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Professor Charlie Beckett

This course is available on the MSc in Media and Communications (Data and Society), MSc in Media and Communications (Research) and MSc in Politics and Communication. This course is available with permission as an outside option to students on other programmes where regulations permit.

In order to accommodate academic staff research leave and sabbaticals, and in order to maintain smaller seminar group sizes, this course is controlled access, meaning that there is a limit to the number of students who can be accepted.

The news media is vital not just for the dissemination information but as a forum for debate. Journalism shapes our individual and community lives. It frames ideological disputes and is a site of contestation. But journalism and the news itself is changing because of technological, social, economic and political forces.  This course led by a media professor with 20 years of experience as a journalist, takes an ethical perspective on media change. It asks what impact journalism has, what kind of journalism do we want, and how will journalism reconstruct itself according to competing national, cultural, or political contexts. On completion of this course, students should be able to: understand the role of journalism in society today; critically discuss different theoretical conceptions of journalism as practiced in a wide variety of social and political contexts; compare and contrast the role of journalism in contexts ranging from mainstream to alternative media outlets; evaluate the normative and empirical connections between media journalism, the production of news and ethical considerations; critically assess contemporary debates about the changing nature of journalism and its implications for cultural understanding and democracy.

This course is delivered through a combination of lectures and seminars totalling a minimum of 20 hours across Michaelmas Term. This course includes a reading week in Week 6 of term.

All students are expected to complete advance reading, prepare seminar presentations, and submit one essay of 1500 words.

• Beckett, C. (2008) Supermedia, London: Blackwell.
• Bell, E. & Owen, T. (2017) The Platform Press: How Silicon Valley Re-engineered Journalism. Tow Center, Columbia University.
• Boczkowski, P. and Anderson, C.W, Eds (2017) Remaking The News. MIT Press.
• Bruns, A .(2019) Are Filter Bubbles Real? Polity.
• Chouliaraki, L. (2006) Spectatorship of Suffering, London: Sage.
• Diakopoulos, N. (2019) Automating the News. Harvard University Press.
• Muhlmann, G. (2008) A Political History of Journalism, Cambridge: Polity.
• Schudson, M. (2008) Why Democracies Need An Unlovable Press. Polity.
• Silverstone, R. (2006) Media and Morality: On the rise of the Mediapolis. Cambridge: Polity.
• Wahl-Jorgensen, K. (2019) Emotions, Media and Politics. Polity.

Essay (100%, 3000 words) in the LT.

This course will explore how journalism is going through a series of revolutionary changes thanks to digital technologies and how those changes are impacting on everything from politics to war.

Students' comments

"I really enjoyed how interactive this course was and the way we participated in the lectures and seminars."