This widely used and popular text provides a broad-ranging analysis of the relationship between the media and politics. Revised and updated throughout, this second edition includes coverage of the mediatization of politics; of E-politics and governance; of the impact of 'reality TV'; and of issues raised by the reporting of war in Iraq.

This handbook on Mediatization of Communication uncovers the interrelation between media changes and changes in culture and society. This is essential to understand contemporary trends and transformations. “Mediatization” characterizes changes in practices, cultures and institutions in media-saturated societies, thus denoting transformations of these societies themselves. This volume offers 31 contributions by leading media and communication scholars from the humanities and social sciences, with different approaches to mediatization of communication. The chapters span from how mediatization meets climate change and contribute to globalization to questions on life and death in mediatized settings. The book deals with mass media as well as communication with networked, digital media. The topic of this volume makes a valuable contribution to the understanding of contemporary processes of social, cultural and political changes. The handbook provides the reader with the most current state of mediatization research.

We live in a profoundly challenging era for journalists. While the profession has historically taken on the mantle of providing clear, sound information to the public, journalists now face competition from dubious sources online and smear campaigns launched by public figures. In The Power of Journalists, four of the United Kingdom’s foremost journalists—Nick Robinson, Barbara Speed, Charlie Beckett, and Gary Gibbon—give on-the-ground accounts of how they’ve weathered some of the most significant political events of the past five years, including the referendum on Scottish independence and Brexit. These monumental political decisions exposed each journalist to the dangerous vicissitudes of public opinion, and made them all the more certain of their mission. In describing the role of the journalist as truth-teller and protector of impartiality as well as interpreter of controversial facts and trusted source of public opinion, they issue a clarion call for good journalism.

Since its development shaped by the turmoil of the World Wars and suspicion of new technologies such as film and radio, political communication has become a hybrid field largely devoted to connecting the dots among political rhetoric, politicians and leaders, voters' opinions, and media exposure to better understand how any one aspect can affect the others. In The Oxford Handbook of Political Communication Kate Kenski and Kathleen Hall Jamieson bring together leading scholars, including founders of the field of political communication Elihu Katz, Jay Blumler, Doris Graber, Max McCombs, and Thomas Paterson,to review the major findings about subjects ranging from the effects of political advertising and debates and understandings and misunderstandings of agenda setting, framing, and cultivation to the changing contours of social media use in politics and the functions of the press in a democratic system. The essays in this volume reveal that political communication is a hybrid field with complex ancestry, permeable boundaries, and interests that overlap with those of related fields such as political sociology, public opinion, rhetoric, neuroscience, and the new hybrid on the quad, media psychology. This comprehensive review of the political communication literature is an indispensible reference for scholars and students interested in the study of how, why, when, and with what effect humans make sense of symbolic exchanges about sharing and shared power. The sixty-two chapters in The Oxford Handbook of Political Communication contain an overview of past scholarship while providing critical reflection of its relevance in a changing media landscape and offering agendas for future research and innovation.

The symptoms of the crisis of the U.S. media are well-known—a decline in hard news, the growth of info-tainment and advertorials, staff cuts and concentration of ownership, increasing conformity of viewpoint and suppression of genuine debate. McChesney's new book, The Problem of the Media, gets to the roots of this crisis, explains it, and points a way forward for the growing media reform movement. Moving consistently from critique to action, the book explores the political economy of the media, illuminating its major flashpoints and controversies by locating them in the political economy of U.S. capitalism. It deals with issues such as the declining quality of journalism, the question of bias, the weakness of the public broadcasting sector, and the limits and possibilities of antitrust legislation in regulating the media. It points out the ways in which the existing media system has become a threat to democracy, and shows how it could be made to serve the interests of the majority. McChesney's Rich Media, Poor Democracy was hailed as a pioneering analysis of the way in which media had come to serve the interests of corporate profit rather than public enlightenment and debate. Bill Moyers commented, "If Thomas Paine were around, he would have written this book." The Problem of the Media is certain to be a landmark in media studies, a vital resource for media activism, and essential reading for concerned scholars and citizens everywhere.

SuperMedia is a lively, engaging, and refreshingly-opinionated text offering informed discussion on the importance and future of liberal journalism as a healthy part of a flourishing society. Examines the profound changes journalism is undergoing for social, economic and technological reasons Explores the potential for a entirely new type of journalism which these changes create, discussing the impact of social networking sites and blogs on traditional journalism, and making the case that journalism could be the catalyst for change needed to solve many of the world’s problems in a controversial manner Written by a first class broadcast journalist, it provides a practical roadmap for identifying the issues and solutions that will ensure an open and reliable news media for generations to come

A "compelling indictment of the news media's role in covering up errors and deceptions" (The New York Times Book Review) due to the underlying economics of publishing—from famed scholars Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky. With a new introduction. In this pathbreaking work, Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky show that, contrary to the usual image of the news media as cantankerous, obstinate, and ubiquitous in their search for truth and defense of justice, in their actual practice they defend the economic, social, and political agendas of the privileged groups that dominate domestic society, the state, and the global order. Based on a series of case studies—including the media’s dichotomous treatment of “worthy” versus “unworthy” victims, “legitimizing” and “meaningless” Third World elections, and devastating critiques of media coverage of the U.S. wars against Indochina—Herman and Chomsky draw on decades of criticism and research to propose a Propaganda Model to explain the media’s behavior and performance. Their new introduction updates the Propaganda Model and the earlier case studies, and it discusses several other applications. These include the manner in which the media covered the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement and subsequent Mexican financial meltdown of 1994-1995, the media’s handling of the protests against the World Trade Organization, World Bank, and International Monetary Fund in 1999 and 2000, and the media’s treatment of the chemical industry and its regulation. What emerges from this work is a powerful assessment of how propagandistic the U.S. mass media are, how they systematically fail to live up to their self-image as providers of the kind of information that people need to make sense of the world, and how we can understand their function in a radically new way.

Political sociology is a large and expanding field with many new developments, and The New Handbook of Political Sociology supplies the knowledge necessary to keep up with this exciting field. Written by a distinguished group of leading scholars in sociology, this volume provides a survey of this vibrant and growing field in the new millennium. The Handbook presents the field in six parts: theories of political sociology, the information and knowledge explosion, the state and political parties, civil society and citizenship, the varieties of state policies, and globalization and how it affects politics. Covering all subareas of the field with both theoretical orientations and empirical studies, it directly connects scholars with current research in the field. A total reconceptualization of the first edition, the new handbook features nine additional chapters and highlights the impact of the media and big data.

Health is a contested concept that has been defined in numerous ways. The media is extremely powerful in promoting health beliefs and in creating role models for contemporary people. The ways in which health is defined or understood can have wide-ranging implications and can have an impact on issues such as health promotion or health literacy. Health presentation in the media has a significant social impact because this type of message is important in changing people's beliefs, attitudes and behaviours relating to health and in promoting health-related knowledge among the target audience. The present volume provides an interdisciplinary and multicultural contemporary approach to the controversial link between medicine and media. The authors that have contributed to this volume analyse the media and medicine from different perspectives and different countries (USA, UK, Portugal, Turkey, Taiwan, Mexico, Estonia, Romania), thus offering a re-positioning of the study of media and medicine. The new perspectives offered by this volume will be of interest to any health communication or media studies student or academic since they bring to light new ideas, new methodologies and new results.