Communication, Society and Politics

Series · 32

books · 1997-2020

By Margaret Scammell, Sabina Mihelj, C. Edwin Baker, and more

Books in series

Mediated Politics

Communication in the Future of Democracy

2000

This book explores the changing nature of democracy in light of dramatic changes in the media of mass the Internet, the decline of network television news and the daily newspaper; the growing tendency to treat election campaigns as competing product advertisements; the blurring lines among news, ads, and entertainment. It explores such questions Does the Internet make it easier for citizens to find political information? Do today's highly competitive old and new mass media serve the needs of democratic citizenship? Does the new media environment produce public opinion that is more or less manipulated, or manipulated in new ways?

Communication and Democratic Reform in South Africa

2001

The book examines the reform of the communications sector in South Africa as a detailed and extended case study in the transition from apartheid to democracy. The reform of broadcasting, telecommunications, the state information agency, and the print press from apartheid-aligned apparatuses to accountable democratic institutions took place via a complex political process in which civil society activism, embodying a post-social democratic ideal, largely won out over the powerful forces of formal market capitalism and older models of state control.

Media, Markets, and Democracy

1997

Giving people the media they want is thought to justify the move toward deregulation that has swept media policy circles. Freedom of the press is thought to require resistance to government interventions in the media realm. This book uses economic and democratic theory to undermine the premises of both beliefs. It also relies on these theories to evaluate journalistic practice, to recommend appropriate governmental policy toward the media, and to defend a preferred constitutional conception of press freedom. These issues should be vitally important to anyone interested in the proper practice of journalism, media policy, a free press, or democracy.

The Winning Message

Candidate Behavior, Campaign Discourse, and Democracy

2002

This study breaks new ground in investigating candidate behavior in American electoral campaigns. It centers on a question of equal importance to citizens and scholars: how can we produce better political campaigns? First, Simon develops the idea of dialogue as a standard for evaluating political campaigns. Second, he reveals that candidates' self-interest in winning leads to avoiding dialogue or substantive campaign discourse. Third, the text demonstrates the beneficial effects produced by the little dialogue that actually occurs and finally, pinpoints the forces responsible for these rare occurrences.

Shaping Abortion Discourse

Democracy and the Public Sphere in Germany and the United States

1998

Using controversy over abortion as a lens through which to compare the political process and role of the media in these two very different democracies, this book examines the contest over meaning that is being waged by social movements, political parties, churches and other social actors. Abortion is a critical battleground for debates over social values in Germany and the U.S., but the constitutional premises on which arguments rest differ, as do the strategies that movements and parties adopt and the opportunities for influence that are open to them.

#10

Information and American Democracy

Technology in the Evolution of Political Power

2003

To provide a comprehensive evaluation of the internet in American democracy, Bruce Bimber sets the contemporary information revolution in historical context, asserting that past developments in American history offer important lessons for understanding how the internet is affecting politics. He examines how citizens and organizations use it for political purposes and is especially interested as to whether new technology is making Americans more engaged in their government. This study about the internet and politics combines historical and survey analysis with case studies of political events.

#11

Media and the Path to Peace

2004

Examining the role that the news media play in peace processes, Gadi Wolfsfeld argues that, although often destructive, the role of the press varies over time and political circumstance. Wolfsfeld analyzes these variations by examining three major cases: the Oslo peace process between Israel and the Palestinians; the peace process between Israel and Jordan; and the process surrounding the Good Friday Agreement in Northern Ireland.

#13

New Television, Old Politics

The Transition to Digital TV in the United States and Britain

2004

Digital TV offers many advantages over analog TV, but the transition process is complex and costly. This book explains how the process is unfolding in the U.S. and Britain and explores the changes in the legal framework and the industry structure associated with it. It is a unique study about the technological, political, and social factors shaping the emergence of the Information Society in the U.S. and Europe.

