The SAGE Handbook of Media Studies provides a state-of-the-art overview of media research and examines the theories, practices, and future of media studies. Editors John D.H. Downing, Denis McQuail, Philip Schlesinger, and Ellen Wartella have brought together a variety of U.S. and international contributors to provide a universal viewpoint of the increasingly diverse and globalized media studies field. The Handbook offers a comprehensive review of today's burgeoning field of media studies and examines five distinct areas including basic approaches to date, methods of media research,...

Public opinion - is it a simple aggregation of individual views, or is it some kind of collective-level, emergent product of debate? What is the role of public opinion in popular government? How do the mass media shape public opinion or link it with governmental decision-making? This book explores such questions by tracing the historical development and application of the concept of public opinion.

This book offers a major reconceptualization of the term audience, including the landscape of a given audiencethe situated and territorializing features of any way of seeing and defining the world. Given de Certeau's hypothesis that listening, watching, and reading all occur in places and result in produce transformed paths or spaces, the contributors to this landmark volume have provided innovative essays analyzing the transformations that take place in the geography between sender and receiver. The book acknowledges, in the face of conventional discourse analysis, the contextual features of...

First Published in 1986. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.