Topic: Case Study: Lords of the Global Village Instructor:
Jack Lule On this page are the assignments for Thursday, June 10. DEADLINES: You should have Thursday's assignments, your research paper on a media mogul, completed by Thursday, June 17, at 7 p.m.
To complete our section on global conglomeration, it's time for us to become more acquainted with some of "The Lords of the Global Village." I used to follow Bagdikian and ask students to study particular individuals, such as Rupert Murdoch of Fox and Michael Eisner of Disney, or Jack Welch of General Electric and Gerald Levin of Time-Warner. However, the particular individuals come and go; the conglomerate itself has become the enduring and important subject. We are rapidly seeing a time when a handful of companies are in control of much of the world's media:
We don't have the time, energy or resources for each of you to study all of the world's major media companies. But we can do it as a group. SECOND RESEARCH ESSAY For your second research essay, I would like each of you to do a profile of a media company -- one of the lords of the global village -- whom I will assign to you via email from the table above. You should give some company history. You should talk about when they moved into the media business. You should provide a fairly comprehensive rundown (it can be a list) of media and non-media holdings of the company. You should talk about the current officers. You should give a sense of future plans. You should find articles and quote criticism or praise of your subject. Keep in mind that you're writing a research essay. You'll want to quote the writers of articles and people who have been quoted in the articles. You will want to cite web sites. You will need endnotes or footnotes. Show clearly where your information came from. Provide full URL addresses if the information was taken online. The research essay should be 1,000 to 2,000 words, perhaps 4 to 8 double-spaced, typewritten pages or 2 to 4 single-spaced pages. Again, you should probably write it in a word processing program first, such as Microsoft Word, saving as you go along. Be sure to make a copy on a hard drive or disk. You can then send the file to me via email. If you have trouble doing it, you could paste the text into an email message but a file is preferable. You should find plenty of information. Nexis and the old reliable Reader's Guide to Periodical Literature should be useful. I also ran each of the companies through Infotrac at Lehigh's Information Resources page under Article Indexes and came away with many articles. A great starting place for media holdings is: http://www.cjr.org/owners/. You also may want to poke around at http://www.mediachannel.org. The Web will have much to offer. But as always, be careful about taking information directly from unknown web sites. You may not know how reliable the information is. Learning how to do good, focused, reliable searches is a valuable skill you can take from the course. You may also try to find and search the archives of various publications such as Mother Jones, Business Week, The Nation, Forbes and others. The essays will be due by 7 p.m. Thursday, June 17. We won't have any email or conference assignments from Thursday, June 10, to Monday, June 14, so you can get a good start to studying your media mogul. We will have assignments posted on Monday, June 14. Let me know if you have questions. I think you'll have an interesting time learning about these "lords of the global village." If you have questions: jack.lule@lehigh.edu. return to J/IR 246 International Communication |
