Global Comparative Media

This book is to familiarize you with the comparative approach to global and regional media systems. This entails reading key literature, grasping theoretical and epistemological issues, and understanding basic concepts. A more challenging but more exciting objective is theory construction through a critical engagement of the broad and ongoing debates about the future of the comparative systems approach. Critical media theory looks at how the corporate ownership of media production and distribution affects society, and provides a common ground to social conservatives (concerned by the effects of media on the traditional family) and liberals and socialists (concerned by the corporatization of social discourse). The study of the effects and techniques of advertising forms a cornerstone of media studies.