MEDIA IN QUESTION. POPULAR CULTURES AND PUBLIC INTERESTS

Media in Question sets the agenda for a revitalized debate on the hybrid communicative practices that constitute the postmodern media landscape: practices that cross the boundaries between fact and fiction, information and entertainment, public knowledge, and popular culture. In this challenging and provocative collection, the individual contributors rethink key issuesùthe meaning of the public interest, the quality of media performance, and deregulation. In the process they raise questions rarely addressed in normative media theories, for example, the ethics of sports reporting, the moral reasoning in popular culture, and the required professional standards for infotainment genres such as reality television and gossip journalism. Accessible and wide-ranging, The Media in Question will be essential reading for students in mass communication and political communication studies.

Liesbet van Zoonen is Professor of Communication and Media Studies at Loughborough University and Professor of Popular Culture at Erasmus University Rotterdam. Her work covers the articulation of popular culture and politics, for which she uses a wide range of standard and creative quantitative and qualitative methodologies.