A Note from the Guest Editor for This Issue

Dear Colleagues:

Welcome to the peer-reviewed scholarship of the Spring 2005 issue of Global Media Journal.  As editor of this special issue, I am pleased to present six award-winning papers (three faculty and three graduate students) from Global Fusion 2004 Conference, which was held in St. Louis, Missouri and hosted by Southern Illinois University. There are two divisions of the Global Fusion paper competition – one for faculty and one for graduate students. All papers in both divisions are blind-refereed by three readers from AEJMC, BEA and ICA. There is also an invited section in this edition of Global Media Journal (see below). Further information about Global Fusion can be found at: http://globalfusion.siu.edu/.

Authorship of our competitive papers comes to us from around the world: the United Arab Emirates, Japan, Iraq, Argentina, India, Pakistan and the United States. Countries and regions of the world that are the subjects of our contributors include: South Korean, Eastern Europe, Ireland, Pakistan, Hong Kong, the Middle East, China, and the North America. But more importantly, our scholars have covered a wide range of theoretical, methodological and practical issues related to media and communication across the globe.

In the faculty division of the paper competition, Dr. Karin Wilkins (University of Texas) presents us with her first-place paper, Constructing Gender across Cultural Space: Japan's International Development Programs. The central question in this research concerns how development discourse within the Japanese International Co-operation Agency (JICA) constructs women and gender across geographical regions. In the second-place paper of the faculty division, Dr. Jane Park (University of Oklahoma) and Dr. Karin Wilkins (University of Texas) examine how media characterizations become problematic in relation to international and intercultural communities when the groups being constructed are not culturally proximate with those administering the media industries. The paper is: Re-orienting the Orientalist Gaze. On Negotiation: Notes on the Study of Reception and Media Ethnography for Global Media Studies is the competition’s third-place paper.  And finally, the Prosser-Sitaram Award for Advancing International and Intercultural Research and Theory goes to Dr. Antonio LaPastina (University of Texas, San Antonio) for his paper, Audience Ethnographies: A Media Engagement Approach. In this paper LaPastina argues that audience ethnography needs to be repositioned as a fieldwork-based, long-term practice that allows researchers to attain a greater level of understanding of the community studied while maintaining self-reflexivity and respect for the everyday life of the community.

In the invited section of Global Media Journal four faculty authors have been asked to present their work on specific topics of global importance. Dr. John C. Merrill (University of Missouri), the renowned journalism scholar, leads of the section with Professionalization: Fusion of Media Freedom and Responsibility. Merrill explores the idealistic goal for journalism of a media system that is both free and controlled. This would mean that the press would be free (or outside control) and at the same time held to high standards by somebody. The question is: "Who would this somebody be?"  Changes and Challenges of the Iraqi Media is a paper that presents an important question posited by Dr. Hana Noor Al-Deen (University of North Carolina at Wilmington). Mirror on the Wall: Who is the best Communicator of them all – AL Jazeera or Al Hurra? is an essay written by Mr. Jihad N. Fakhreddine, Research Manager of Pan Arab Research Center – Gallup International, United Arab Emirates, Dubai. Fakhreddine examines how the US Congress-financed Al-Hurra TV channel performs in Iraq. In the Arab world, Al-Hurra is considered the anti-thesis of Qatari-state-owned Al-Jazeera. Dr. Kuldip R. Rampal (Central Missouri State University) presents his argument that film industries in several Asian countries are in the process of reinventing themselves as traditional approaches are increasingly found not to be economically viable. His paper is titled, Cultural Imperialism or Economic Necessity?: The Hollywood Factor in the Reshaping of the Asian Film Industry.  And, finally, Dr. Douglas Bicket (State University of New York, Geneseo) writes on Reconsidering geocultural contraflow: Intercultural information flows through trends in global audiovisual trade.

Sincerely,

Leo Gher
Southern Illinois University, Carbondale

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