Western Media Systems offers a critical introduction to media systems in North America and Western Europe. The book offers a wide-ranging survey of comparative media analysis addressing the economic, social, political, regulatory and cultural aspects of Western media systems. Jonathan Hardy takes a thematic approach, guiding the reader through critical issues and debates, introducing key concepts and specialist literature. Western Media Systems is essential reading for undergraduate and postgraduate students studying comparative and global media.

Comparing Media Systems Beyond the Western World offers a broad exploration of the conceptual foundations for comparative analysis of media and politics globally. It takes as its point of departure the widely used framework of Hallin and Mancini's Comparing Media Systems, exploring how the concepts and methods of their analysis do and do not prove useful when applied beyond the original focus of their 'most similar systems' design and the West European and North American cases it encompassed. It is intended both to use a wider range of cases to interrogate and clarify the conceptual framework of Comparing Media Systems and to propose new models, concepts and approaches that will be useful for dealing with non-Western media systems and with processes of political transition. Comparing Media Systems Beyond the Western World covers, among other cases, Brazil, China, Israel, Lebanon, Lithuania, Poland, Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Africa and Thailand.

First Published in 2008. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Master's Thesis from the year 2010 in the subject Communications - Media and Politics, Politic Communications, grade: A, City University of New York Brooklyn College, course: Analysis of media information in Russia and the West, language: English, abstract: There is a common view among Western scholars, politicians, and media professionals that Russia continues to be an authoritarian state, due to its history, and that it has recently begun to stray away from democratic processes or even slide back into moderate totalitarianism. Even worse, The Freedom House report (2009) ranked Russia one of the world's most repressive societies, putting it next to Rwanda. However, this and other reports present a distorted picture of democratic development in Russia, which reflects conflicting views between the Western and Russian understanding and measurement of democratic and non-democratic media systems, press pluralism, ownership structures, relative autonomy from the state, negative and positive control of press content, the role of ideology, and the legal frame that protects freedom of speech.

This step is a step toward greater internationalization of mass communication research. Existing differences between the mass media of North American and Western European countries provide a basis for comparative anlayses that illustrate how differences in national mass media systems can contribute towards intellectual understanding of communication behavior. The world of communication scholarship can be divided into two main schools, the empirical school and the critical school. This volume represents some of the leading scholars of each school and is dedicated to the intellectual merging of the schools by means of fostering an improved understanding of each other.