There is a timely and urgent need for a reasoned dialogue reassessing how Marxism can advance the study of human communication and transform the social world in which it is embedded. Indeed, ongoing world-historical events - including the vigorously organized market globalization, the corresponding insurgent global anticorporate movement, and the conflicts engendered by the U.S. invasion of Iraq - have underscored the importance of a thorough critique of global capitalism and its telecommunication technologies and practices.
This important new collection, featuring essays by leading...

Based on extensive original research, Shoot First and Ask Questions Later provides a comprehensive analysis of media coverage of the war in Iraq in 2003. The authors look closely at the main actors involved through a broad range of interviews with journalists (both embedded and non-embedded), news editors, news heads, and with key planners at the Pentagon and the UK Ministry of Defence. This book also investigates how the war was represented on television, employing both a systematic content analysis of the broadcast news coverage of the war and a series of case studies that unravel...

The controversy surrounding the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine and autism has raised unprecedented questions about the communication of health and science. Health, Risk and News: The MMR Vaccine and the Media examines how this story came to be so influential and asks if the media are to blame for unduly panicking the public. Drawing on comprehensive research on media coverage, interviews with a range of journalists and sources, and analysis of audience opinion this book explores how medical controversies are covered, with attention to issues of balance and objectivity,...

The Integrated News Spectacle examines the rational organization of control of popular news forms. It uses spectacular media events such as the mourning of Princess Diana, the Monica Lewinsky presidential scandal, and the Gulf wars of 1991 and 2003 as entry points into a discussion of the broader context surrounding an integrated system of commodity production, distribution and exchange.
James R. Compton critiques the generally accepted notion of tabloidization associated with media spectacles, and situates these dramatic narratives within a broad historical context. Drawing on the...