Published in Media History (Ahead of Print, 2022)

Published in Media History (Ahead of Print, 2022)

This article explores the emergence and destruction of the Zimbabwe Times, a weekly, later daily newspaper in Rhodesia. Covertly aligned to the Patriotic Front, an uneasy coalition of Zimbabwe’s two leading liberation movements, it primarily backed Joshua Nkomo’s ZAPU. Financed by Lonrho, a London-based conglomerate, this nationalist friendly title dramatically altered Rhodesia’s media landscape. The

This study examines the role of a local newspaper in shaping a community’s collective memory of child sexual abuse by documenting changing representations of a former rural orphanage and its custodians where such horrific crimes took place. The paper conducts an across-time analysis of news coverage (1944–1954 and 2010–2020) to map these changing representations in their media, policy and social contexts

This article examines the role of Swedish mail-order catalogues in the everyday life of the early twentieth century, and in the development of consumer culture. The study deals with the materiality, content and distribution of the mail-order catalogues as well as their use in everyday life. The case of Åhlén & Holm, a major Swedish mail-order company, and its audience is relevant beyond the national

Russel Ward claimed that Miles ‘Staniforth Smith, a radical Protectionist, who later joined the Labor Party, was perhaps the most rabidly racist member of either House’ of the first parliament. It has gone unchallenged in the literature, a case of sans aucun doubte. This article inquiries into the strength of the claim by first drawing on newspaper reporting and finds that Ward had drawn a longbow

This study explores how an English-language magazine affiliated with the Indonesian government, The Voice of Free Indonesia (TVFI), conveyed to foreigners Indonesia’s views of the British occupation in Indonesia in October–December 1945. By using historical method, this study argues that for TVFI providing Indonesia’s perspectives to global readers was crucial for Indonesia’s struggle for maintaining

In an explorative manner, this article uses a data-driven digital history set-up to focus on media political issues in Sweden during the second half of the twentieth century. By distant reading and topic modeling a dataset of 3100 Swedish Government Official Reports between 1945 and 1989—a corpus of some 87 million tokens—the article gives a new perspective of how the Swedish state examined and discussed

Thought as a case study illustrating the connections between comics (bandes dessinées) and radio, this article analyses the short-lived radio show ‘Le Feu de camp du dimanche matin’ (Sunday Morning Campfire). It aired for 13 episodes in 1969 on the waves of Europe n°1 and was presented by members of the comics magazine Pilote. This article is based on the two surviving episodes and a few issues of

My research suggests that in addition to local practices, American film historians should continue to be attentive to mass experiences determined not only by location but, in this case, by 19th century periodical reading habits. I focus on the first four years of US public photochemical motion picture exhibition to consider the similarities I found in the use of still photographs to explain and introduce

In 1969, a government report concluded that there was a need for closer contact between the citizens and Swedish government agencies. Television, at this time still considered a new medium, was highlighted in the report as a valuable form of mass communication with great yet unfulfilled promise as a disseminator of government information. A heated debate about the role and function of government information

Historians of Partition have focused upon the bitterly polarized yet vibrant public sphere of the last days of the British Raj, wherein newspapers representing Congress, Muslim League and Akali opinion vied for influence through increasingly hostile propaganda targeted at the ‘other/s’. Such studies’ focus on ideological battles and propaganda results in relatively less attention being given to what

The role of the international press as an external contributing agent to the consolidation of democratic regime change within emerging democracies is a growing research area within the field of media history and political communication. Within the context of these press/power dynamics, this article analyses the intense coverage made by the influential transatlantic weekly magazines, Time, Newsweek

As early as the late eighteenth century, there were English-language periodicals published from Paris. But it was only at the end of the nineteenth century, when well-capitalised American periodicals began to be launched from the city, that a transnational English-language press in the city began to develop into a distinctive media category. This essay examines the activities surrounding these periodicals

The paper seeks to develop new avenues for a study of the Ukrainian press in the West European languages in Europe during the first quarter of the twentieth century. For the first time ever, we employ here the framing perspective for the study of the victimization grand-narrative of Ukrainians in their foreign-language print media in Europe. We examine the victimization of the Ukrainian people in terms

