This book is among the first to systematically explore the impact of community inequality on reporting political and social change. Although most journalism scholars are still fascinated by the impact of media on society, Media and Social Inequality explores the reverse perspective: the impact of society on media. Using a 'community structure' approach, and rejecting the perspective that studies of media and audiences can be reduced to the individual level of psychological phenomena, all contributions examine connections between community-level 'macro' characteristics and variations in the coverage of critical issues. This innovative book differs from previous community structure volumes in two ways. First, contributions explore a far wider range of community characteristics by employing creative methodologies, modern archives, and databases that facilitate larger, more diverse samples; multilevel and longitudinal analyses; composite measures of both 'content' and editorial judgment; new technologies; and social network analysis. Second, a traditional emphasis on media as instruments of political and social 'control' is replaced by media as potential mirrors of social 'change,' exploring 'bottom-up' measures of 'vulnerability', 'concentrated disadvantage', and 'ethnic diversity/pluralism'. The volume contains two original chapters: one on nationwide US coverage of the "Occupy" movement in the expanded introduction, and another on nationwide US coverage of universal health care. This book was originally published as a special issue of Mass Communication and Society.

This open access book presents a qualitative longitudinal panel-study on child and adolescent socialisation in socially disadvantaged families. The study traces how children and their parents make sense of media within the context of their everyday life over twelve years (from 2005 to 2017) and provides a unique perspective on the role of different socialisation contexts, drawing on rich data from a broad range of qualitative methods. Using a theoretical framework and methodological approach that can be applied transnationally, it sheds light on the complex interplay of factors which shape children’s socialisation and media usage in multiple ways.

Women, Inequality and Media Work investigates how women experience gender inequality in film and television production industries. Examining women’s place in the production of media is vital to understanding the broader and related question of how women are (mis)represented in media content. This book goes behind the camera to explore the world of women working in media industries and unpacks the systemic gender inequality that they experience at work. It argues that women internalize their experience of gender inequality by adopting various beliefs: whether it is that gender does not matter in the workplace; that the workplace is now post-feminist; or by adopting a sense of self as liminal, neither fully included nor excluded from the industry. Drawing on detailed academic research and empirical investigation, Women, Inequality and Media Work is an important and timely book for students, researchers and those working in media industries.

Social Inequalities, Media, and Communication: Theory and Roots provides a global analysis of the intersection of social inequalities, media, and communication. This book contains chapter contributions written by scholars from around the world who engage in country- and region-specific case studies of social inequalities in media and communication. The volume is a theoretical exploration of the classical, structuralist, culturalist, postmodernist, and postcolonial theoretical approaches to inequality and how these theoretical discourses provide critical understanding of social inequalities in relation to narratives shaped by media and communication experiences. The contributors provide class and gender analyses of media and culture, engage theoretical discourses of inequalities and capitalism in relation to communication technologies, and explore the cyclical relationship of theory and praxis in studying inequalities, media, and communication.

Economic inequalities have become increasingly prominent in public debate in the last decade as sluggish economic growth, declining or stagnant incomes, high unemployment, and state policy regimes orientated towards austerity dominate many core capitalist regions, often with extreme turbulence in the political arena. Debate over these issues unfolds in both the public sphere and within the academy, with the conversation developing from two disciplinary areas in particular: economics and political economy, and journalism and communication studies. Economic Inequality and News Media brings these fields together. In this interdisciplinary volume, Andrea Grisold and Paschal Preston build on a unique multi-country research project exploring how news media cover and frame issues of economic inequality. Taking media coverage of Thomas Piketty's best-selling Capital in the Twenty-First Century as a case study, this book addresses important blind-spots in the relationship between mainstream media and economics. It interrogates both the failure of economists' to engage with the evolving role of the media as well as journalists' tendency to overlook key aspects of economic processes and power that are politically relevant and of public interest. Grisold and Preston tackle this disconnect and argue for a multi-disciplinary approach in which they acknowledge the crucial role the mass media plays in creating and disseminating economic information. The book explores important questions such as: How do new forms of economic inequality, power, and privilege relate to prevailing theories and conceptualizations of the media? What roles do new trends and forms of economic inequality play in the typical narratives of mediated communication? How do we construct the story of inequality? This eye-opening and transdisciplinary book sheds new light not only on the relation between news media and economic inequality, but also on economic issues more broadly. In an evolving world experiencing the rise of ultra-nationalism, populism, and rampant economic uncertainty, Economic Inequality and News Media is a crucial investigation of the nuances of economic news media.

