed with a timespan of three weeks around the election. The results show that the main form of framing is objective framing, where the articles are impartial, with 49 procent. The second most common form of framing is framing of game and strategy, with 33 procent, the least common form of framing is scandal framing, with 18 procent. It also shows that Socialdemokraterna get more exposure than Liberalerna, this reflects both newspapers. More results show that Aftonbladet och Expressen for the most part are impartial, but were biased repeatedly in articles from both newspapers. 

This article argues that major insights from intermedial studies and ecocriticism could be combined in order to produce a productive theoretical and methodological position called Intermedial Ecocriticism. Intermedial Ecocriticism is built upon the simple observation that the production of scientific knowledge concerning the critical ecological condition in the Anthropocene reaches the laymen public by way of non-scientific texts in a number of different media types. This corpus — called ecomedia products — covers everything from popular scientific journalism, museum exhibitions or educational material, to literary climate fiction, visual art projects and documentary film or poetry. The main goal of Intermedial Ecocriticism is to be able to analyze, interpret and compare samples from this extensive and heterogeneous corpus of texts, thus going far beyond the tradition of ecocriticism to focus only on literary and other artistic texts. Thus, the position is meant to offer a humanities contribution to better understand and act upon the pending ecological crisis.

The first part of the article offers a general outline of theory and method of Intermedial Ecocriticism, whereas the second part exemplifies one particular concretization of the position. A videoanimation by Danish artist Per Arnoldi and two contemporary cli-fi novels by Mats Söderlund and Hanna Rut Carlsson are briefly analyzed and compared. The analysis focuses on the questions of narrativity and the representation of the possibility of human agency in the three ecomedia products.

Based on a rough conceptual divide of (parts of) media studies, including intermedial studies, this article presents two positions based on interests in media as transmission and representation, or media as ecological frame, or media agency. Following that, the article discusses how a new concept in environmental studies, 'environing media' or 'environing technologies' - where representation and media ecological agency seem to find a fruitful meeting point - is discussed in more detail. That description and discussion are put into a debate with central ideas of intermedial studies, before the final part of the article briefly exemplifies the theoretical ideas in the case of the IPCC report's Summary for Policymakers (2021).

This chapter explores transmediation between qualified media types. It discusses the adaptation of a literary canonical work, Joe Wright’s 2005 novel-to-film adaptation of Jane Austen’s novel Pride and Prejudice a novel that repeatedly has been adapted into new contexts and audiences. The qualified medium of opera implies certain conventions but also certain limitations of space, time and voice. The natural venue for experiencing an opera is the stage. An experienced opera or musical librettist will consider where to put such music highlights when writing the text. Both drama text and opera score are a set of directions fixed in a script but resulting in different kinds of performances. It has been our aim to demonstrate in specific analysis the very abstract idea that all media transformation is interplay or a negotiation between transmediality and medium specificity.

In Nick Hornby’s novel High Fidelity (1995), the life of the protagonist Rob revolves around records and popular music. Throughout Virginia Woolf’s novel To the Lighthouse (1927), the painter Lily Briscoe works on a portrait of her friend Mrs Ramsay. In James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), Leopold Bloom’s thoughts, memories and associations are informed by newspaper headlines, snatches of songs, advertising slogans and poster headlines as he walks through the streets of Dublin.

In media types such as novels, paintings, films, computer games and news articles, we encounter characters, avatars or persons that interact with pictures, musical instruments, photos, computers, record players, newspapers or television sets or go to football games. Still, how do we know that the representation of media products or mediatypes means something? Or that references to familiar media types have a symbolic value? In this chapter, we will demonstrate how the representation of media can be analysed. We will focus on narrative literature, but the analytical method is applicable to film, computer games, photography and visual art as well. In the first part of the chapter, we will explore media that are represented inside the diegetic universe.  In the second part of the chapter, we will turn to novels whose narrative structure and style remind readers of other medial experiences, such as watching a movie, looking at an image or listening to music. The effect of structural media representation is to give the impression that the literary text imitates film, music or images. It changes the experience ofreading and draws attention to aspects of literature and language that we usuallypay less attention to.

This introduction to Intermedial Studies provides a concise, hands-on introduction to the analysis of a broad array of texts from a variety of media – including literature, film, music, performance, news and videogames, addressing fiction and non-fiction, mass media and social media. 

Intermedial Studies provides a concise, hands-on introduction to the analysis of a broad array of texts from a variety of media – including literature, film, music, performance, news and videogames, addressing fiction and non-fiction, mass media and social media.

The detailed introduction offers a short history of the field and outlines the main theoretical approaches to the field. Part I explains the approach, examining and exemplifying the dimensions that construct every media product. The following sections offer practical examples and case studies using many examples, which will be familiar to students, from Sherlock Holmes and football, to news, vlogs and videogames.

This book is the only textbook taking both a theoretical and practical approach to intermedial studies. The book will be of use to students from a variety of disciplines looking at any form of adaptation, from comparative literature to film adaptations, fan fictions and spoken performances. The book equips students with the language and understanding to confidently and competently apply their own intermedial analysis to any text.

Edith Head, possibly Hollywood’s most iconic costume designer, won a record eight Oscar statuettes for Best Costume Design. Despite her popularity, Head has also sparked controversy; many detractors question her talent as a designer by arguing that her success rested merely on her self-promotional efforts rather than her work inside the wardrobe department. This article explores Head’s career vis-à-vis the discourses surrounding her public persona to understand how she constructed her image as Hollywood’s most famous costume designer, surviving for over five decades in an industry fraught with constant economic and political turmoil. In doing so, this article will shed light on the activities assigned to her as head of costume during and after the studio era.