Although many scholars identify the first newspaper in South Africa as The Cape Town Gazette and African Advertiser / Kaapsche Stads Courant en Afrikaansche Berighter (1800), it often does not receive in-depth or prolonged attention. In this article various reasons are suggested as part of a critical review of the historiography of the first newspaper, from (contemporary) critics of the early nineteenth

Immediately following the dramatic coup against J. F. Struensee in 1772, information on the events at court was in high demand. Amid this political upheaval an enterprising publicist in Copenhagen launched a new magazine with the explicit ambition of reporting whatever information could by picked up about the coup. In order not to be on a collision course with the new regime the magazine invented a

Media history is still written largely from national perspectives so that the role of import and export, translations and franchises is seldom foregrounded. On geographically and linguistically limited markets, imported materials have nevertheless been crucial parts of popular print culture. This paper explores the market of ‘sex edutainment’ magazines in 1970s Finland, zooming specifically in on Leikki

Cholera was the emblematic disease of the nineteenth-century Europe. This article explores the cultural ramifications of cholera by concentrating on the ways in which public discourse participated in circulating information on the disease. It focuses on the reuse of texts about cholera in the Finnish press from 1860 to 1920. The most difficult cholera epidemics in Finland were the first ones in the

This study takes up the subject of the Journalist biography of Edgar Whitaker, one of the three editors of The Levant Herald (1856-1914), extending from London to the Ottoman Empire, while giving particular focus on his adventurous journey as a publisher since under his editorship The Levant Herald contributed to the formation of the political opposition to the Hamidian regime (1878-1909). The study

This article investigates the reproduction of the foundational terrain of media work as composed of amateur and professional realms through the youth movement of amateur journalism in the late 19th-Century United States. Amateur journalists wrote, typeset and printed journals of essays, commentary, word puzzles and stories, which were circulated primarily among themselves in subcultural networks of

This study examines local government reporting in the English provincial press from 1900 to 1950. It has two main findings—firstly, that the press moved from verbatim council reports in the early part of the century to selective news stories that were designed to maximise news values and commercial revenues. City council meeting reports were re-shaped, re-focused and re-formulated to resemble news

This paper revisits the history of Indonesian broadcasting, focusing particularly on the broadcasting model implemented during the Japanese occupation (1942–1945) and its influence on broadcast organizations in the post-independence era. Taking into consideration four elements of broadcast governance—remit, structure, ownership, and funding—this study examines how the Japanese colonial model of radio

As an innovative photojournalism publication with a left-of-centre worldview, Picture Post was hugely popular in Ireland but also has the distinction of being one of the most frequently banned periodicals in twentieth-century Ireland. Senior church figures and morality campaigners viewed its photojournalism as indecent and obscene and engaged in a sustained decades-long battle to ban the publication

The article focuses on the numerous English-language periodicals published in Italy during the long nineteenth century. Who were the editors and why, for whom and to what purpose did they engage in this journalistic activity in a foreign country; what mediating role did they play as cultural brokers between their British readers and contemporary Italian society; how did they partake in the cross-border

Australian newspapers mediate the response of the prime minister to communities stricken by disaster. From 1967, newspapers have reported ritualised visits by the prime minister to sites of natural disaster along with associated press conferences. A historical overview of national and metropolitan newspapers reveals that through word and image, dress is presented as a meaningful performative element

(2022). The Mediatization of Political Personae, 1880s–1930s. Media History: Vol. 28, The Mediatization of Political Personae, 1880s-1930s, pp. 1-12.

This article argues that the increasing use of press images around 1900 contributed to the construction of the political persona of the British Statesman Joseph Chamberlain. These images fused scenes from his public and private life and, paradoxically, the new focus on his private characteristics reinforced his public role. His private life did not replace his public side, nor was the private unrelated

This article examines how the 1940s Lisbon Flower Exhibitions and their impact on the press served the propaganda of the Portuguese dictatorship as they fostered and disseminated a positive image of the government’s policies and competencies. The propaganda used the garden culture to fabricate an idea of national identity, bestowing Portugal as a modern and culturally elevated regime. Based on archive

In early nineteenth-century German-speaking Europe, the press was a key cultural forum, in which emotions were discussed in public through newly emerging journalistic practices and discourses. The era of educational reforms created debates about the right kinds of means of cultivating the human. One of the key concepts of these debates was the concept of ‘education of the heart’ (Bildung des Herzens)

(2022). The Digitally Disposed: Racial Capitalism and the Informatics of Value. Media History: Vol. 28, The Mediatization of Political Personae, 1880s-1930s, pp. 175-177.

