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Looking at a series of recent large street protests in the city of São Paulo, Brazil, the chapter examines the relationship between political action, urban space, and media use. We specifically look at what we are calling media epiphanies, moments in which the public becomes aware of its existence as a mediated public, that is, as a public that is forged through the use of a particular media. We rely on extensive participant observation and interviews for the description of the June 2013 protests and the subsequent massive rallies. We examine the materiality of the employed media and the experience of participants to understand the meaning of the phenomenon, for which we used a combination of Frankfurt and Toronto Schools approach. The strength of the fluid June 2013 protests in São Paulo questioned the political status quo and served as a trampoline for subsequent media demonstrations whose political impact relied as well on traditional cultural forms. The 2016 impeachment House vote, as a true media event, reconstructed, in positive and negative terms, the fractured political dialogue of representation. The concept of media epiphany can be used to assess the strength of demonstrations and the meaning of collective action in general. Identifying these phenomena, we can give focus to empirical research and better examine the complex intersections between forms of communications, physical environments, and the experience of the individual in contemporary cities.

When questioning the relationship between media, development, and democracy, especially in the ill-defined “Global South,” it’s important to go beyond the commonly held meta-narratives that frame these concepts as common sense. In a quest to investigate alternative characterizations of these terms, this chapter uses Ghanaian political economist Lord Mawuko-Yevugah’s (2014) theoretical framework of “developmentality” to explain how development has been used as an ideological instrument to promote the Western liberal media model in the “Global South.” Using a case study of Malawi, which is heavily dependent on foreign aid from the same countries who have defined and promoted this liberal media model aboard, raises important questions about a media model that is characterized by high objectivity and political neutrality on one side, but subjects countries to high levels of competition and free market principles on the other. By outlining the temporal sequence of events that have unfolded since the arrival of missionary media in the 1800s, the presence of international donors and the rise in non-governmental organizations, this chapter reveals how certain ideologies and practices have been legitimized through development to preserve the unequal balance of power between the “Global South” and their former colonial powers.

This chapter explores the development of advertising regulations governing food advertising to children in Australia since the 1940s. By introducing the advertising and marketing self-regulatory system, the Australian Government is taking a neoliberal approach, advocating for the free market to initiate and sustain the country’s economic development, instead of greater government regulation. By examining the primary and secondary literature, such as government reports and research, and newspaper and academic articles, this chapter outlines different regulatory initiatives adopted by both the government and food industry to limit food and beverage advertising to children on television and online, in order to prevent obesity rates increasing in children. This chapter synthesizes and critically evaluates food industry and public health studies, government and non-government reviews, and other research studies to evaluate the influence of self-regulation on Australian television food advertising within the neoliberal context since the 1990s. It contributes to the literature on food advertising regulations for children in Australia by offering evidence of how the government, public health authorities and the food industry have attempted to keep pace with changes in the advertising, marketing and media industries by developing and reviewing advertising codes. It identifies the loopholes that exist in these self-regulatory codes and concludes that Australia’s current advertising regulatory arrangements are failing to protect our children from unhealthy food marketing on television, especially on relatively under-regulated online platforms such as social media and branded websites. The issues identified in this chapter could aid the food and beverage industry, as well as the self-regulatory system, to offer comprehensive and applicable solutions to combat Australia’s obesity crises by implementing new legislations that align with different marketing practices.

Everyday conversation has not yet been assigned its full role in public discussion of citizen’s issues, despite the growing number of studies about it. Casual conversations are not usually regarded as a particularly privileged place for political discussions mainly because of its apparent lack of organization following the principles and rules of the deliberative tradition in Political Studies. However, due to its closeness, informality, and personal proximity, it is particularly adequate to rise political aspects of everyday lives that otherwise would not be publicly disclosed. But how to grasp the spontaneity of everyday conversation? This chapter argues that focus groups, as a research method, are fit to observe and understand real-time ordinary conversation on political issues. In what follows, the argument goes threefold: (1) it contrasts “conversation” with “deliberation” from a micro-point of view; (2) all conversation, as a discourse embroiled in power relations, is political in a broad sense (3) as it brings forward personal views and experiences, casual conversations defies the borders between public and private issues.

This chapter examines books written by foreign authors which were published in Brazil and censored by the military regime between 1964 and 1985. The study focuses on non-fiction books, using official period documentation, with the goal of conducting an extensive survey of these works as well as examining the reasons why they were censored by the regime. The results of the research lead us to a greater understanding of the reasoning of censorship from within the State and to a greater understanding of the Brazilian military dictatorship as a whole.

This qualitative study examines the influence of media development in Iraqi Kurdistan after nearly a decade and a half of donor country-funded professional journalism training in a period following an oil boom and bust, influence of a transnational terror organization, and a recent vote to secede from the rest of Iraq. The study builds out a typology of economic, political, bureaucratic, legal, cultural, and societal capture, and applies it in an analysis of data from in-depth, semi-structured interviews that were conducted in the two largest cities in Iraqi Kurdistan.

This chapter examines the evolution of the authoritarian political tradition in Russia from its inception to the present, and its influence on the development of Russian mass media. The authoritarian tradition became most pivotal for daily life in Russia, as it ensured that the media fully ascribed to specific political agendas. The cohesion has consistently affected Russian media coverage and continues to shape it today. The authors investigate how precisely this occurs, focusing on several political events, specifically the current situation in Ukraine. Through studying certain empirical materials concerning the political evolution in Russia, the authors answer the question of whether in the future Russian media will be likely to continue serving as an instrument of political propaganda rather than as a source of non-biased information.