Under increasingly intense newsroom demands, reporters often find it difficult to cover the complexity of topics that deal with racial and social inequality. This path-breaking book lays out simple, effective reporting strategies that equip journalists to investigate disparity’s root causes. Chapters discuss how racially disparate outcomes in health, education, wealth/income, housing, and the criminal justice system are often the result of inequity in opportunity and also provide theoretical frameworks for understanding the roots of racial inequity. Examples of model reporting from ProPublica, the Center for Public Integrity, and the San Jose Mercury News showcase best practice in writing while emphasizing community-based reporting. Throughout the book, tools and practical techniques such as the Fault Lines framework, the Listening Post and the authors' Opportunity Index and Upstream-Downstream Framework all help journalists improve their awareness and coverage of structural inequity at a practical level. For students and journalists alike, Reporting Inequality is an ideal resource for understanding how to cover structures of injustice with balance and precision.

How the World Changed Social Media is the first book in Why We Post, a book series that investigates the findings of anthropologists who each spent 15 months living in communities across the world. This book offers a comparative analysis summarising the results of the research and explores the impact of social media on politics and gender, education and commerce. What is the result of the increased emphasis on visual communication? Are we becoming more individual or more social? Why is public social media so conservative? Why does equality online fail to shift inequality offline? How did memes become the moral police of the internet? Supported by an introduction to the project’s academic framework and theoretical terms that help to account for the findings, the book argues that the only way to appreciate and understand something as intimate and ubiquitous as social media is to be immersed in the lives of the people who post. Only then can we discover how people all around the world have already transformed social media in such unexpected ways and assess the consequences

Leading economists and policymakers consider what economic tools are most effective in reversing the rise in inequality. Economic inequality is the defining issue of our time. In the United States, the wealth share of the top 1% has risen from 25% in the late 1970s to around 40% today. The percentage of children earning more than their parents has fallen from 90% in the 1940s to around 50% today. In Combating Inequality, leading economists, many of them current or former policymakers, bring good news: we have the tools to reverse the rise in inequality. In their discussions, they consider which of these tools are the most effective at doing so.

Although discussion of the digital divide is a relatively new phenomenon, social inequality is a deeply entrenched part of our current social world and is now reproduced in the digital sphere. Such inequalities have been described in multiple traditions of social thought and theoretical approaches. To move forward to a greater understanding of the nuanced dynamics of digital inequality, we need the theoretical lenses to interpret the meaning of what has been observed as digital inequality. This volume examines and explains the phenomenon of digital divides and digital inequalities from a theoretical perspective. Indeed, with there being a limited amount of theoretical research on the digital divide so far, Theorizing Digital Divides seeks to collect and analyse different perspectives and theoretical approaches in analysing digital inequalities, and thus propose a nuanced approach to study the digital divide. Exploring theories from diverse perspectives within the social sciences whilst presenting clear examples of how each theory is applied in digital divide research, this book will appeal to scholars and undergraduate and postgraduate students interested in sociology of inequality, digital culture, Internet studies, mass communication, social theory, sociology, and media studies.

This edited collection draws on and expands the findings from a pan-European research project undertaken during 2012-13 which was funded by the European Institute for Gender Equality and aimed to explore three key issues in relation to gender and media: women’s inclusion in decision-making positions within media industries; how women are represented in the media; and what policies and mechanisms are in place to support women’s career development and promote gender equality. The research looked at 99 major media organisations across the EU including public and private sector broadcasters (TV and radio) as well as a number of major newspaper groups. Researchers also monitored TV programmes (factual only but including entertainment genres) across one week and coded 1200 hours of TV. In addition to elaborating the results from 16 of the participating nations, the collection includes a set of context-setting essays and a summarizing conclusion as well as a reflection on the purpose and utility of gender indicators. It is the first major work to look across the European media landscape and explore both employment and representation, providing a unique glimpse into the contemporary media scene in relation to gender equality, including examples of good and less good practice.