(2022). International News Agencies: A History. Media History: Vol. 28, The Mediatization of Political Personae, 1880s-1930s, pp. 177-179.

(2021). Electric News in Colonial Algeria. Media History: Vol. 27, No. 4, pp. 561-563.

The phenomenon of letters to newspapers developed into a nationwide and pervasive culture of local letters in the mid-1800s Finnish-language press. A characteristic feature of this culture was that the readers’ letters published in the press were written in the names of local communities. Thus, the writer of the letter claimed to represent the entire local community. This interaction between different

2017 marked the 70th anniversary of the end of colonial rule in British India and of the division of the country into the two independent states of India and Pakistan. To commemorate the event, in August 2017, the BBC broadcast a series of programmes focused specifically on Partition. Focusing on My Family, Partition and Me: India 1947, this article analyses the programme’s structure and rhetorical

This article sheds theoretical and empirical light on the ritual media events constructed around the deaths of three Cold War political leaders in the 1980s: the Finnish president, Urho Kekkonen (1900–1986), the Swedish prime minister, Olof Palme (1927–1986), and the Soviet Union general secretary, Leonid Brezhnev (1906–1982). Investigating news articles published in the first days after the news of

One of the most decisive landslide victories in the political history of Japan was achieved by Prime Minister Ōkuma Shigenobu in March 1915. His election campaign catalysed the mediatisation of Japanese politic(ian)s. In its centre, Ōkuma resided as a carefully crafted political persona and as a populist, charismatic orator. Ichishima Kenkichi, head of the Count Ōkuma Support Association, resorted

(2021). Correction. Media History. Ahead of Print.

Moral panic has become a popular concept to explain a media frenzy that has provoked public alarm. A largely unexplored area of panic has been the exceptional allegations of pro-Nazi secret agents in Australia during World War II. Moral panics have often been viewed as the outcome of the media acting as a single entity to generate wild reporting and mass hysteria. This article proposes a refinement

The study examined the leadership role of Charlotta Bass, the editor/publisher of the California Eagle in Los Angeles during the 1950s. Bass helped lead a massive protest campaign in the legal case for Wesley Robert Wells, an inmate sentenced to death row in 1947. During the Cold War, scholars recognized that Black women challenged patriarchal leadership by creating their own paths toward Black radicalism

This study provides a cultural-historical analysis of remote control in three stages. In the early 20th century, remote control first emerged as the extension of individual intention across geographic space. Later, remote control became articulated to shifting geopolitical contexts, which placed in tension the reliability and security of the connection between the individual and the outcome. In more

This essay analyzes how public figures became accessories and what audiences gained from that accessorization. It argues that the development of three visual technologies—lithography, carte-de-visite photography, and the twinned impact of photojournalism and brand name commercial images—materially contributed to a solipsism of equivalence in the German consumer. Social and political celebrities became

This article examines how The Vegetarian Review, the monthly periodical founded in Kishinev and published in Kiev from 1910–1915, and the emerging vegetarian activism, enabled, re-affirmed and empowered each other. The focus of the article is on the periodical’s emergence, logistical aspects of its production, ideological settings, form, content, rationale, (re)presentational strategies, as well as

This essay discusses what the topical approaches to history—digital history and different concepts of historical temporality—have to offer for media history studies especially in terms of defining a common theory of media history. The outcome of the essay is that since often media historical approaches essentially take the plurality of media historical time and the layering of media forms for granted

In the Edwardian period the Daily Mail utilised a range of sophisticated marketing techniques to promote its brand. This article explores a series of competitions run by the newspaper, including the Daily Mail rose. As publicity stunts, these competitions associated the newspaper’s brand with the lifestyle of the suburban middle class, and were promoted through exhibitions, including the Ideal Home

(2021). The Late-Victorian Little Magazine. Media History: Vol. 27, No. 4, pp. 558-560.

