This part includes articles from our beloved traditional media: film, radio,
television and the printed press. Though many have made a move to merge
these mediums with the Internet and social media, much is still left to be said
about the media themselves, which are continually evolving. Learning about
our history also helps us understand the present and improve the future. The
chapter begins with an article on film censorship during the Portuguese
dictatorship (1926-1974) that provides us with a vivid account of censorship
and reminds us of its lasting effects through film. According to the author,
Leonor Areal, censorship comes about in different forms and conditions in
society to self-censor itself by using alternatives to direct speech which results
in a muted form of expression, and in this case a limited artistic view of the
world around us. In another take on repression, Jeanne Ellen Clark discusses
apartheid representations in three video contest winning short films sponsored
by the It Is Apartheid Collective. Discrimination, physical and immaterial walls
are discussed.
In a different film study, Okan Ormanli offers a brief historical account of
the Turkish cinema industry. He traces the rise and fall of the industry and
offers details of the factors that contributed to its rebirth as of the 1990s.
Turkey’s film industry today is smaller than what it had been fifty years ago,
but its output now wins awards at international festivals. Taking a broader
approach to film studies, Rengin Ozan focuses on the relationship of semiology
and Film. She shows that knowledge of the cultural and linguistic aspects of a
country are crucial in analyzing the films of that country semiotically.
A number of studies are about broadcasting. As far as radio is concerned,
plus ça change, plus, c’est pareil, as the French would say, in other words, the
more it changes, the more it stays the same. As Anya Luscombe explains, the
BBC radio news in the 1960s is not much different from what it is today with
respect to certain journalistic practices, however, many social changes have
occurred within the organization that have had an influence on the industry as a
whole. Across the Channel, Alain Lamboux-Durand takes a historical approach
to the study of television news in France. He identifies distinct periods of
development of French television news and describes the impact of those
developments on the form and structure of the news process.
Turning to the Middle East, Saadia Izzeldin Malik reports on a seminal
study on Qatari women’s views on satellite television programs. He attempts to
evaluate women’s television programs broadcast by Arab satellite channels and
to explore their audiences’ opinions, with an eye toward developing programs
for women by women.
Veli Polat examines Kurdish-language broadcasts in Turkey. He discusses
the role of state media and ethnic media, as well as the cross-border nature of
broadcasting, and highlights the competing contexts of political empathy and
conflict. Minority media are also the focus of Cindy Cheung-Kwan Chong,
who uses both qualitative and quantitative methods to examine minority
language newspapers of two types of expatriates in Hong Kong. She finds that
community newspapers serving Filipino and Indonesian domestic workers are
less integrated into mainstream society than the business newspapers of
Japanese and Korean expatriates.
In the last paper of this section, Büyükbaykal & Mengü attempt to analyze
the news about Greece in two Turkish newspapers. They find that the two
newspapers had often used a humorous tone in reporting the current economic
crisis in Greece. Still, the language used in that coverage was found to be
cautious and not derisive.