ABSTRACT

In this book we examine the forces that shape media content, the messages that constitute the symbolic environment. This is an ambitious task, given the multitude of factors that exert infl uence on the media. Not only that, but questions of media operation, bias, and control have moved to the center of the public arena, with an increasing number of media-literate citizens developing and promoting their own views. Media questions are often highly normative and highly politicized. Thus, the scholarly research questions we consider are very much in the public sphere, closely related to press criticism that circulates among activists, policy elites, and media professionals themselves. Reconciling these confl icting and often partisan-based charges can be diffi cult. What is more, a cynical public appears increasingly skeptical of the possibility of settling questions with evidence, substituting instead a combination of ironic detachment and impressionistic theories of personal media experience. But systematic media research on even the most controversial subjects is possible. That is why we must bring conceptual and theoretical organization to this area of research, to build understandings and research into a more comprehensive pattern. The same research tools used so extensively to examine media effects can be turned on those media and their links with culture, other organizations, and institutions. In developing Mediating the Message in the 21st Century , we hope to strengthen the case that these questions can be generated and examined with rigor given a clear and accepted conceptual framework. We expect the fi eld of communication to devote the same sustained research to the creation, control, and shape of the mediated environment as it has to the effects on audiences of that environment.