A Note from the Graduate Guest Editor for This Issue

Dear Colleagues:

Welcome to the peer-reviewed scholarship of the Global Media Journal. As editor of this special issue, I am pleased to present seven award-winning papers (four faculty and three graduate students) from Global Fusion 2004, 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/.

In the graduate student division of the paper competition, the top paper was authored by Haipeng Zhou (Geogia State University). Her research explores the 1967 riots in Hong Kong. Her examination of The Times’ reports on the riots seeks to understand the anti-British movement in the colonial city from a new angle. Whose Sound and Fury? The 1967 Riots of Hong Kong through The Times is the title of the paper. Reaz Mahmood, a master’s student (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) authored the second-place paper titled, Traveling Away from Culture – The Dominance of Consumerism on the Travel Channel. Mahmood posits that the simple existence of more television channels does not necessarily guarantee adequate programming diversity in every area.  Commercial pressures may dominate programming agendas and interfere with the general substance of those programs. The Role of the State in the National Mediascape: The Case of South Korea written by Woongjae Ryoo (Georgia State University) examines recent South Korean cultural transformations that contest the theoretical viability of globalization and political economy.  Applying Appadurai's "mediascape" to the Korean context, Ryoo argues that while the demise of the state as touted by many popular and economic liberal scholars, it is not likely in South Korea given its distinctive economic and cultural developmental path.

In the invited section of Global Media Journal, four graduate student authors have been asked to present their work on specific topics of global importance. Ruoyun Bai, a Ph.D. Candidate (University of Illinois) presents his paper titled, Media Commercialization, Entertainment, and the Party-State: The Political Economy of Contemporary Chinese Television Entertainment Culture. Watching Chinese television today, one could hardly imagine that just a little over ten years ago, it was so drab that a melodramatic soap opera – Kewang, or Yearnings – could virtually empty streets when it was on, and could even cause a riot due to a power outage that interrupted its viewing. From Communism to Nationalism: China’s Press in the Transition of Dominant Ideology is the research work of Yong Cao, Ph.D. Student (Southern Illinois University Carbondale). Within a theoretical framework of media hegemony, this paper identifies the Party-led nationalism as a hegemonic ideology, which is constructed from the top to legitimate the ruling of the Party, and investigates how China’s press behaves during such transition of dominant ideology in past 20 years. Our next study has been partially supported by the Fulbright Commission and the Institute of International Education, and comes to us from Miguael Malagreca (University of Illinois). Ominous Impunity: Rethinking State Terrorism in Argentina, Twenty Years after the Return of Democracy discusses the last Argentinean dictatorship (1973-1983), during which thirty thousand people were tortured and made ‘disappeared’ by the Dictatorial State. The work is centered on the European countries’ petition for extradition of these repressors and the Argentinean Supreme Court’s decision, which continued to protect the repressor’s impunity. Jongbae Hong, Ph.D. candidate (Southern Illinois University Carbondale) in Conflict Management in an Age of Globalization: A Comparison of Intracultural and Intercultural Conflict Management Strategies between Koreans and Americans explores the conflict management strategies between Koreans and Americans involving intracultural and intercultural interaction. Based on cultural difference between Korea and the U.S., Wilmot and Hocker’s "Duel Concern" model and previous intercultural conflict management studies, five research questions involving the characteristics of and similarities and differences between Koreans’ and Americans’ CMS in intracultural and intercultural interaction were established.

Leo Gher

Southern Illinois University, Carbondale

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