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Ronald V. Bettig and Jeanne Lynn Hall, BIG MEDIA, BIG MONEY: CULTURAL TEXTS AND POLITICAL ECONOMICS. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003; pp. 200, $65.00 hardcover, ISBN: 0742511294; $22.95 paper, ISBN: 0742511308.
Big Media, Big Money combines the strengths of research in political economy and cultural studies in an effort to grasp contemporary trends in communication across a range of venues including the mass media and institutions of higher education. It offers a crucial contribution to the literature in that it goes beyond merely pointing out the need for synthesis between various and previously disparate perspectives by actually providing an example of how the synthesis might be achieved.
Big Media, Big Money offers students of media and society an opportunity to consider carefully the relationship between communication and democracy at a time when all indicators point toward increased concentration and control over the means of communication. This concentration and control is seen in the structure and content of media institutions, in pedagogical practices, and in the educational content of school texts used from kindergarten to theaters of higher learning.
Although I have a reservation concerning the way Bettig and Hall's Big Media, Big Money is structured and thus with the overall focus, it is useful to first point out the value of this contribution to critical communication studies. First, Big Media, Big Money offers an example of how to circumvent the long-standing rift between cultural studies scholars and scholars studying the political economy of...