The Media in Question: Popular Cultures and Public Interests

This collection of innovative essays sets the agenda for a revitalised debate on the hybrid communicative practices that constitute the (post)modern media landscape and which cross the boundaries between fact and fiction, information and entertainment, public knowledge and popular culture.

In this challenging and provocative collection, the individual contributors rethink key issues - the meaning of the public interest, the quality of media performance and (de)regulation. In the process they raise questions rarely addressed in normative media theories, for example, the ethics of sports reporting, the moral reasoning in popular culture and the required professional standards for infotainment genres such as reality television and gossip journalism.

Accessible and wide-ranging, The Media in Question will be essential reading for students in mass communication and political communication studies.