This nuanced work draws on social movement studies to challenge current understandings of the relationship between media and the internet. The book's lively style will make it relevant for anyone interested in politics and media in Malaysia and Singapore.

Today, nearly everyone carries sophisticated devices that provide instant access to news reported from thousands of sources. An endless stream of stories appears on-screen with just the tap of an icon. This technology is often taken for granted, but it is, in fact, a revolution. Readers will trace the development of new kinds of journalism in the digital age, and evaluate the opportunities and dangers they provide.

Using interviews, newspaper articles, online texts, official documents, and national surveys, Lei shows that the development of the public sphere in China has provided an unprecedented forum for citizens to organize, influence the public agenda, and demand accountability from the government.

Ever since radio entered the American private home, technology has shaped political campaign strategy. Radio brought candidates more intimately and vividly into citizens' lives than newspapers could. The televised presidential debate of 1960 -- in which a strapping John F. Kennedy embarrassed a clammy Richard M. Nixon -- was technology's next coup. In the last decade, though, it is the internet that has radically changed the way that candidates campaign: social networking sites, YouTube, and blogs have become important vehicles for political activism. And the grand editorial and political power that this group -- the "netroots," as bloggers call it -- wields has never been more apparent than in the groundbreaking 2008 presidential election. Bloggers on the Bus traces the online events that rocked the campaign trail and reveals the untold stories of the internet activists who made them all possible. In the tradition of Timothy Crouse's classic, The Boys on the Bus, Bloggers on the Bus investigates the cutting edge of liberal politics to reveal the stories and scandals at its very heart. The cast includes everyone from former professional rock saxophonist John Amato who, years before YouTube, changed blogging forever by unleashing his TiVo and figuring out how to post TV clips online, to sixty-something Oakland housewife Mayhill Fowler, who joined the Huffington Post as a volunteer journalist and went on to break two of the biggest stories of the Democratic primary. Boehlert tells the story of acerbic West Coast blogger Digby, whose gender shocked the male-dominated blogosphere, as well as that of graphic tech Philip de Vellis, who culture-jacked an iconic Apple ad in order to create the infamous "Vote Different" video that influenced the Democratic primary. These are just a few of the bloggers pioneering the major shift in today's media who are profiled in Bloggers on the Bus. All of their efforts have set off an industry-wide debate about journalism and privacy and have permanently altered the character of campaign strategy. Using the 2008 presidential race as a dramatic backdrop, Boehlert details the myriad ways these bloggers influenced both the candidates and their campaigns, while also chronicling the bitter blogger civil war that erupted during the contentious Democratic primary season. Offering unprecedented portraits of these new power brokers, Bloggers on the Bus goes behind the scenes to chronicle a media and political rebellion in the making.

Truth qualities of journalism are under intense scrutiny in today's world. Journalistic scandals have eroded public confidence in mainstream media while pioneering news media compete to satisfy the public's appetite for news. Still worse is the specter of "fake news" that looms over media and political systems that underpin everything from social stability to global governance. This volume aims to illuminate the contentious media landscape to help journalism students, scholars, and professionals understand contemporary conditions and arm them to deal with a spectrum of new developments ranging from technology and politics to best practices. Fake news is among the greatest of these concerns, and can encompass everything from sarcastic or ironic humor to bot-generated, made-up stories. It can also include the pernicious transmission of selected, biased facts, the use of incomplete or misleadingly selective framing of stories, and photographs that editorially convey certain characteristics. This edited volume contextualizes the current "fake news problem." Yet it also offers a larger perspective on what seems to be uniquely modern, computer-driven problems. We must remember that we have lived with the problem of people having to identify, characterize, and communicate the truth about the world around them for millennia. Rather than identify a single culprit for disseminating misinformation, this volume examines how news is perceived and identified, how news is presented to the public, and how the public responds to news. It considers social media's effect on the craft of journalism, as well as the growing role of algorithms, big data, and automatic content-production regimes. As an edited collection, this volume gathers leading scholars in the fields of journalism and communication studies, philosophy, and the social sciences to address critical questions of how we should understand journalism's changing landscape as it relates to fundamental questions about the role of truth and information in society.

This compelling book explores how Egyptian bloggers used citizen journalism and cyberactivism to chip away at the state’s monopoly on information and recalibrate the power dynamics between an authoritarian regime and its citizens. When the Arab uprisings broke out in early 2011 and ousted entrenched leaders across the region, social media and the Internet were widely credited with playing a role, particularly when the Egyptian government shut down the Internet and mobile phone networks in an attempt to stave off the unrest there. But what these reports missed were the years of grassroots organizing, digital activism, and political awareness-raising that laid the groundwork for this revolutionary change. Radsch argues that Egyptian bloggers created new social movements using blogging and social media, often at significant personal risk, so that less than a decade after the information revolution came to Egypt they successfully mobilized the overthrow of the state and its president.