Sociology of the News Media (Contemporary Sociology (New York, N.Y.).) Book

The Sociology of News offers a brief, but comprehensive account of the origins, structures, operating practices, codes, and cultures of the contemporary news media, analyzing the question of the consequences of news on society—and politics, in particular. Michael Schudson treats soberly and skeptically a great deal of what passes for wisdom about the press in popular opinion, academic research, and journalists' own self-understanding. The book's ultimate objective is not to settle controversies involving the press, but to define them and to characterize the role that news institutions play in the formation of modern public consciousness.

The Sociology of News is part of the Contemporary Societies series. This series marks the coming of age of a generation and a discipline. It has been half a century since the world's leading sociologists engaged in a collective effort to make their cutting-edge thinking and research so concise and so widely accessible. What has changed in the meantime? Just about everything! Theoretical hegemony has given way to plurality. Disengagement has given way to relevance, and a provincial focus on America has opened up to the currents of globalization. Running through all these transformations has been the cultural turn, the recognition that meaning dynamics-codes, narratives, metaphors, values, and beliefs-remain central features of even the most contemporary societies. In this series, the world's leading sociologists show how these developments have transformed their specialties. They do so by engaging a genre that has almost disappeared from the social sciences today-the essay. Well-written, clear-minded, and elegant, these brief compositions are major creative endeavors in their own right, even as they bring the ideas of the world's most advanced thinkers into the world of the lay reader.