WHY WE'RE STUFFED WITH INFORMATION BUT STARVED FOR UNDERSTANDING Three decades ago, Media Power predicted the coming of our 24/7 news culture and how it would make us suffer from "deprivation by surfeit". Selected by the Book of the Month Club And the Fortune Book Club Robert Stein, an award-winning editor, publisher, media critic and journalism teacher, is a former chairman of the American Society of Magazine Editors. "His inquiry leads ultimately to moral concerns and he asks the right questions in abundance." -The New York Times Book Review "Keen insights a humanitarian critic." -Public Opinion Quarterly "You'll like it. It's salty." -Arnold Gingrich, Founding Editor, Esquire "If freedom of the press ever disappears in America it will not be with a bang but a whimper. Well said." -Columbia Journalism Review

h2 style="page-break-after:avoid"Examines the Indonesian media industry in the digital era, examining contemporary ‘battlefields’ between media owners and ordinary citizens.

Contesting Media Power is the most ambitious international collection to date on the worldwide growth of alternative media that are challenging the power concentration in large media corporations. Media scholars and political scientists develop a broad comparative framework for analyzing alternative media in Australia, Chile, China, Indonesia, Malaysia, Russia, Sweden, South Africa, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Topics include independent media centers, gay online networks and alternative web discussion forums, feminist film, political journalism and social networks, indigenous communication, and church-sponsored media. This important book will help shape debates on the media's role in current global struggles, such as the anti-globalization movement.

This fascinating study focuses on an area neglected in previous studies of the media: the meetings between ordinary people and the media. Couldry explores what happens when people who normally consume the media witness media processes in action, or even become the object of media attention themselves.

Studies of Hong Kong media primarily examine whether China will crush Hong Kong’s media freedom. This book however traces the root problem of Hong Kong media back to the colonial era, demonstrating that before the resumption of Chinese sovereignty there already existed a uniquely Hong Kong brand of hyper-marketized and oligopolistic media system. The system, encouraged by the British colonial government, was subsequently aggravated by the Chinese government. This peculiar system is highly susceptible to state intervention and structurally disadvantaged dissent and marginal groups before and after 1997. The book stresses that this hyper-marketized media system has been constantly challenged. Through a historical study of media stigmatization of youth, this book proposes that over the years various counter forces have penetrated the structurally lopsided Hong Kong media: independent, public, popular and news media all make occasional subversive alliances to disrupt the mainstream, and news media, with a strong liberal professionalism, provide the most subversive space for challenging cultural hegemony. The book offers an alternative and fascinating account of the dynamics between hegemonic closure and day-to-day resistance in Hong Kong media in both the colonial and post-colonial eras, arguing that the Hong Kong case generates important insights for understanding ideological struggles in capitalist media.

While policymakers in the world reiterate the importance of protecting voice diversity, traditional media conglomerates and new social media giants make their task increasingly challenging. This book assesses the current state of policy-making on media plurality and explores novel policy ideas for funding, regulatory and structural interventions.

The work of Jeremy Tunstall, one of the founding fathers of British media studies, is the inspiration behind Media Power, Professionals and Policies. In this collection of new work, leading international contributors address the central themes of Tunstall's work; the history, structures and practices of the international media industry, the relationship between media and government, and the sociology of labour in the media industry.

Media Power in Central America explores the political and cultural interplay between the media and those in power in Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Panama, and Nicaragua. Highlighting the subtle strangulation of opposition media voices in the region, the authors show how the years since the guerrilla wars have not yielded the free media systems that some had expected. Rick Rockwell and Noreene Janus examine the region country by country and deal with the specific conditions of government-sponsored media repression, economic censorship, corruption, and consumer trends that shape the political landscape. Challenging the notion of the media as a democratizing force, Media Power in Central America shows how governments use the media to block democratic reforms and outlines the difficulties of playing watchdog to rulers who use the media as a tool of power.

This collection brings together 71 papers by 83 authors from 20 countries presented at the 5th Central and Eastern European Communication and Media Conference, titled “Media, Power and Empowerment”, in Prague, Czech Republic, in April 2012. It maps out trends in CEE media research across the entire region and provides insight into the broad span of relevant topics. The contributors to the volume successfully voice the multiple, yet specific, questions relevant to the CEE countries; the papers offer original research results to the reader, and invite them to participate in further debate on CEE media and communications research. To date, there have not been many publications dedicated to outlining the media and communications research interests across the region. This collection shows that the countries of the region indeed have a lot in common – historically, politically, and socially – while also discussing the differences among them, including the multiple political particularities within the unifying label “the East”, and variations in the transformation process and the consequences for concerned societies and their media scenes, as well as the individual lived experiences of the people of the CEE countries.

This book aims to feed into the critical debates about media, power and change through the respectful inclusion of a wide variety of critical approaches and traditions. This diversity is simultaneously structured and balanced by a deeply shared set of concerns, that are mobilised to defend core societal values including social justice, equality, fairness, care for the other and humanity. Critical Perspectives on Media, Power and Change raises questions about how the omnipresent media can contribute to the materialisation of these core values, and how it sometimes works against them. Rethinking social change, mediatisation and regulations are thus significant issues – explicitly addressed in this book. In addition the authors show how the role of the critical media and communication scholar merits and requires (self-)reflection; critical voices matter, but they also face structural limitations. This book was originally published as two special issues of Javnost – The Public.