Bücher der Reihe Communication, Society and Politics

Using new tools to analyze media coverage and its effects, this book addresses issues of central importance to representative democracy in the US and world-wide: the communication of accurate information about what government does with policy, and public responsiveness to this information.

Today's digital revolution is a worldwide phenomenon. This book presents a new theory of media ethics that is explicitly international. It will interest scholars and students of media, new technologies, and global justice.

This book traces the historical development of Fox's counter-elite news brand and reveals how an iconoclastic news style was crafted by fusing two class-based traditions of American public culture: populist politics and tabloid journalism. Through this style Fox successfully reframes narrow, conservative political demands as popular and universal.

Based on a highly original analysis of 10,000 letters to the editor from 1948 through the present, Civic Hope is the most capacious history to date of what ordinary Americans think about politics and how they engage in argument.

Examining contemporary youth media practices of proto-political and political communication and activism, this book will be of interest to college instructors and their students, scholars of media and democracy, youth workers, parents, media activists, and community activists.

Networked News, Racial Divides tracks power and privilege in the digitized media ecologies of progressive cities, documenting the institutional and cultural obstacles that exist to amplifying all voices in these liberal places, while also detailing the strategies and opportunities to move forward and build trust in local communities.

Drawing from extensive archival research, this book uncovers the American media system's historical roots and normative foundations. It charts the rise and fall of a forgotten media reform movement to recover alternatives and paths not taken.

Rodney Benson challenges classic liberalism's assumptions about state intervention's chilling effects on the press, suggests costs as well as benefits to the current vogue in personalized narrative news, and calls attention to journalistic practices that can help empower civil society.

This book argues that marketing is inherent in competitive democracy, explaining how we can make the consumer nature of competitive democracy better and more democratic. Margaret Scammell argues that consumer democracy should not be assumed to be inherently antithetical to 'proper' political discourse and debate about the common good.

Stockmann argues that the consequences of introducing market forces to the media depend on the institutional design of the state. In one-party regimes, market-based media promote regime stability rather than destabilizing authoritarianism or bringing about democracy. This book links censorship with patterns of media consumption and the media's effects on public opinion.

Sellers examines strategic communication campaigns in the U.S. Congress, arguing that they create cycles of spin: leaders create messages, rank-and-file legislators decide whether to promote those messages, journalists decide whether to cover the messages, and any coverage feeds back to influence the policy process.

This book explores how people participate in public life through organizations in a time when digital media can make organizations seem irrelevant. The authors examine three of the largest organizations in the United States. In each, people use technology when they participate, but technology does not make them participate more.

American party members work together to build a positive brand name in the public eye. The party brand name comes from what partisans do and what they say. This book focuses on the latter: when party members are critical of fellow partisans, what they say is both credible and damaging.

This book analyzes how reality television stirred an explosive mix of religion, politics, and sexuality, fuelling heated polemics over cultural authenticity, gender relations, and political participation in the Arab world. It challenges the notion of a monolithic 'Arab Street' and offers an original perspective on Arab media.

One of the most difficult problems facing Western democracy today is the decline in citizens' political engagement. This book examines the media's key role in shaping the character of civic engagement and its potential to shape and enhance political engagement, as well as create new forms of political involvement.

This book provides a normative critique of mass media ownership concentration. It emphasizes a democratic need to distribute communicative power more widely and to prevent abuse of media power. It also shows why ownership dispersal can be expected to improve the quality of media content.

This book explains how the process of moving from analog TV to digital is unfolding in the US and Britain and explores the changes in the legal framework and the industry structure associated with it. It is an interesting study about the technological, political, and social factors shaping this transition.

The book examines the reform of the communication sector in South Africa in the transition from apartheid to democracy. It studies the complex political process by which broadcasting, telecommunications, the state information agency and the print press were transformed from apartheid-aligned apparatuses to accountable democratic institutions.

Technological innovations can alter the organization of power in politics, and it is difficult to distinguish political systems from their communication technologies. This book explores how political organizations use new information technologies to construct public opinion, and analyzes what it means to be a citizen in a modern, representative democracy.

Baker challenges the premises of deregulation of the media and government interventions in this sphere. While arguing for a constitutional conception of freedom of the press, he argues that economic and democratic theories justify deviations from free trade in media products.

This book examines the role the news media plays in peace processes, arguing that it is often destructive. Wolfsfeld examines three major cases: the Oslo peace process between Israel and the Palestinians; the peace process between Israel and Jordan; and the process surrounding the Good Friday Agreement in Northern Ireland.

There is widespread concern that the explosive growth of the Internet is exacerbating existing inequalities between the information rich and poor. Digital Divide sets out to examine the evidence for access and use of the Internet in 179 nations across the world.

This study investigates candidate behavior in American electoral campaigns. It centers on a question of equal importance to citizens and scholars: how can we produce better political campaigns? It takes an innovative approach by bringing together critical and empirical methods as well as game theory.

This book provides a comprehensive evaluation of the Internet in American democracy. The author places the contemporary information revolution in historical context. This was the first book published at the time about the Internet and politics to combine historical analysis, case studies of political events, and survey analysis.

A Virtuous Circle, first published in 2000, examines the role of the news media and parties in 29 postindustrial societies and challenges the idea that the process of political communications by the news media and by parties is responsible for civic malaise.

An answer to the question first raised in the classic, 'Why is the press as it is?', examining the development of media systems in eighteen Western countries, and explaining why media systems evolved differently, and how their evolution can be understood within their political and historical context.

This book is about how people in power use language to generate and perpetuate misunderstandings. Edelman explores the ways in which social institutions such as language, authority, courts, science, and the media generate erroneous understandings of political realities in ways that protect the power and interests of the elite.

Political journalism is often under fire. Conventional wisdom and much scholarly research suggest that journalists are cynics and political pundits. Political news is void of substance and overly focused on strategy and persons. Citizens do not learn from the news, are politically cynical, and are dissatisfied with the media. This book challenges these assumptions, which are often based on single-country studies with limited empirical observations about the relation between news production, content, and journalism's effects. Based on interviews with journalists, a systematic content analysis of political news, and panel survey data in different countries, this book tests how different systems and media-politics relations condition the contents of political news. It shows how different content creates different effects and demonstrates that under the right circumstances citizens learn from political news, do not become cynical, and are satisfied with political journalism.

The new media environment has challenged the role of professional journalists as the primary source of politically relevant information. After Broadcast News puts this challenge into historical context, arguing that it is the latest of several critical moments, driven by economic, political, cultural and technological changes, in which the relationship among citizens, political elites and the media has been contested. Out of these past moments, distinct 'media regimes' eventually emerged, each with its own seemingly natural rules and norms, and each the result of political struggle with clear winners and losers. The media regime in place for the latter half of the twentieth century has been dismantled, but a new regime has yet to emerge. Assuring this regime is a democratic one requires serious consideration of what was most beneficial and most problematic about past regimes and what is potentially most beneficial and most problematic about today's new information environment.