Media and Culture with 2009 Update: An Introduction to Mass Communication

Breaking the mold of traditional mass communication textbooks, Richard Campbell’s Media & Culture goes beyond the basic facts and presents students with a critical and cultural perspective on the media. Campbell uses a unique five-stage critical thinking process to help students examine the forces that shape the mass media and become active participants in the media. Media & Culture’s integrated cultural perspective focuses on the reciprocal relationship between the mass media and our shared culture — how cultural trends affect our media and how historical developments, technology, and key media leaders have shaped our society. Completing the full picture of the mass media is the text’s in-depth coverage of the history, structure, and economics of each industry. Continuing the tradition of cutting-edge content, the 2009 Update includes the most current media trends and developments.

RICHARD CAMPBELL, director of the journalism program at Miami University, is the author of 60 Minutes and the News: A Mythology for Middle America (1991) and coauthor of Cracked Coverage: Television News, the Anti-Cocaine Crusade and the Reagan Legacy (1994). Campbell has written for numerous publications including Columbia Journalism Review, Journal of Communication, and Media Studies Journal and he is on the editorial board of Critical Studies in Mass Communication and Television Quarterly. As a writer and media critic, he is a frequent speaker on public radio and television.

CHRISTOPHER R. MARTIN is an associate professor of journalism at University of Northern Iowa and author of Framed! Labor and the Corporate Media (2003). He has written articles and reviews on journalism, televised sports, the Internet, and labor for several publications including Communication Research, Journal of Communication, Journal of Communication Inquiry, Labor Studies Journal, and Culture, Sport, and Society.

BETTINA FABOS, an award-winning video maker and former print reporter, is an assistant professor of Visual Communication and interactive media studies at University of Northern Iowa. She is the author of Wrong Turn on the Information Superhighway: Education and the Commercialized Internet (2003). Her areas of expertise include critical media literacy, Internet commercialization, the role of the internet in education, and media representations of popular culture.