Future directions of international communication research?
long before the arrival in office of George W. Bush and the neo-conservatives, Washington was a company town, and a small one at that ... The company is government, and the product is money and power, the two intimately related and in the Bush administration all but indistinguishable. The town's sources of information have steadily diminished over the years. Serious newspapers have disappeared, broadcast news became entertainment ... Virtually no attention is paid to information generated from non-US sources, which are considered irrelevant or hostile. The result, so far as international affairs are concerned, is that nobody knows much of anything about what really is going on. Those who do, who have worked in the field ... professional diplomats and intelligence people, experienced journalists, have increasingly been cut out of the policy making chain ... Washington people think they are informed, but they actually deal in a limited number of ideologically constructed stories about the world that rely heavily on stereotype and prejudice ... Iran's phantom weapons of mass destruction and the fantasy of quasi-spontaneous democratisation of Iraq are the two most recent examples. (10 October 2003, p.12)
How to Make Thin Journalism Strong?
The concepts of audience and public create an interesting division within media studies. On the one hand, the empirical research on readers and viewers talk primarily about ‘the audience’; if any mention is made of ‘the public’, it will usually be used interchangeably with ‘the audience’. Thus, if the distinction between the audience and the public should be analytically meaningful, as some scholars insist (see Dahlgren 1995, 19), then audience studies seem to have refused to take it seriously. On the other hand, for scholars who take an interest in the media and democracy, this distinction is of great importance. Even if they seem to have an analytical advantage over audience researchers, it is not quite clear what this distinction means empirically. Is the public anything else but a slogan? This article explores the empirical meanings of the public through a case study. It is inspired, firstly, by the theory and practices of public journalism (see Rosen 1999; Glasser ed. 1999). Secondly, it echoes a more general interest that has been re-emerging in Finland (among other places) in the concept of the public. Some scholars have gone so far as coining a brand new word (julkiso) into Finnish language to denote the public in contrast to the audience (yleisö), because hitherto the word yleisö has covered in addition to the meaning of the audience also that of the public (Pietilä & Ridell 1997, 95). Later this initiative has been elaborated both theoretically and empirically.
D'une application pratique des indices bio-météorologiques
Abstract The purpose of the author is to determine statistically in what part of Switzerland maize could be cultivated with certain chance of rentability. The author gives first the method he used for determining the biometeorological index of four species of maize which were selected by the Swiss agronomical research stations. He has considered two possibilities for the growing period: ( a ) raising-ripening (l'approche globale); ( b ) raising-flowering, flowering-ripening (l'approche fractionee). From the biometeorological index, he calculated retrospectively the ripening time of these four species in the years 1901–1965. Assuming a priori that maize should be harvested before October 15th at the latest, he calculated, for a number of meteorological stations, the relative number of years when such conditions were fulfilled. Dividing the country in regions of similar mesoclimates and sorting these stations per region, it is possible to average the maximum altitude where maize can ripen at least 7, 8, 9 and 10 times within 10 years. Finally, taking into account the exposure and ground slope, he draws maps of the theoretically possible extension area, which maps are more reliable and detailed than the ones derived from actual means.