Cover: Media & Culture, 14th Edition by Richard Campbell; Christopher Martin; Bettina Fabos; Ron Becker

Media & Culture

An Introduction to Mass CommunicationFourteenth Edition ©2025 Richard Campbell; Christopher Martin; Bettina Fabos; Ron Becker

The #1 introduction to mass communication text, Media & Culture: Mass Communication in a Digital Age, is at the forefront of this dynamic course, addressing the most current issues of our time. In this fourteenth edition, Media & Culture examines the reality of what it means to...
Read more
Achieve $79.99

ISBN:9781319560614

Access all your course tools in one place!

Retail:$79.99 Wholesale:$64.00

Go to Achieve

ISBN:9781319560577

ISBN:9781319339715

ISBN:9781319602048

Cover: Media & Culture, 14th Edition by Richard Campbell; Christopher Martin; Bettina Fabos; Ron Becker

Navigating Our Dynamic Digital World

The #1 introduction to mass communication text, Media & Culture: Mass Communication in a Digital Age, is at the forefront of this dynamic course, addressing the most current issues of our time. In this fourteenth edition, Media & Culture examines the reality of what it means to live, work, and communicate in an interconnected age where change is constant and social media and AI are revolutionizing our relationship with media. This edition is available with Achieve, Macmillan’s courseware platform that sets the standard for powerful learning content, engaging activities, and actionable insights and analytics. 

Features

Media & Culture’s hallmark critical approach to media literacy introduces students to five steps of the critical thinking and writing process—description, analysis, interpretation, evaluation, and engagement—and applies those stages with critical process exercises in each chapter and in Achieve.

Media & Culture’s storytelling narrative and cultural approach immerse students in the stories and events that have shaped the media and that have had an impact on our shared culture.

Media & Culture explores key topics related to media economics and democracy, including the significance and impact of multinational media systems, the Telecommunications Act of 1996, net neutrality, and the effects of particular mass media on the nature of democratic life.

Learning tools in every chapter help students find and remember the information they need to know. Bulleted lists at the beginning of every chapter give students a road map to key concepts, Media Literacy and the Critical Process boxes model the five-step critical process, Examining Ethics and Global Village boxes spotlight key ethical and global issues, and Chapter Reviews help students prepare for quizzes and exams.

Achieve courseware for Media & Culture sets the standard for driving student learning in your mass communication course with powerful learning content, engaging activities, and actionable insights and analytics. Achieve brings together an interactive e-textbook, LearningCurve adaptive quizzing, media literacy activities, engaging videos, and extensive instructor resources–all within an enhanced technology platform.

Achieve is Macmillan Learning’s complete online learning system. It houses instructor resources to support teaching and a range of interactive resources and the full ebook to help students succeed in their course. Access to Achieve for instructors is available on this page. Student access to Achieve could be through their institution if the institution has signed a license or as a separate student purchase. The instructor must set up a course for students to benefit from this product.

New to This Edition

Fourteenth Edition Updates:

Coverage of AI's rapid growth and change. The AI revolution is here, and Media & Culture takes a balanced and thoughtful look at artificial intelligence’s use and influence across our media environment. With coverage that spans the media industries, the fourteenth edition explores timely topics such as the debut of AI chatbots, deep fakes’ influence on democracy, AI’s impact on the creative community, AI-prompted copyright dilemmas, and more, while  interrogating what these developments mean for media and for society as a whole.

In-depth exploration of social media topics. The fourteenth edition includes new and expanded coverage of social media’s role in our world today. Introduced in Chapter 1, examined in detail in Chapter 2, and integrated throughout, coverage spotlights a wide variety of issues and developments in the social media sphere, including AI “friends” on social media apps; the rising influence of BookTok in the publishing world; influencers as advertisers; ongoing issues of social media privacy, fraud, and disinformation; debates about the appropriateness of content moderation; and research on teen social media use and mental health.

A unified newspapers and magazines chapter. The new Chapter 8, “Newspapers and Magazines: From Print to Digital Brands,” joins together the material on newspapers and magazines to better reflect the synergies between these industries and emphasize their current state and future opportunities for growth. (The stand-alone journalism chapter, which is now Chapter 13, is unaffected by this merger.) 

Digital Options

ACHIEVE icon

Achieve

Achieve is a comprehensive set of interconnected teaching and assessment tools that incorporate the most effective elements from Macmillan Learning's market leading solutions in a single, easy-to-use platform.

Schedule Achieve Demo Go to Achieve

EPUB3_EBOOK icon

E-book

Read online (or offline) with all the highlighting and notetaking tools you need to be successful in this course.

