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The chapter situates the role of narrative power in shifting media policy amidst calls for police abolition, defunding, and media reparations following the documentation of media harm. Community-based narrative intervention is not only focused on those aspects of reporting and media that deal with harms perpetuated by discourses on public safety, but also about developing what I refer to as “collective narrative self-determination” to reflect the needs and desires of communities. The chapter documents how grassroots media efforts attempt to reconfigure the space of media policy and shift narratives toward the community power needed to reckon with the consequences of vital public resources being systematically defunded for budgets and policies that entail greater police powers. The chapter concludes this is an important moment for community-based initiatives and interventions that can shift media narratives around policing and urban violence and also shift who is served by those narratives, contributing to the long-term process of building narrative power and racial justice across a wide range of community and media organizations.

Rights and duties are involved in every area of business and markets, and society and governments. Most often, rights and duties involve serious ethical and moral issues of conflict. A good theory of the ethics of rights and duties, obligations, and responsibilities will empower us to understand the impact of our actions on various stakeholders. Additionally, a deep understanding of rights and duties could help us to analyze better the impact of our executive actions on various stakeholders and, in particular, to fathom the damaging effects of rights and duties violated by the man-made current financial crisis when seen from an ethical and moral point of view. Our coverage on the ethics of corporate rights and duties will comprise of two parts: Part 1: The Nature of Corporate Business Rights and Duties, and Part 2: Respecting Corporate Rights and Duties. The chapter will feature Newcomb Wellesley Hohfeld’s framework of legal interests such as claims, privileges, power, and immunity and its various applications to contemporary market and corporate executive situations. We illustrate the theory of rights and duties using several cases from the current turbulent markets.

Purpose – This chapter aims to show how media law strongly contributed to shape in Hungary what has been pictured as a U-turn. This illiberal trend was subsequently strengthened during the Covid-19 pandemic. Methodology/Approach – It considers that law also constitutes and not only orders political and social relationships. Law, including media law, has been in Hungary one of the main factors of change or rather of political-social construction. This chapter therefore moves from the study of positive law and analyzes Hungarian media laws within the theoretical framework of illiberal democracy, drawing from contributions to political science and socio-legal studies. Findings – This chapter demonstrated that media laws have outlined in Hungary a centralized regulatory system with broad powers, which lacks political independence, therefore encouraging self-censorship and limiting freedom of expression and pluralism. These laws contributed to shape the illiberal U-turn occurred in the country before the pandemic, but the coronavirus offered the occasion to reinforce government powers, giving the leeway to rule with no or minimum scrutiny for an indefinite period and further limiting dissent. The analysis enabled to argue that neither the media regulation established during the past decade nor the laws adopted during the Covid-19 pandemic are compatible with a modern democracy. Originality/Value – Based on existing literature, little research has been conducted on the appearance and endurance of non-democratic regimes, and supposedly even less within the context of the coronavirus pandemic which started only a few months ago, compared to the contributions available on democratization processes and democratic consolidation.

This chapter looks at web-radio and podcasting in Greece, exploring their past, current status and considering possible futures. The analysis begins from broadcast radio in order to explore the, sometimes complex, relationships between traditional and new digital formats, particularly as these exist in an already financially and politically challenging terrain. Some tensions are revealed as the author, via primary and secondary research, navigates the radio landscape in a country that is now emerging from a long financial crisis. As there is very little writing on Greek Podcasting, this chapter aims to provide a snapshot of what currently exists and to suggest possible functions and creative avenues for it in Greece moving forward.

With 43.2 million coronavirus cases and 525,000 deaths in 2022, India ranked second worldwide, after the United States (84.6 million cases and 1 million deaths), according to the latest available June 2022 COVID-19 impact data.

Amid people’s growing mistrust in the government, India’s news media enhanced the nation’s distinguished designation as the world’s largest and most populous democracy. India’s news media inform, educate, empower, and entertain a surging population of 1.4 billion people, which is roughly one-sixth of the world’s people.

Drawing upon the media agendamelding theoretical framework, we conducted a case study research into interplay between two prominent democratic institutions, the media and the government, to analyze the role of the COVID-19 pandemic in redefining India’s networked society.

India’s COVID-19 pandemic aggravated internecine tensions between media and government relating to four key freedom issues: (1) world’s largest COVID-19 lockdown affecting 1.3 billion Indians from March 25, 2020 to August 2020 with extensions and five-phased re-openings, to restrict the spread of COVID-19; (2) Internet shutdowns; (3) media censorship during the 1975–1977 “Emergency”; and (4) unabated murders of journalists in India.

Although the COVID-19 pandemic caused deleterious problems debilitating the tensions between the media and the government, India’s journalists thrived by speaking truth to power. This study delineates key aspects of India’s media agendamelding that explicates how the people of India form their media agendas. India’s news audiences meld media messages from newspapers, television, and social media to form a picture of the issues, insights, and ideas that define their lives and times in the 21st century digital age.

Racism in the United States is complex given the cultural logics that uphold notions of “post-race” or “colorblindness” as a means for understanding racialized events. The various forces at play within media institutions create paradoxes in the power that the media wields in society. Utilizing the concept of “media spectacle” and putting it into dialogue with colorblind racism, the author looks at local coverage of the 2009 arrest of Henry Louis Gates. The author’s primary concern is to identify not only the narratives that uphold or challenge colorblind racism during racialized events, but also the dynamic in which racialized events are mediated in contemporary society. Through a critical discourse analysis of two Boston newspapers, the author demonstrates the way colorblind racism adapts during a racialized event. This study demonstrates the contested nature of the media and nuance to the ways we understand colorblind racism in an increasingly mediated society.

Industry platforms can alter relations among exchange partners in such a way that the industry structure is changed. The focus of much industry platform research has been on how platform creation and leadership offers advantages to the most central firms, but platforms can also be advantageous for small specialist firms that compete with the most central firms. We examine book publishing as an example of an industry in which the central players – large publishing firms – are losing power to self-publishing authors because the distributor Amazon has a powerful platform for customers to communicate independently, and the non-publishing platform Twitter also serves as a medium for readers to discuss and review books. Our empirical analysis is based on downloaded sales statistics for Amazon Ebooks, matched with Amazon reviews of the same books and tweets that refer to the book or the author. We analyze how Ebook sales are a function of publisher, Amazon reviews, and tweets, and we are able to assess the importance of each factor in the sale of book titles. The main finding is that Amazon reviews are powerful drivers of book sales, and have greater effect on the sales of books that are not backed by publishers. Twitter also affects book sales, but less strongly than Amazon reviews.