This paper surveys some recent developments in media criticism and recent developments in film and media representations of mental distress. Focusing on a representations drawn from various forms of media, the paper argues that media and film images of mental distress are in many cases 'positive' and sympathetic, although they can also contain sexist, racist and other problematic elements that are not commonly identified by anti-stigma campaigners. It also suggests that while still valid in many ways, existing anti-stigma criticism tends to focus on a rather undifferentiated notion of 'violence to others' as the sole criterion against which media images are judged. Finally, the paper proposes that critics and campaigners pay closer attention to how the particular form or genre of any media text influences its treatment of psychological distress.

In the last 10 years, media studies have started to address the problem of the stigmatization of mental illness in the media. This article argues that while much of this work has been invaluable in identifying unsatisfactory media representations of madness, it also contains certain argumentational and theoretical weaknesses. Anti-stigma discourse, it is claimed, tends to homogenize the texts it examines and can even contribute to the stigmatization of popular culture. It is also overreliant on an individualistic definition of violence and on notions of representational ‘accuracy’ and verisimilitude, while inadvertently misrepresenting the statistics about mental illness and violence. While it argues for the vital importance of anti-stigma research and criticism, the article recommends that critics pay more attention to the exigencies of particular media forms, and to the social and political functions, as well as the ‘accuracy’, of media images of madness.

This paper explores the political-economic basis and ideological effects of talk about neoliberalism with respect to media and communication studies. In response to the supposed ascendancy of the neoliberal order since the 1980s, many media and communication scholars have redirected their critical attentions from capitalism to neoliberalism. This paper tries to clarify the significance of the relatively new emphasis on neoliberalism in the discourse of media and communication studies, with particular reference to the 2011 phone hacking scandal at The News of the World. Questioning whether the discursive substitution of ‘neoliberalism’ for ‘capitalism’ offers any advances in critical purchase or explanatory power to critics of capitalist society and its media, the paper proposes that critics substitute a Marxist class analysis in place of the neoliberalism-versus-democracy framework that currently dominates in the field.

No abstract

The representation of the 1992–1995 Bosnian war in both news media and popular cultural forms has received remarkably little scholarly attention. Drawing upon the recent work of radical historians and critics, this article begins with a reassessment of the dominant western news media narrative of the Bosnian conflict. It then proceeds to consider some popular representations of the conflict, focusing on Leigh Jackson and Peter Kosminsky's unduly neglected BBC two-part television drama Warriors. By comparison with United States and United Kingdom news media coverage of the conflict and other popular screen representations of the Bosnian war, Warriors offers one of the most sensitive and sophisticated accounts of the conflict. Nevertheless, the drama reproduces many of the fundamental western news media biases and implicitly endorses the discourse of humanitarian interventionism that has been used, particularly since the 1990s, to justify western military imperialism. That Kosminsky, who is known for making dramas that question dominant political paradigms, should have adopted an interventionist line in Warriors may suggest something of the potency and reach of western news media propaganda throughout the 1990s on behalf of what Noam Chomsky has called 'humanitarian imperialism'.