"From outbreaks of the flesh eating viruses Ebola and Strep A, to death camps in Bosnia and massacres in Rwanda, the media seem to careen from one trauma to another, in a breathless tour of poverty, disease and death. First we're horrified, but each time they turn up the pitch, show us one image mor
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e hideous than the next, it gets harder and harder to feel. Meet compassion fatigue--a modern syndrome, Susan Moeller argues, that results from formulaic media coverage, sensationalized language and overly Americanized metaphors. In her impassioned new book, Compassion Fatigue, Moeller warns that the American media threatens our ability to understand the world around us. Why do the media cover the world in the way that they do? Are they simply following the marketplace demand for tabloid-style international news? Or are they creating an audience that as seen too much--or too little--to care? Through a series of case studies of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse--disease, famine, death and war--Moeller investigates how newspapers, newsmagazines and television have covered international crises over the last two decades, identifying the ruts into which the media have fallen and revealing why. Throughout, we hear from industry insiders who tell of the chilling effect of the mega- media mergers, the tyranny of the bottom-line hunt for profits, and the decline of the American attention span as they struggle to both tell and sell a story. But Moeller is insistent that the media need not, and should not, be run like any other business. The media have a special responsibility to the public, and when they abdicate this responsibility and the public lapses into a compassion fatigue stupor, we become a public at great danger to ourselves." (Publisher description)
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"Grundlage der Studie sind Repräsentativ-Umfragen in zehn postkommunistischen Ländern - von der Ex-DDR bis zur Ukraine -, die im Zeitraum November 1997 bis März 1998 durchgeführt wurden. Ergebnis: Einerseits versteht sich ein großer Teil der postkommunistischen Gesellschaft als nichtreligiös u
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nd nichtkonfessionsgebunden, andererseits sind - mit Ausnahme der Ex-DDR, Tschechiens und der Ukraine - die formellen Kirchenmitglieder überall in der Mehrheit. Zudem hat im Vergleich zu Umfragen unmittelbar nach der "Wende" (1990/91) in den meisten Reformstaaten das Vertrauen in die christlichen Kirchen zugenommen. Der erste Band (1999) umfasste Ungarn, Litauen und Slowenien, der zweite Band (2001) Polen, Kroatien und Tschechien, der dritte Band (2002) behandelt die Länder Rumänien, Ukraine und Slowakei." (Kathpress Tagesdienst 25./26.1.1999)
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"This international survey of literature on women an mass communications focuses on the 1990s and continues where the first volume (1991) left off. Some pre-1990 works that were omitted in the first volume are included here as well. The work is organized by continents and regions. The first chapter
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provides a global perspective, and the following chapters are divided topically. All genres of publications, such as books, periodicals, dissertations, and conference papers, are examined." (Catalogue Greenwood Publishing 2000)
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"In this essay I discuss the transformation of television journalism into popular culture, and the ideological effect of this transformation. The analysis is based on the systematic observation of Slovene television news (on TV Slovenia and POP TV), carried out for several weeks in 1998." (Summary)
"This is something of a benchmark volume on the subject of publishing and book development in Africa (and in some other developing countries). It contains the proceedings, and reflects the thinking and the deliberations that emerged from a seminar on“Understanding the Educational Book Industry”,
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which was organized by the World Bank in Washington, DC in September 1997. Participants included representatives of publishing houses and book trade associations from both industrial and developing countries, as well as donor representatives with a strong interest in strengthening publishing capacity in Africa and in other parts of the world. The objective of the seminar was to offer World Bank Group staff from education, finance, and private sector development networks with a better understanding of the nature of educational publishing, including the linkages between government textbook policies, the publishing industry, and Bank-financed textbook operations. It also provided an opportunity for some participants to voice their current grievances about the World Bank’s textbook procurement procedures and bidding systems. The book contains over 30 papers which are grouped under four major themes: “Policies for the Long-Term Provision of Educational Materials’” “Finance and Book Trade Issues”, “Procurement, Protection, and Copyright”, and “The Role of Publishing Partnerships”, together with a section on “The Publishing Industry in the Twenty-First Century”. Contributions include papers reporting about the publishing industries in various countries of Africa, in Central and South America, the Caribbean, as well as in Eastern Europe. A record of the discussions that took place follows each section." (Hans M. Zell, Publishing, Books & Reading in Sub-Saharan Africa, 3d ed. 2008, nr. 1885)
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