Several of the most important and influential political economists of communication working today explore a rich mix of topics and issues that link work, policy studies, and research and theory about the public sphere to the heritage of political economy. Familiar but still exceedingly important topics in critical political economy studies are well represented here: market structures and media concentration, regulation and policy, technological impacts on particular media sectors, information poverty, and media access. The book also features new topics for political economy study, including racism in audience research, the value and need for feminist approaches to political economy studies, and the relationship between the discourse of media finance and the behavior of markets.

Coverage of the Clinton-Lewinsky saga followed in a long trail of media exposures of the more personal details of the lives of public figures. Many commentators have seen stories like this, and TV shows like Jerry Springer's, as evidence of a decline in the standards of the mass media. This increasing interest in private lives and the falling off of coverage of serious news is often described as Otabloidization.O The essays in this book are the first serious scholarly studies of what is going on and what its implications are. Reality, it turns out, is much more complex than some of the laments suggest. As the contributors show, this is not just a U.S. problem but is repeated in country after country, and it is not certain that the media anywhere are getting more tabloid. What is more, there is no consensus about whether tabloidization is just Odumbing downO or whether it is a necessary tactic for the mass media to engage with new audiences who do not have the news habit. Tabloid Tales will be of interest to students and scholars in journalism, mass communication, political science, and cultural and media studies.

What roles can and should governments play in communication policymaking? How are communication policies related to welfare politics? With the rapid globalization of commerce and culture and the increasing recognition of information as an economic resource, the grounds for defending the welfare state have shifted. Communication policy is now more widely understood as social policy. Communication, Citizenship, and Social Policy examines issues of communication technology, neoliberal economic policies, public service media, media access, social movements and political communication, the geography of communication, and global media development and policy, among others, and shows how progressive policymakers must use these bases to confront more directly the debates on contemporary welfare theory and politics.

It's been said that without Harold A. Innis there could have been no Marshall McLuhan. Empire and Communications is one of Innis's most important contributions to the debate about how media influenced the development of consciousness and societies. In this foundational work, he traces humanity's movement from the oral tradition of preliterate cultures to the electronic media of recent times. Along the way, he presents his own influential concepts of oral communication, time and space bias, and monopolies of knowledge. With a new introduction by Alexander John Watson, author of Marginal Man: The Dark Vision of Harold Innis, and a new foreword by series editor Andrew Calabrese, this previously hard-to-obtain book is now readily available again. All communication scholars should have this classic book on their shelves, and it also serves as a great supplementary text in communication and economics courses.