Journal Roundup: Noteworthy Special Issues

You may have noticed this blog likes to highlight special themed issues of journals. Here are a few of late:

Journalism Studies, Volume 8, Number 4 (August 2007)
Mapping the Magazine, guest edited by Tim Holmes. Includes articles on For Women, women's pornography magazine; irony in men's magazines; Kate Moss and photojournlism; South Africa's Drum, women's magazines in Russia, gossip magazines in Spain, consumer magazines in South Africa and Israel, metal music magazines, and 19th Century popular science magazines.

Rhetoric & Public Affairs Volume 10, Number 2 (Summer 2007)
Rhetoric and the War in Iraq, guest edited by Herbert W. Simons. Includes an article by Kathleen Hall Jamieson, "Justifying the War in Iraq: What the Bush Administration's Uses of Evidence Reveal."

Journal of Consumer Culture Volume 7, Number 2 (July 2007)
Citizenship and Consumption, guest edited by Frank Trentmann and Don Slater.

Televizion (20/2007/E)
TV for TV Beginners, Edited by Maya Gotz. This German journal devoted to children and television limits this issue to infants through preschoolers. Not all issues of Televizion are in English but this one is.

Information Communication & Society Volume 10, Number 3 (2007)
Gender and ICT, guest edited by Clem Herman and Juliet Webster.

Social Semiotics (Volume 17, Number 3 (September 2007)
Somatechnics: Reconfiguring Body Modification, guest edited by Jessica Cadwallader and Samantha Murray. The papers that make up this special issue are drawn from the Body Modification: Mark II Conference, held at Macquarie University in 2005. Explain the editors: "The vast array of practices, discourses and texts discussed at this conference led to the coining of the neologism "somatechnics." The inextricability of soma - the body - and technics, techniques, technologies and technes is thus at the heart of a set of politicised and critical interrogations of subjectivity and bodily being. This issue, engaging as it does with such a range of body modificatory practices, offers a consideration of this newly named area of study." Articles on the corset, queer culture, colonialism and corporal punishment, the Body Worlds exhibit, the surgical imaginary, deviant (fat) bodies, and genital modification collect around this theme.

Declassified Iraq Media War Plan Paper

From the National Security Administration Archive, just released on May 8, 2007: a White Paper and PowerPoint slides on "a critical interim rapid response component" of the United State's Defense Department's strategic information campaign for Iraq "in the event hostilities are required to liberate Iraq." The plan, put together in January of 2003, called for a Rapid Reaction Media Team "to serve as a bridge between Iraq's formerly state-controlled news outlets and an 'Iraqi Free Media' network" (NSAA website).

These documents were obtained through the Freedom of Information Act and are posted in their entirety on the NSAA website.

More in the way of explanation from the website:
"The Pentagon team would portray a "new Iraq" offering hope of a prosperous and democratic future, which would serve as a model for the Middle East. American, British, and Iraqi media experts would be hand-picked to provide "approved USG information" for the Iraqi public, while an ensuing "strategic information campaign" would be part of a "likely 1-2 years . . . transition" to a representative government. A new weekly Iraqi newspaper would feature "Hollywood" along with the news.

Defense Department planners envisioned a post-invasion Iraq where the U.S., in cooperation with a friendly Baghdad government, could monopolize information dissemination. They did not account for independent media outlets, the Internet, and all the other alternative sources of information that are available in the modern world. The U.S. media campaign has not been able to control the message - but its execution was privatized, and contracting has made it a profitable enterprise for those able to capitalize on the Pentagon's largesse."

The site also includes an "Iraq Media Timeline" that summarizes the U.S. media campaign and the difficult conditions faced by reporters in Iraq.