Media, Religion, and Politics in the Age of Globalization

This special issue of the Global Media Journal highlights the critical role of media in shaping, absorbing, and facilitating political controversy within global contexts. Attention to this global context might consider the economic conditions of media industries and corporate power, the political alliances across nations or among movements, or the ideological struggles of dominant and resistant groups. In some ways attention to religious affiliation becomes an illustration of broader dynamics of privilege and subordination, operating in similar ways to distinctions across nationality, ethnicity, gender and other conditions that perpetuate access to financial, cultural, political and social capital. Religious affiliation is seen here not just as an individual choice about spiritual beliefs, but also as a manifestation of collective identity, grounded in cultural histories and practices with political consequences. 

The entries in this issue comprise a variety of perspectives addressing these issues, but all consider the way media contribute to political conflict and controversy. Unless otherwise identified, the entries in this special issue have been competitively refereed. In his invited contribution on the role of local and global media in instigating and masking genocide in Rwanda, Jolyon Mitchell chronicles how local radio was used to provoke ethnic conflict, while international journalists did little to expose the atrocities being committed given the global economic parameters of the industry as well as the national political restrictions to their work. His provocative accounting of this horrific set of events is a critical reminder of the limitations of local community radio as well as of global journalism.  

The limitations of journalism resonate clearly in Smeeta Mishra’s analysis of New York Times coverage of Muslim men and women. She identifies central themes intersecting textual articulations of gender as well as of Islam, demonstrating the ways that media serve to justify US intervention through a projected need to save Muslim women by fighting Muslim men. Just as local media may be exploited by dominant cultural groups to attempt to justify internal violence and conflict, as evidenced in Mitchell’s work, national media also serve to legitimate the violent interventions and foreign policies of political administrations.

While the power of media to serve the interests of the elite seems to endure, the potential for media to facilitate resistance is also worth recognizing. Barbara Selznick’s exploration of race and religion in the production and distribution of a BBC documentary chronicling the life of Jesus offers a useful case in which a dominant representation, of Christ as a white, blue-eyed man, was able to be challenged, visualizing a darker skinned, brown-eyed man. While the assertion of an alternative image is worth commending, it is worth noting that this framing was couched in the rhetoric of science and technological discovery in order to make the substance seem less controversial and more palatable.

While an association with new technologies may in some instances allow for a de-politicization of content, as a structural channeling of interactive communication emerging information technologies offer the potential to facilitate political dialogue. Yam and Vala-Haynes’ study of an on-line forum illustrate the way this interactive channel permitted a discussion of abortion politics, registering recognition of global political movements against local and national concerns.

Although the invited paper entitled "Unethical Consequences of Pack Journalism," by Jonathan Matusitz & Gerald-Mark Breen, does not directly address the topic of religion, it contributes to our understanding of the ethical concerns raised in news media coverage of critical social issues.

Reviewing these contributions as a whole, religious identity seems to stimulate and represent political positions of dominant and as well as victimized and resistant groups. This is an emerging area of research that requires much more attention, particularly moving scholarship on religion and media within local and national settings toward serious recognition of the global contexts that restrict and guide political debate and action.

Karen Gwinn Wilkins
University of Texas at Austin
Guest Editor, Fall 2007