Media & Culture

Media & Culture focuses on the vital relationship between the media and our shared culture—including how cultural trends influence the media, and how specific historical developments, technical innovations, and key media decision makers have affected the ways our democracy and society have evolved.

In keeping with this emphasis, and aided by explicit reviewer feedback responding to the text’s coverage of diversity, inclusion, and culturally-responsive pedagogy, the Thirteenth Edition further extends what has always been a key theme of this text: the importance of media representations and the value of including diverse viewpoints, images, and experiences in our exploration of the media.

The authors revised this Thirteenth Edition to further emphasize the importance of media representation—who gets to tell their stories through media portrayals, who controls the production of these stories, and what it means when some stories are emphasized and others go untold.

The new “Politics of Media Representations” section in Chapter 1 prompts students to consider how media representations reflect and contribute to the distribution of power, status, resources, and visibility in our culture, and emphasizes the importance of interrogating these media representations in terms of fairness and equity.

These issues are then revisited throughout the text in a number of ways, including an expanded discussion of gender and racial diversity in digital games (Chapter 3); a new subsection about gay material and the quality audience during television’s post-network era (Chapter 6); a new section on representation in advertising (Chapter 11); and a look at how journalistic objectivity and newsroom diversity are being reconsidered in light of the racial justice movement (Chapters 8 and 14).

Content throughout the book explores the connection between communication and culture and incorporates a range of diverse perspectives and discussions. In particular, the Global Village boxes connect students with media-related issues from all over the world, and the Examining Ethics boxes consider a range of important contemporary ethical issues, including those related to culture and perspective.

Among the new boxes in this Thirteenth Edition:

• “Telling Stories about ‘Voices We Seldom Hear,” an examination of media coverage of meatpackers and other essential workers whose stories are not traditionally explored in the news (Ch1)
• “Algorithmic Bias,” which examines biases woven into algorithms that increasingly guide the way we live (Ch2)
• “Aya Nakamura: France’s Global Pop Star,” a look at the success of French Malian music superstar Aya Nakamura (Ch4)
• “Is This Entertainment? TV Industry Reconsiders Police Shows,” about new perspectives on police television shows in the wake of George Floyd’s death (Ch6)
• “The Unfairness of Fairness Creams,” which explores the marketing of popular fairness cream products in India (Ch11)

In response to specific reviewer feedback, the Thirteenth Edition incorporates expanded coverage spotlighting the work of a variety of individuals who played foundational roles in media’s development, including voice actor Jack Gibson, filmmaker Oscar Micheaux, and PR pioneer Doris Fleischman.

The new edition also highlights the contributions of a wide variety of contemporary media figures whose work has impacted our culture, including journalists Nikole Hannah-Jones and Wesley Lowery, cult filmmaker John Waters, director Bong Joon-ho, and radio deejay Angie Martinez.