ABSTRACT
Critical research in communication is a broad category encompassing divergent methodologies, approaches, and theoretical assumptions. Whereas the Frankfurt School's legacy of pessimistic analysis of modern communications media left a strong impression on New Left critics in the United States, the cultural studies approach to television from the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies and the political economy approach from the University of Leicester in England broke new ground in critical media research. As John Fiske has noted, "The work of the two centers in Britain is both complementary and contradictory, and each proceeds along its own path in the knowledge of where the other is going. The comparative absence of the political economic perspective in cultural studies is perhaps less disabling in the United Kingdom than it is in the United States" (1989:21)—a perspective with which I agree.
