First published in 1994. The media report terrible events. But the academic study of the media is increasingly trivial and lacking in moral seriousness. Media, Culture and Morality examines how this paradoxical situation could have emerged. The author seizes upon the disparity between the enormous production of books in the field and the lack of substantive insights generated. He argues that such a mass of self-conscious criticism should have provided a moral critique of contemporary culture not the quagmire of theoretical verbiage and threadbare politicizing we are faced with today. The book is a disturbing speculation on the fate of moral and cultural values in a media-dominated world.

Popular culture provides a daily catalog of cultural attitudes, values, and practices. From television sitcoms to the daily news, from the theater to the sports stadium, we observe embodiments and enactments of character, virtue, honesty, and integrity (or lack thereof) in situations we find understandable, if not familiar. The essays in this volume address popular mediated constructions of ethical and unethical communication in news, sports, advertising, film, television, and the internet. Emphasis is on the consumption of popular culture messages, as well as how auditors make moral sense out of what they read, hear, and observe.

As modern media shifts from the distribution of information to the creation of entertainment, a fresh inquiry into the ethics of media becomes vital. This collection of 19 essays provides useful guidelines and perspectives for the producers and consumers of entertainment. Topics covered include the contemporary creation of celebrity, the effects of entertainment on children, the hybridization of entertainment and news, author and intellectual property rights, and the role of human dignity in modern media, among many others. The essays question the nature and ethics of media entertainment as it becomes increasingly pervasive in our time.

The changing pattern of contemporary media is one of the most striking and important transformations of our age. This major new work seeks to understand the implications of a series of mediated processes in relation to public cultures and modern identities. In The Transformation of the Media the author leads the reader through a number of complex theoretical issues, connecting the nature of modern communication to the affects this has on our common moral and ethical lives. Most significantly, he argues that a number of perspectives as diverse as Marxism, post-modernism, liberalism, communitarianism and technological determinism can all be found wanting in this regard. The Transformation of the Media attempts to situate the media, and more theoretical concerns, within a broad sociological framework. The volume adds to our shared understanding of the media's relation to contemporary cultural transformations including globalisation, the development of informational capitalism, the changing nature of the public sphere and the impact of new social movements. More specifically, through a discussion of the 'new media order' and the Rwandan genocide a critical prism is held up to existing debates concerning the globalisation of the media. Key features: an extremely topical and accessible analysis of the media's implications for contemporary cultural transformations combines a theoretical and empirical approach presents complex theoretical ideas in an accessible way This book will be essential reading for students studying globalisation, the global media, new media technology, identity and cultural development in cultural studies, media studies, and sociology and politics courses.