Learn About E-book

Table of Contents

1      Media, Culture, and Communication: A Critical Approach

Part 1: Interactive Media
2      The Internet, Social Media, and AI
3      Digital Gaming and the Media Playground

Part 2: Sounds and Images
4      Sound Recording and Popular Music
5      Popular Radio and the Origins of Broadcasting
6      Television: From Broadcasting to Streaming
7      Movies and Visual Storytelling

Part 3: Words and Pictures
8      Newspapers and Magazines: From Print to Digital Brands
9      Books and the Power of Print

Part 4: Strategic Communication
10    Advertising and Commercial Culture
11    Public Relations and Framing the Message

Part 5: Democratic Expression and the Mass Media
12    Media Economics and the Global Marketplace
13    The Culture of Journalism: Values, Ethics, and Democracy
14    Why and How to Do Media Research
15    Legal Controls and Freedom of Expression

Case Study: A Guide to Identifying Fake News

Headshot of Richard Campbell

Richard Campbell

Richard Campbell is professor emeritus and founding chair of the Department of Media, Journalism, and Film at Miami University, as well as the 2019 recipient of the university’s Benjamin Harrison Medallion for his “Outstanding Contribution to the Education of the Nation.” Campbell is the author of “60 Minutes” and the News: A Mythology for Middle America (1991) and coauthor of Cracked Coverage: Television News, the Anti-Cocaine Crusade, and the Reagan Legacy (1994). He has written for numerous publications, including Columbia Journalism Review, Critical Studies in Mass Communication, and TV Quarterly. Campbell is cocreator of Stats+Stories, a long-running podcast sponsored by Miami University and the American Statistical Association, and winner of the 2021 Communication Award from the Mathematical Association of America. His other projects include the digital Oxford Observer newspaper and Report for Ohio, initiatives aimed at getting more young journalists real-world experience covering under-reported areas in rural and urban communities. He is executive producer of a 2019 documentary on the role that Oxford, Ohio, played in 1964’s Freedom Summer, titled Training for Freedom: How Ordinary People in an Unusual Time and Unlikely Place Made Extraordinary History. He served for ten years on the board of directors for Cincinnati Public Radio and holds a PhD from Northwestern University.

Headshot of Christopher Martin

Christopher Martin

Christopher R. Martin is a professor of digital journalism and former department head of the Department of Communication and Media at the University of Northern Iowa. He is author of two award-winning books on labor and the media: No Longer Newsworthy: How the Mainstream Media Abandoned the Working Class and Framed! Labor and the Corporate Media, both with Cornell University Press. He has written articles, book chapters, and reviews on journalism, televised sports, the Internet, and labor for several publications, including Communication Research, Journal of Communication, Journal of Communication Inquiry, Labor Studies Journal, Culture, Sport, and Society, NiemanReports, and Perspectives on Politics. He is also on the editorial board of the Journal of Communication Inquiry. He is a contributing scholar to the Center for Journalism & Liberty and a regular contributor to Working-Class Perspectives. Martin holds a Ph.D. from the University of Michigan and has also taught at Miami University.

Headshot of Bettina Fabos

Bettina Fabos

Bettina Fabos is a professor of visual communication and interactive digital studies at the University of Northern Iowa. She is the executive producer of the interactive web photo history Proud and Torn: A Visual Memoir of Hungarian History (proudandtorn.org); the cofounder of a public digital archive of Iowa family snapshots, Fortepan Iowa (fortepan.us); and a champion of the Creative Commons. Fabos has also written extensively about critical media literacy, Internet commercialization, the role of the Internet in education, and media representations of popular culture. Her work has been published in Visual Communication Quarterly, Library Trends, Review of Educational Research, and Harvard Educational Review and she has received numerous awards for her creative work. Fabos has also taught at Miami University and has a Ph.D. from the University of Iowa.

Headshot of Ron Becker

Ron Becker

RON BECKER is a professor of media and communication and strategic communication at Miami University. He is the author of Gay TV and Straight America (Rutgers University Press) and co-editor of Saturday Night Live and American TV (Indiana University Press). His work has also appeared in publications like The Craft of Criticism, The Television Studies Reader, How to Watch TV, Reading the Bromance, The Velvet Light Trap, Queer Studies in Media and Popular Culture, and Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television. Becker holds a Ph.D. in Media and Cultural Studies from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Instructor Resources

Need instructor resources for your course?

Unlock Your Resources

Instructor Resources

Access Test Bank

The Test Bank will be available soon. Check back later!

request locked icon

Test Bank for Media & Culture

Richard Campbell; Christopher Martin; Bettina Fabos; Ron Becker | Fourteenth Edition | ©2025 | ISBN:9781319560621

Learn more about our Test Banks or Sign up for training.

Go To Test Bank