Between December 2009 and March 2010, members of xenophobic groups attacked Kyoto Korean Daiichi Elementary School, organizing a series of three discriminatory rallies. When the school and the parents sought to fight back in the criminal and civil courts, they were met with obstacles: the undefined nature of hate speech, the legal system’s incapacity to deal with hate crime, and the Japanese majority’s lack of understanding of ethnic education, rooted in Zainichi Korean resistance against colonialism and assimilation. Charged under existing laws, four attackers were convicted in criminal court. The school’s persistence also paid off in victory in the civil courts. Inevitably, discussion of anti-discrimination legislation ensued, resulting in the Hate Speech Elimination Act of 2016 (the first anti-racism Act in Japan) and Kawasaki City’s anti-hate speech ordinance of 2019 (the first to stipulate criminal penalties). Nevertheless, many issues remain. This chapter reports the pain suffered by those subjected to the discriminatory attacks. It also discusses what it means for minorities to fight a legal fight and what issues persist even after victory.

Annotations and “translations” of the seemingly cryptic statements of President Donald Trump have been an ongoing feature of media coverage of his candidacy and the first year of his presidency. Efforts in the media to decipher Trump’s enigmatic references have presented Donald Trump and his campaign as communicating in a language unintelligible to mainstream media audiences. As in Keith Basso’s account of a Western Apache speech genre termed “speaking with names” (1996), the coherence and significance of Donald Trump’s use of proper names and a variety of other expressions often become clear only when linked to a context at a remove from their immediate surround, generally one found in the world of conservative and alt-right media. In providing such clarification, mainstream media annotations of Donald Trump’s words render his speeches a moment of something like language contact between two distinct communicative worlds: the “right-wing” and the “mainstream.” The result is the aggravation of divisions between multiple disconnected communicative “silos” or “bubbles.” Trump’s verbal practices thus bring into question the very existence of something that might be called “the American public.”

Mass media are commonly held responsible for strengthening bonds of national solidarity and supporting relationships of mutual support among citizens as members of a political community. At the same time, mass media increasingly raise questions of global justice and through their coverage of distant suffering confront audiences with their moral responsibility to provide assistance to strangers. The notion of solidarity as grounded in global justice is therefore not only an abstract normative and legalistic principle but, sociologically speaking, is also linked to an expansive logic of building solidarity relationships of modern society as a community of strangers. To investigate this relationship between the media and (trans)national solidarity, the chapter discusses the role played by old and new (digital and social) media in establishing solidarity relationships among individuals across established borders of political community. It gives examples of mediated solidarity discourses in which mutual obligations between states and equal rights of citizens across borders are discussed controversially. It is argued that the Janus-faced nature of the media as a transmission mechanism for universal notions of justice (representing the world) and as the filter for the consolidation of thickened and contextualised relationships of solidarity within a community of equals (representing the nation) offers an opportunity for transnational solidarity mobilisation.

This chapter explores the development of a popular print culture in Ireland during the decades between 1830 and 1880, as well as the growth of an audience for such publications. It traces the history of the technological and legislative changes – such as the arrival of steam presses and the abolition of stamp and paper taxes – necessary for a popular press to emerge, as well as the social and political landscape which enabled an expanded readership to develop. In particular, the chapter examines the role of the radical political press in actively developing that readership through both its network of reading rooms across Ireland and its publishing of newspapers and juvenile story papers, including the Nation newspaper, the Irish Fireside Magazine, Young Ireland and the Shamrock magazine. These publications were intended to establish an imaginative link between popular entertainment and radical politics, especially through the use of Irish history and historical fiction in order to create a print culture which created and reinforced a national Irish audience for both the popular press and mass political movements.

Formal institutional and legal reform is inadequate to achieve enhanced, effective international governance; attention must also be paid to engage the support and participation of global populations whom the institutions will serve. The foundation for a renewed United Nations must be the shared values of all those who support it, and a solid “civics” understanding of global institutions. Public education, both formal and informal, and extensive engagement with the mass media, are critical to establishing strengthened global governance. Populations around the world must be grounded in key principles of the international order—such as peaceful settlement of disputes and universal respect for human rights—to uphold these principles and the relevant institutions. Education is also needed for those who serve in enhanced global institutions and those who participate in international governance processes. Many will need new skills, new ways of thinking and particular qualities of evolved, ethical leadership relevant to their roles in complex, international environments. This chapter sketches the multiple forms of education and the related sharing of knowledge that should accompany the proposed processes of reform, to ensure the correct general cultural and practical circumstances needed for functional global governance, requiring unprecedented new levels of cooperation and investment.

The chapter argues that John Dos Passos in his novel Manhattan Transferappropriates cinematic immediacy effects and documentary aesthetics for the sake of literary innovation and cultural intervention. His formal innovations—the narrative’s montage structure, shifting focalization, and sampling of mass media item—allow the novel to convey the complexity of modern city life while opening up a critical perspective on mass media discourse and urban consumer culture. The chief strategy Dos Passos uses to critically refract popular mass culture is the creation and subsequent dissolution of immediacy effects that encourage the readers to grapple self-reflexively with the text, their reading strategies, and the represented social realities. The novel’s documentary style creates an urban world that seems recorded rather than imagined. Yet the novel continually disrupts this impression of immediacy: its disjunctive structure and surprising narrative shifts confront the readers with their interpretive routines and push them to develop new ways of reading that enable them to cope with both the novel’s experimental form and the depicted cultural practices.

The chapter defines TV’s immediacy effects. Television started out as a live medium. Although shows were soon pre-produced and recorded, an aesthetic of liveness, retained by shooting sitcoms and talk shows in front of studio audiences, has remained integral to TV culture. It sets TV apart from earlier visual media, particularly film, and is pivotal for the medium’s reality effects. Although “television” means to “see at a distance,” the initial promise of TV was that it would erase the distance between the viewers and the depicted events. Because event, transmission, and reception occur simultaneously during a live broadcast, it possesses not only temporal immediacy but also evokes a sense of spatial proximity and actuality. TV live coverage seems to bring the world home or to transport the viewers to the site of action. By presenting on- and off-screen worlds as directly connected, live TV blurs the boundary between public and private spheres, between fiction and fact, and creates the impression that the viewers participate in the broadcasted events. Since American TV is a commercial medium, the cultural dominance of TV results in a pervasive commodification of experience.