This book explores the role and purpose of journalism to spark and propagate change by investigating human rights journalism and its capacity to inform, educate and activate change. Downman and Ubayasiri maximize this approach by proposing a new paradigm of reporting through the use of human-focussed news values. This approach is a radical departure from the traditional style that typically builds on abstract concepts. The book will explore human rights journalism through the lens of complex issues such as human trafficking and people smuggling in the Asian context. This is not just a book for journalists, or journalism academics, but a book for activists, human rights advocates or anyone who believes in the power of journalism to change the world.

Journalism and Democracy in Asia addresses key issues of freedom, democracy, citizenship, openness and journalism in contemporary Asia, looking especially at China, Japan, Korea, Indonesia, the Philippines and India. The authors take varying approaches to questions of democracy, whilst also considering journalism in print, radio and new media, in relation to such questions as the role of social, political and economic liberalization in bringing about a blooming of the media, the relationship between the media and the development of democracy and civil society, and how journalism copes under authoritarian rule. With contributions from highly regarded experts in the region examining a broad range of issues from across Asia, this book will be of high interest to students and scholars in political communications, journalism and mass communication and Asian studies.

Commentators on the media in Southeast Asia either emphasise with optimism the prospect for new media to provide possibilities for greater democratic discourse, or else, less optimistically, focus on the continuing ability of governments to exercise tight and sophisticated control of the media. This book explores these issues with reference to Malaysia and Singapore. It analyses how journalists monitor governments and cover elections, discussing what difference journalism makes; it examines citizen journalism, and the constraints on it, often self-imposed constraints; and it assesses how governments control the media, including outlining the development and current application of legal restrictions.

Making full use of newly declassified material, extensive interviews and specific casestudies, this book examines the Hong Kong media over a forty year period, focusing in particular on how its newspapers and TV stations have struggled for press f.

This book examines different aspects of Asian popular culture, including films, TV, music, comedy, folklore, cultural icons, the Internet and theme parks. It raises important questions such as – What are the implications of popularity of Asian popular culture for globalization? Do regional forces impede the globalizing of cultures? Or does the Asian popular culture flow act as a catalyst or conveying channel for cultural globalization? Does the globalization of culture pose a threat to local culture? It addresses two seemingly contradictory and yet parallel processes in the circulation of Asian popular culture: the interconnectedness between Asian popular culture and western culture in an era of cultural globalization that turns subjects such as Pokémon, Hip Hop or Cosmopolitan into truly global phenomena, and the local derivatives and versions of global culture that are necessarily disconnected from their origins in order to cater for the local market. It thereby presents a collective argument that, whilst local social formations, and patterns of consumption and participation in Asia are still very much dependent on global cultural developments and the phenomena of modernity, yet such dependence is often concretized, reshaped and distorted by the local media to cater for the local market.

As part of the advocacy of the Asian Congress for Media and Communication (ACMC) to promote regional studies in global academic discourse, this book contributes to a better understanding of social media within the context of Southeast Asian countries, with the addition of Sri Lanka. The contributors here are primarily Asian academics and practitioners, immersed in the fields of media and communication. Throughout the chapters, the reader will discover that social media has changed the paradigm of communication in the region: as an avenue for free expression; as a tool for news gathering and news distribution; as an aid in crime prevention; and even as a means to find a lifelong partner. For non-Asian readers, there is also an annex that provides a summary of social media statistics in the region to allow the countries mentioned in this book to be situated within the global context.

Every political aspirant and activist knows the media are important. But there is little agreement on how an increasingly diversified media operate in post-authoritarian transitions and how they might promote, or impede, the pathways to a sustainable liberal democracy in the 21st century. This book examines the role of the media during Indonesia’s longest experiment with democratisation. It addresses two important and related questions: how is the media being transformed, both in terms of its structure and content, by the changing political economy of Indonesia after the fall of Suharto? And what is the potential impact of this media in enabling or hampering the development of democracy in Indonesia? The book explores the relation between the working of democratisation, by examining the role of ethnic identity and nationalism; increasingly cheaper and diversified means of media production, challenging state monopolies of the media; the reality of personalised and globalised media; and the challenging of the connection between a free media and democracy by global capitalism and corporate control of the media. The book argues that the dominant forces transforming Indonesia today did not arise from the singular point of Suharto’s resignation, but from a set of factors which are independent from, but linked to, Indonesia’s internal politics and which shape its cultural industries.