ABSTRACT
While we often ignore or are not necessarily even aware of the fact, the vast bulk of the media we engage and consume in our daily lives – the television, film, radio, books, magazines, and so on – are produced and distributed commercially and thus according to commercial imperatives and prerogatives. Sometimes this commercialism is tempered, for instance where a media organization is state-owned and has public-service responsibilities to fulfill. More often, however, it is not, and profit maximization objectives are explicitly to the fore. As such, the “logic” of the media world and the commodities that circulate through it “must be situated,” as Ronald Bettig (1996: 3) observes, “within the larger context of the logic of capital.”
