Labour, the Left and the Media Book

The importance of media ownership - and the issues of control, accountability, influence and democracy which cluster around it - has been hotly contested ever since the emergence of a truly mass media. In "Labour, the Left and the Media", Tom O'Malley - author of "Regulating the Press" (With Clive Soley), 2000 - provides the first single-volume history of the sometimes troubled postwar relationships between left, labour and community movements and the media in Britain and the US. He examines the tensions that have existed - and which continue to exist - between those on the left who have taken a broadly libertarian, anti-statist line on questions of media policy and those who have drawn on marxist and liberal traditions to argue for a more diverse approach.O'Malley's principal concern is to examine what theoretical and practical conclusions we might draw from this historical account that could usefully inform a revitalised left approach to media policy in the fragmenting mass media world of the twenty-first century.Read More