Author: Einar Thorsen

Einar ThorsenBournemouth University I want to thank our previous Chair Anita Biressi, who has done an incredible job in the role over the past three years and as a member of the Executive Committee for many more. I am pleased she is staying on the committee and continuing to work on existing initiatives — including …Continue Reading

MeCCSA colleagues will have been saddened by the death of Jay G. Blumler, a pioneering scholar in our field and a friend and well-wisher to many of us. At the MeCCSA conference held at the University of Leeds Jay was not only in attendance at every session, at which he would typically raise the most …Continue Reading

Deborah GraysonGoldsmiths, University of London Public media are under attack. Boris Johnson has made it clear that the funding and remit of the BBC is up for grabs and that the privatisation of Channel 4 may soon be under consideration. Meanwhile, the launch of GB News and Murdoch’s News UK TV channel will move Britain’s …Continue Reading

Declan McDowell-NaylorCardiff University What do you do about a problem like Facebook? This question is set to define a decade of legislative and judicial agendas. And from Australia, we have now seen one approach in action. Back in 2018, I questioned the intent behind Facebook’s hiring of Nick Clegg and the notion of “building bridges” between governments and …Continue Reading

Steven BarnettUniversity of WestminsterJulian PetleyBrunel University The last days of Donald Trump did a great deal, albeit belatedly, to spotlight the corrosive effects on the democratic process of partisan media, and particularly Fox News. As an interviewee put it in an article in the Financial Times, 15 January 2021, following the Capitol invasion: “Those outlets that …Continue Reading

Tom ChiversGoldsmiths, University of London So farewell to Sir David Clementi, the outgoing Chairman of the BBC. Most previous Chairs are remembered only by an anorak’s shorthand of reforms, scandals and political conflicts: Real Lives, ‘internal markets’, the Hutton Inquiry, Savile, DMI, and so on. By modern standards Clementi’s four years in office have been uneventful, …Continue Reading

Kulraj PhullarIndependent Scholar “Decolonisation” is a term that has become familiar to many of us in recent years. Last summer’s Black Lives Matter protests across the UK contributed to the global wave of solidarity with African Americans following the killing of George Floyd, and raised the political stakes of decolonising our disciplines, histories and institutions. …Continue Reading

Julian PetleyBrunel University London In his triumphant and swaggering Brexit speech at the Greenwich Royal Naval College on 3 February 2020, we find one of Boris Johnson’s earliest mentions of the coronavirus. It is a warning, but not of imminent peril. Rather it is a warning of the danger posed to the economy by what he regards …Continue Reading

Simon CottleCardiff University As our academic field gears up and sets about interrogating the ways in which media and communications have variously engaged with and communicatively enacted this unprecedented – though in truth long-predicted – global pandemic, it is worth considering what appears to be on the research agenda and, importantly, what seems to be …Continue Reading

Alison Scott-Baumann & Simon PerfectSchool of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) There’s no such thing as free speech and it’s a good thing too, according to American academic Stanley Fish. By this he means that there is no situation where speech is truly ‘free’, without constraint; in every scenario there are rules, explicit or implicit, which …Continue Reading