From Gorbachev through Yeltsin to Putin, Russia’s media landscape has undergone profound change since the late 1980s. The centralized Soviet system of propaganda collapsed, to be replaced by freewheeling broadcast media that were not fully independent of the oligarchs who owned or controlled them. Vladimir Putin brought these media under his control after assuming the presidency in 2000, but for some time, he was content to let information circulate in other arenas. That changed with his return to the presidency in 2012. Since the anti-government protests (2011–12), state control of the media has been consolidated and extended to online media. Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 saw a marked escalation of state pressure on media outlets and foreign social media platforms, and pervasive control over the framing of the Russian Armed Forces and the war in the media and online.

This chapter explores the ways in which the publishing, broadcasting and recording industries shaped the production and consumption of British and Irish symphonies since 1900. Featuring an example from each industry – Boosey & Hawkes, the BBC and Chandos Records – it reviews the influence of these institutions on the formation of a national canon of symphonic works. Attendant to the accelerating technological advancements that transformed listeners’ relationships to music over this period, the chapter highlights notable ensembles, conductors and composers who engaged with new media. It frames the reception histories of British and Irish symphonies within the context of national identity and the music appreciation movement. The chapter demonstrates how media institutions and networks used technology to curate and promote works by national composers, framing their symphonies as emblematic of culture and achievement.

The perceived success (or failure) of symphonies by British composers rested largely, in part, on how music critics, writers and the general public felt about the works and how they discussed the works publicly. The British musical press, firmly established by the beginning of the twentieth century, provided any number of outlets for critics, anonymous writers, performers, conductors and others to write about symphonic music as it was being premiered and performed. And it is this body of writing that this chapter primarily engages with, to provide insight into how both the public and the press perceived the then current state and future of British symphonic music.

Exploring the representation of human rights abuses in media and journalism is a vital area of study, given that the media help shape understandings of the world and its conflicts. That said, the scholarship into the intersection of journalism, media, and human rights, which we trace here, is diverse. We identify three major strands: first, researchers who explore how propaganda and journalism can and have exacerbated human rights abuses; second, those who analyse how the conventions of mainstream journalism may lead to the misrepresentation or omission of human rights issues; and third, studies that focus on professional and citizen journalists and non-governmental organization reporters who cover human rights topics, often at significant risk to themselves. Within the tertiary sector, few courses are offered in human rights and media or journalism as a combined field, although the topic may pop up periodically in journalism and human rights courses. Where research clusters committed to human rights journalism exist, passionate individual researchers or small groups of scholars and teachers are most often at the helm.

Up to at least the 1960s, English was seen as a world language integrated around two equipollent standards, British and American. Since then, in the wake of decolonisation, this bi-polar constellation has given way to models arguing for various pluricentric constellations. What tends to be overlooked, however, is the fact that the agents of standardisation and the sociocultural environment in which standardisation is taking place are markedly different today from what they were in the mid twentieth century. The power of educated elites to define linguistic standards has weakened considerably, while language technologies and software algorithms enforce homogenisation of usage in the written domain, promoting new norms that are not always in line with traditional notions of ‘good English’. In addition, the global spread of English has not only involved standard varieties, but also some non-standard ones. Removed from their vernacular home-bases, these non-standard forms have gained prestige and become available for new functions. This has produced the ‘standardisation paradox’ that Global English is facing in the early twenty-first century and that the present chapter will illustrate and analyse.

Chapter 5 explores the sharper edges of China’s image-making and illuminates the subtle, multifaceted silencing that permeates China’s diplomacy. The experiences of Ethiopian journalists, PR professionals, officials, and scholars point to the core feature of censorship as controlled information release. This includes proactive selective publicity and information withdrawals, as well as spontaneous and reactive silencing, at times carried out by non-state actors. Ethiopian elites reinforce the efforts of Chinese stakeholders and co-discipline China narratives out of their own strategic interest in upholding a positive relationship with China. At the same time, in private spaces, these same elites also articulate and spread negative stories about China through satire and rumors.

Chapter 6 brings in a transnational dimension to the study of China’s image-making in Ethiopia by examining the role of the West in conditioning this encounter. Drawing on interviews with core participants in Chinese initiatives, including Ethiopian elites and Chinese diplomatic professionals, the analysis reveals their shared aspirations for the West, and especially for the United States. Ethiopian participants tend to treat the West as a quality marker, and China as a secondary choice, and at times even as a pathway to experiencing the West. Ironically, Chinese soft power promoters also appear to uphold and aspire to Western hierarchies and use Ethiopia and Africa as a channel toward more desired professional destinations in the West. While Chinese official narratives invoke competition with the West, the actual participants in the Sino-African encounter still strive to be part of it.

Data-centric socialities are media-centric socialities. One way to make sense of the novelty of digital media is to ask what scientists can do with them that they could not do before. This chapter does so for digital imaging in astronomy. It explores two arithmetic operations – adding and subtracting digital exposures pixel by pixel – and their surprising practical and organizational consequences. Setting out from a lecture on image processing to undergraduate students, it traces astronomers’ understandings of digital data’s affordances. It argues that the introduction of charge-coupled devices in the 1980s provided solutions to a set of practical problems that astronomers had formulated with increasing clarity since the 1950s. Subsequently, new organizational possibilities for astronomical research emerged. These include mobilizing data beyond local contexts, rendering abstract time as an object of management, sharing data as nonrivalrous goods, assessing others’ work remotely, and building new forms of collaboration – elements of a novel medial middle ground in data-rich science.

Scholars once divided British Romanticism into two generations (Wordsworth, Coleridge, Blake; Byron, Shelley, Keats), seeing the 1800s as a transitional period with little significant work. However, this view has changed with the rediscovery of women poets, working-class authors, and Black and Brown writers highlight Romanticism’s connection to global warfare, imperialism, slavery, and the expansion of communication technologies and print media. This chapter examines problems of communication in the works of William Wordsworth and Charlotte Smith, using their writing to reconsider Romantic temporality. It explores how both poets engage with time’s contradictions – its rapidity and slowness – driven by commercial and geological changes. By analyzing their differing approaches to temporal irregularity, the chapter argues that Romanticism reflects not only rapid changes (revolutions, industrialization, media) but also slower, more subtle transformations. This view of time, including geological slowness, offers Romantic poets a way to explore time and history, presenting Romanticism itself as a poetic expression of the tension between speed and slowness.

When the Brexit referendum result came in, Tony Gallagher, editor of the Daily Telegraph, triumphantly texted the Guardian newsroom: ‘Who said the mainstream media was finished?’ Gallagher was apeing Kelvin McKenzie, one of his predecessors as Sun editor, who proclaimed after John Major’s upset election victory in 1992: ‘It was the Sun wot won it!’ Brexit appeared to vindicate his view that the press, in particular the Sun, had tipped the balance in favour of Leave. The mood inside the FT newsroom was funereal. Over at The Sunday Times, Michael Sheridan, a veteran foreign correspondent, arrived early that morning to see Martin Ivens alone in the editor’s office. ‘What have you done?,’ he exclaimed, extending a congratulatory hand. Ivens held out the possibility of a renegotiation based on the Brexit vote followed by a second referendum.