Political debate about refugees is heavily influenced by how media images depict them. Centering on the victim/threat dichotomy in relation to the visual construction of the refugee figure, scholarship on media representations of refugees fails to acknowledge the historical layers of how refugees are visually conceptualized. Through scrutiny of historical Finnish media representations of refugees from

Sport programming played a vital and catalytic role in the development of national relay and network broadcasting in the first decade of Australian radio. Sport programmes sold radio apparatuses, attracted listeners willing to pay for licenses, and provided live entertainment drawing large and appreciative audiences to radio relays throughout the nation. They also propagated a unifying ideal of Australian

This article investigates an alleged link between US organized crime and the UK’s Hammer Film Productions Ltd that is said to have operated via Meyer Lansky (the notorious Syndicate casino lynchpin) and Eliot Hyman, the latter being head of Seven Arts Productions Ltd, a US film production company. It does so by first examining the significant business link between Hammer and Seven Arts, which encompassed

This article considers the representation of tabloid journalists in 1930s British cinema. It argues that during this period, British films showed journalists to be collaborating with state powers to maintain a stable society. They also depicted reporters as not adhering to any recognised ethical framework. As a result, cinematic journalists in 1930s Britain differ markedly from later, better-known

This article seeks to establish connections between histories of education and media by examining long-term institutional and structural factors. In order to establish a role for broadcasting in schools, the BBC formed a relationship with the educational world through advisory machinery called the Central Council for School Broadcasting (CCSB), later reconstituted as the School Broadcasting Council

(2021). Provincial Newspapers—Lessons from History. Media History: Vol. 27, No. 2, pp. 125-128.

(2021). Reading Books and Prints as Cultural Objects. Media History: Vol. 27, No. 2, pp. 266-267.

This article explores the process carried out by Spain’s state radio station -Radio Nacional de España- to devise the figure of Francisco Franco, first as a war hero, supreme chief of the rebel side of Spanish Civil War and, after the conflict ended, as a statesman and rebuilder of the Spanish nation, in his roles as head of state and Caudillo de España (leader of Spain). Through the examination of

This article presents an overview of the role of the media in nationalism and identity-shaping in post-crisis societies experiencing conflict, focusing on the impact of the recent economic crisis on diversity in political news reporting. The research is based on a time series analysis (2000–2019) of diversity in traditional and online political news reporting, framed by a thematic analysis of journalists’

(2021). Playful Visions: Optical Toys and the Emergence of Children's Media Culture. Media History: Vol. 27, No. 3, pp. 405-407.

This article, while tracing the relationship of the press in princely state of Jammu and Kashmir state with politics and religion, tries to locate the origins of journalism as a distinct field. It fills a major gap in the South Asian media scholarship that has for long ignored the media cultures of the princely states, which covered two-fifth of the territory and possessed a quarter of the population

In December 1848, the Illustrated London News (ILN) created a sensation by presenting Queen Victoria’s Christmas tree at Windsor Castle. Inspired by Benedict Anderson’s concept of imagined communities and drawing upon his analysis of newspapers along with Michael Buckland’s documentary dimensions, this article presents a conceptual documentary analysis of Queen Victoria’s Christmas tree to illuminate

The paper navigates Ethiopia's history of resistance against Italian colonial aggression as reported by New Times and Ethiopia News (NTEN) founded and edited by Sylvia Pankhurst in defence of Ethiopia. Her London-based weekly, which started the day fascist forces took control of Addis Ababa, was in the years to come to step up discursive pressure on Italy and the big powers for the salvation of the

Radio ‘Błyskawica’, broadcasting during the Warsaw Uprising from the capital city of Poland, was the Second World War phenomenon - it was the only case during the war that from the occupied country a regular programme was broadcast. In the present article we try to show its activity from the human perspective, taking into consideration those who had a chance to broadcast but also listen to the station