Making Sense of Media
The overarching focus of the text’s ten chapters is on the measures to control media content and contain potential meanings, from the printing press and podcasts to streaming services and social media sites. In varying ways, each chapter considers the diverse control and containment mechanisms. These include official church and state censorship, partisan press priorities, right to copy restrictions, state and federal court mandates, statutory restraints, movie, radio, and television formats and formulas, advertiser and public relations ploys, and the prevailing attention-selling prototype. A central consideration is how the profited-minded custodians of evolving media techniques and technologies—private corporations, hedge funds, and transnational conglomerates—affect depictions in news and entertainment fare of the rich mosaic of colors, cultures, and communities long comprising American society.
