Results by title
79 books match the query 'Media & Communications' and 3 start with h
Hedged
How Private Investment Funds Helped Destroy American Newspapers and Undermine DemocracyMargot Susca
University of Illinois Press, 2024
The ultrawealthy largely own and guide the newspaper system in the United States. Through entities like hedge funds and private equity firms, this investor class continues to dismantle the one institution meant to give voice to average citizens in a democracy.
Margot Susca reveals the little-known history of how private investment took over the newspaper industry. Drawing on a political economy of media, Susca’s analysis uses in-depth interviews and documentary evidence to examine issues surrounding ownership and power. Susca also traces the scorched-earth policies of layoffs, debt, cash-outs, and wholesale newspaper closings left behind by private investors and the effects of the devastation on the future of news and information. Throughout, Susca reveals an industry rocked less by external forces like lost ad revenue and more by ownership and management obsessed with profit and beholden to private fund interests that feel no responsibility toward journalism or the public it is meant to serve.
Hollywood and Broadcasting
From Radio to CableMichelle Hilmes
University of Illinois Press, 1990
an excellent introduction to a most important subject. This is an invaluable
work for both scholars and students that places film, radio, and television
within the context of the national culture experience."
--- American Historical Review
"Hilmes is one of the few historians
of broadcasting to move beyond a political economy of the media. . . . Her work
should serve as a model for future histories of broadcasting."
--- Journal of Communication
"All media historians will
find this work a critical addition to their bookshelves."
--- American Journalism
"A major addition to media
history literature."
--- Journalism History
How to Think about Information
Dan Schiller
University of Illinois Press, 2006
It is common wisdom that the U.S. economy has adapted to losses in its manufacturing base because of the booming information sector, with high-paying jobs for everything from wireless networks to video games. We are told we live in the Information Age, in which communications networks and media and information services drive the larger economy. While the Information Age may have looked sunny in the beginning, as it has developed it looks increasingly ominous: its economy and benefits grow more and more centralized--and in the United States, it has become less and less subject to democratic oversight.
Corporations around the world have identified the value of information and are now seeking to control its production, transmission, and consumption. In How to Think about Information, Dan Schiller explores the ways information has been increasingly commodified as a result and how it both resembles and differs from other commodities. Through a linked series of theoretical, historical, and contemporary studies, Schiller reveals this commodification as both dynamic and expansionary, but also deeply conflicted and uncertain. He examines the transformative political and economic changes occurring throughout the informational realm and analyzes key dimensions of the process, including the buildup of new technological platforms, the growth of a transnationalizing culture industry, and the role played by China as it reinserts itself into an informationalized capitalism.