Media & Communication: Research Guide

‘Cortisol belly’ and ‘cortisol face’ are catchy terms but they oversimplify complex biological processes into insecurities.

Corporation responds to ‘urgent need’ following earthquake by taking over Voice of America’s former channelThe BBC has stepped in to launch a news service in Myanmar after the devastating earthquake in the country, replacing a US service that Donald Trump has ceased to fund.A direct-to-home satellite video channel delivering BBC News Burmese content will be launched to cater for what the corporation sees as an urgent “audience in need”. Continue reading...

Watchdog’s new codes of practice are not strong enough, says children’s commissioner for EnglandThe communications watchdog has been accused of backing big tech over the safety of under-18s after the children’s commissioner for England criticised new measures for tackling online harms.Rachel de Souza said she warned Ofcom last year that its proposals for protecting children under the Online Safety Act were too weak. New codes of practice issued by the watchdog on Thursday have ignored her concerns, she said.Requiring social media platforms to deploy “highly effective” age checks to identify under-18s.Ensuring algorithms filter out harmful material.Making all sites and apps have pro..

The executive told business summit that most people no longer want cinemas and ‘we deliver the programme to you in a way you want to watch it’Ted Sarandos, the co-CEO of Netflix, has defended his company’s reputation, saying the streamer is “saving Hollywood” by securing an audience for content which would otherwise disappear.Speaking at the TIME100 summit in New York on Wednesday, Sarandos said Netflix was providing a much-needed service to those people – for instance in rural areas – who are keen to see films, but without the means of going to a cinema. Continue reading...

Producer and production manager who worked in the Scottish film industry with Bill Forsyth and Peter MullanThe film and television producer Paddy Higson, who has died aged 83 from cancer, was Scotland’s pre-eminent fixer and facilitator. She helped capture the nation’s sensibility in the early films of the director Bill Forsyth, among them the hit romantic comedy Gregory’s Girl (1981). Of this cultural predisposition toward the wry and whimsical, Higson observed: “Perhaps it is the old Scottish feeling that if we didn’t laugh, we’d cry.”But her portfolio also included episodes of the crime series Taggart, as well as the harrowing Silent Scream (1990), about the poet and convict..

Highly skilled specialist editors produce two-minute promos that can make or break a blockbuster. We step inside their hidden worldA few years ago, a Hollywood studio approached the tech giant IBM with an idea. Perhaps it would be fun if Watson – the company’s artificial intelligence system – analysed its new film about an artificial humanoid gone rogue, and created a trailer for it. The technology was duly “trained” on 100 horror trailers, fed the 90-minute film, and a human editor helped stitch its chosen clips together.The result, billed as “the first movie trailer made by AI”, is awful. The exchanges are slow and pause-filled, as though filmed underwater. Toby Jones raises ..

Written with the cooperation of Charles Spencer, and access to BBC emails obtained through a freedom of information request, Dianarama promises ‘a radical reappraisal of a major historical event’A book about the BBC’s controversial Panorama interview with Diana, Princess of Wales, is due to be published later this year.Dianarama: Deception, Entrapment, Cover-up: The Betrayal of Princess Diana by Andy Webb will feature unseen material pertaining to the scandal over the methods employed by BBC journalist Martin Bashir to secure the interview. Continue reading...

A crop of conservative personalities such as Brett Cooper and Candace Owens, and outlets like Evie, are convincing young women of a gender-essentialist worldviewOn the most recent episode of her YouTube show, the rightwing commentator Brett Cooper joined the rest of the world in jeering Katy Perry, Gayle King and Lauren Sánchez’s brief flight to space.“These women were completely dependent on men who built this spacecraft,” she said with a cheeky smirk. “Frankly, we all are, because men built civilization. They built the homes that we live in, they built the studio that I am recording in … the spaceships that all of these rich celebrities are flying around in.” The difference be..

The Match of the Day presenter has been challenged again on his views on Gaza and Israel. But can we really expect him to have no opinions about the outside world?The most extraordinary revelation to come from Gary Lineker’s interview with Amol Rajan on the BBC is that he’d sometimes come home from school to find Engelbert Humperdinck playing cards with his dad. Surprisingly, almost all the reaction to the conversation has ignored this bombshell – Engelbert apparently not such a big player in the culture war world; best focus on your Middle Easts, your Bravermans, your impartialities, Brian.Of course the job of news outlets is to pick out headlines but it does appear almost no one has ..

The retail chain that filed for bankruptcy in 2017 believes a film starring mass produced kids’ merch will be a good way to refresh its brand relevance. Let’s all blame Barbie …Seth Rogen’s Apple TV+ show The Studio has a compelling character at the centre; a studio executive who loves cinema but is forced to churn out endless soulless dreck based on increasingly miserable IP. In real life, however, it would be silly to assume that someone would be creatively barren enough to make a film based on Kool-Aid. And this is because in real life people are creatively barren enough to make a film about Toys R Us.Variety has reported that a live-action Toys R Us movie is in the works, made by..

Instead of bazooka-level fines on global turnover, this €700m was no more than a slap on the wrist. It’s a missed opportunityThe European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, had some tough words for big tech this week, but it seems that at the last minute, the EU lost its nerve. Under the Digital Markets Act, companies that the EU has designated as “gatekeepers” – that is, digital platforms that provide core services such as search engines, app stores and messenger services – have special obligations and constraints that are meant to ensure a fair playing field for other companies.Apple, which takes a significant cut of purchases (including subscriptions) made through its..

As digital replicas of real people become more common in image-based industries like fashion, urgent questions are emerging about the future of work in the cultural economy.