Big Media, Big Money: Cultural Texts and Political Economics

(Paperback, Second Edition)

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Big Media, Big Money is a lively and scathing critique of the contemporary communications industry, examining how media ownership and the profit-making motive affect the messages we receive in alarming ways. Through close readings of recent news events and critical examination of corporate influence, Bettig and Hall conclude that current interconnections among media, big business, government, and education pose a serious threat to democratic communications. The second edition includes three new chapters, covering the contemporary Hollywood film industry; the changing landscape of the music industry; and ad creep, the proliferation of advertising into previously ad-free venues such as schools and childrens television programming.

Reviews

In Big Media, Big Money, Ronald Bettig and Jeanne Hall have brought their careers' worth of experience together to produce perhaps the single best exposition of the political economy of the media that I have seen. It is a thrilling, provocative, and highly original book that weaves issues like the commercialization of education into the narrative. I recommend it unconditionally for classroom use. -- Robert W. McChesney, author, Blowing the Roof Off the Twenty-First Century: Media, Politics, and the Struggle
Bettig and Hall have done it again! The second edition of Big Media, Big Money expands and updates the originals engaging overview of the American media system and its intermixture of new and traditional technologies. Big Media, Big Money explains how the concentration of ownership, the structure of media companies, and advertisers demands combine to limit what can be asked, said, or depicted in the media. Given the emphasis on what we can do from the grass roots to remedy this situation, this book is particularly relevant and timely. -- Eileen R. Meehan, Southern Illinois University
The new edition of Big Media, Big Money could not have come at a more important time. This may be the most important book written on the various ways in which power, capital, and politics combine to undermine the media saturated culture that is undoing any vestige of democratic values, identities, and hopes. But this is more than a powerful criticism of the media in its multiple variants, it is also a road map for citizens who want to fight back, who believe that a critical and informed formative culture is fundamental to any viable notion of democracy. Any one who wants to understand the both the destructive power and democratic possibilities of the media in today's world has to read this book. -- Henry Giroux, Global Television Network Chair in Communication Studies, McMaster University

Author Bio

Ronald V. Bettig is associate professor in the College of Communications at the Pennsylvania State University. Jeanne Lynn Hall (1958-2011) was associate professor in the College of Communications at the Pennsylvania State University.