The media are in crisis. Confronted by growing competition and sagging advertising revenue, news operations in print, on radio and TV, and even online are struggling to reinvent themselves. Many have gone under. For too many others, the answer has been to lay off reporters, join conglomerates, and lean more heavily on generic content. The result: in a world awash with information, news organizations provide citizens with less and less in-depth reporting and a narrowing range of viewpoints. If democracy requires an informed citizenry, this trend spells trouble.

Julia Cagé explains the economics and history of the media crisis in Europe and America, and she presents a bold solution. The answer, she says, is a new business model: a nonprofit media organization, midway between a foundation and a joint stock company. Cagé shows how this model would enable the media to operate independent of outside shareholders, advertisers, and government, relying instead on readers, employees, and innovative methods of financing, including crowdfunding.

Cagé’s prototype is designed to offer new ways to share and transmit power. It meets the challenges of the digital revolution and the realities of the twenty-first century, inspired by a central idea: that news, like education, is a public good. Saving the Media will be a key document in a debate whose stakes are nothing less crucial than the vitality of democracy.

We can trace many important strategic decisions to compelling official fictions such as Kennedy's "missile gap" and Reagan's "window of vulnerability." Over the years, antinuclear movements have had mixed success debunking these fictions, raising public consciousness, and reorienting government policy. 

Andrew Rojecki explores links between nuclear arms policy and the visibility of opposition groups in the media. He pays particular interest to two cycles of protest: the test ban movement of the Eisenhower and the Kennedy administrations and the Reagan-era nuclear freeze movement. As Rojecki shows, space devoted to the opposition as well as the quality of the coverage varied widely from the first to the second period. The change reflected different climates of public opinion and foreign policy but also a subtle shift in political culture that undermined the legitimacy of citizen protest. As the rationalized policymaking of government agencies, think tanks, and university departments increasingly restricted public debate, the potential for citizens to influence nuclear politics became more circumscribed while nuclear weapons continued to proliferate.

Media platforms continually evolve, but the issues surrounding media representations of gender and sexuality have persisted across decades. Spectator: The University of Southern California Journal of Film and Television Criticism has published groundbreaking articles on gender and sexuality, including some that have become canonical in film studies, since the journal’s founding in 1982. This anthology collects seventeen key articles that will enable readers to revisit foundational concerns about gender in media and discover models of analysis that can be applied to the changing media world today.

Spectatorship begins with articles that consider issues of spectatorship in film and television content and audience reception, noting how media studies has expanded as a field and demonstrating how theories of gender and sexuality have adapted to new media platforms. Subsequent articles show how new theories emerged from that initial scholarship, helping to develop the fields of fandom, transmedia, and queer theory. The most recent work in this volume is particularly timely, as the distinctions between media producers and media spectators grow more fluid and as the transformation of media structures and platforms prompts new understandings of gender, sexuality, and identification. Connecting contemporary approaches to media with critical conversations of the past, Spectatorship thus offers important points of historical and critical departure for discussion in both the classroom and the field.

During the worst years of apartheid, the most popular show on television in South Africa—among both Black and White South Africans—was The Cosby Show. Why did people living under a system built on the idea that Black people were inferior and threatening flock to a show that portrayed African Americans as comfortably mainstream? Starring Mandela and Cosby takes up this paradox, revealing the surprising impact of television on racial politics.

The South African government maintained a ban on television until 1976, and according to Ron Krabill, they were right to be wary of its potential power. The medium, he contends, created a shared space for communication in a deeply divided nation that seemed destined for civil war along racial lines. At a time when it was illegal to publish images of Nelson Mandela, Bill Cosby became the most recognizable Black man in the country, and, Krabill argues, his presence in the living rooms of white South Africans helped lay the groundwork for Mandela’s release and ascension to power.

Weaving together South Africa’s political history and a social history of television, Krabill challenges conventional understandings of globalization, offering up new insights into the relationship between politics and the media.

This powerful presentation of photographs of Poland from the late 1980s to the present depicts the hybridized landscape of this pivotal Eastern European nation following its entry into the European Union. A visual record of the country's transition from socialism to capitalism, it focuses on the industrial blue-collar city ofLodz—located in the heart of New Europe and home to nearly one million people. Photographer Kamil Turowski's monotones are captivating—seeming to conceal a looming threat—while Katarzyna Marciniak's accompanying text expands on the photos and the "crocodilian" texture of contemporary Eastern Europe. A walk on the wild side, Streets of Crocodiles captures viscerally the changing landscape of postsocialist Poland.