Class and News - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0742527131 ISBN 13: 9780742527133

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2004

Synopsis

News as a cultural product has earned a place in scholarly research over the past several decades, and media scholars and sociologists have successfully looked at news for ideological content and how news may shape an audience's ideas on politics, gender, and race. But how does news influence an audience's ideas about social structure? Class and News is a multidisciplinary collection of essays examining how the news media treats or neglects this structure in everyday reporting. Are certain stories chosen for their appeal to the upper or middle classes? Are stories of interest to lower class readers/viewers avoided? How are issues of social order reported or reflected in stories that aren't about class? This in-depth work will be a valuable resource for students, scholars, and general readers interested in the dynamics of class and news in the United States.

About this title

About the Author:

Don Heider is associate professor of journalism at the University of Texas at Austin.

Review:

Heider has brought together some excellent current scholarship explicating the very concept of class in America, how news influences people's ideas about class and what people believe and how they act, the way meaning is constructed in news, and how media operate to create or reinforce social values. No doubt the book will enlighten veteran scholars as well as readers who have not given the subject much attention. This book should be essential reading for students and scholars seriously interested in mass communication and society. (Mass Communication and Society)

Essential. (CHOICE)

This book deserves to be read by anyone who cares about classed news and its intersections with race and gender. Its deliberate eclecticism offers a range of methods that might make it especially useful for graduate students formulating their own research agendas and strategies. (Political Communication)

Class and News is a lively anthology of news media studies which brings class and class bias back into media sociology. Heider's authors demonstrate how much America's news is still produced largely for and about the country's middle classes while ignoring or demonizing those lower in the socio-economic pecking order. (Herbert J. Gans, Robert S. Lynd Professor Emeritus of Sociology, Columbia University; author of Making Sense of America)

About this edition

• Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 0742527131
• ISBN 13: 9780742527133
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 376
• Editor: Heider Don