#14

Comparing Political Communication

Theories, Cases, and Challenges

2004

Aimed at providing a comprehensive understanding of comparative political communication, this volume analyzes the media systems of Europe and America. It considers whether election campaigns around the world have become "Americanized," how international news journalists understand their jobs and produce different forms of television news programs, and how governmental media relations and news management efforts evolve in different political systems. The book analyzes transnational similarities and dissimilarities in the context of their potential effects on society and democracy.

#15

New Media Campaign Managed Cit

2005

The political campaign is one of the most important organizations in a democracy, and whether issue, or candidate, specific, it is one of the least understood organizations in contemporary political life. With evidence from ethnographic immersion, survey data, and social network analysis, Philip Howard examines the evolving act of political campaigning and the changing organization of political campaigns over the last five election cycles, from 1996 to 2004. Over this time, both grassroots and elite political campaigns have gone online, built multimedia strategies, and constructed complex relational databases.

#17

Evaluating Campaign Quality

Can the Electoral Process be Improved?

2007

For a number of years, voters and academic observers have been dissatisfied with American campaigns. Contemporary races are seen as too negative, too superficial, and too unfair or misleading. Based on these complaints, a variety of reform organizations have targeted millions of dollars to improve the situation. This book seeks to evaluate whether these activities have improved the level of campaign discourse and conduct in U.S. House and Senate campaigns and argues that while individual reform efforts have achieved some of their stated objectives, the overall effect of these reform efforts has been disappointing. A different approach to campaign conduct and political discourse in American elections is clearly called for if improved campaigning is the goal.

#18

The Internet and Democratic Citizenship

Theory, Practice and Policy

2007

Relations between the public and holders of political authority are in a period of transformative flux. On the one side, new expectations and meanings of citizenship are being entertained and occasionally acted upon. On the other, an inexorable impoverishment of mainstream political communication is taking place. The Internet has the potential to improve public communications and enrich democracy, a project that requires imaginative policy-making. This argument is developed through three stages: first exploring the theoretical foundations for renewing democratic citizenship, then examining practical case studies of e-democracy, and finally, reviewing the limitations of recent policies designed to promote e-democracy and setting out a radical, but practical proposal for an online civic commons: a trusted public space where the dispersed energies, self-articulations and aspirations of citizens can be rehearsed, in public, within a process of ongoing feedback to the various levels and centers of governance: local, national and transnational.

#19

Cosmopolitan Communications

Cultural Diversity in a Globalized World

2009

Societies around the world have experienced a flood of information from diverse channels originating beyond local communities and even national borders, transmitted through the rapid expansion of cosmopolitan communications. For more than half a century, conventional interpretations, Norris and Inglehart argue, have commonly exaggerated the potential threats arising from this process. A series of fire-walls protect national cultures. This book develops a new theoretical framework for understanding cosmopolitan communications and uses it to identify the conditions under which global communications are most likely to endanger cultural diversity. The authors analyze empirical evidence from both the societal level and the individual level, examining the outlook and beliefs of people in a wide range of societies. The study draws on evidence from the World Values Survey, covering 90 societies in all major regions worldwide from 1981 to 2007. The conclusion considers the implications of their findings for cultural policies.

#20

Reality Television and Arab Politics

Contention in Public Life

2009

What does it mean to be modern outside the West? Based on a wealth of primary data collected over five years, Reality Television and Arab Politics analyzes how reality television stirred an explosive mix of religion, politics, and sexuality, fueling heated polemics over cultural authenticity, gender relations, and political participation in the Arab world. The controversies, Kraidy argues, are best understood as a social laboratory in which actors experiment with various forms of modernity, continuing a long-standing Arab preoccupation with specifying terms of engagement with Western modernity. Women and youth take center stage in this process. Against the backdrop of dramatic upheaval in the Middle East, this book challenges the notion of a monolithic “Arab Street” and offers an original perspective on Arab media, shifting attention away from a narrow focus on al-Jazeera, toward a vibrant media sphere that compels broad popular engagement and contentious political performance.

#22

When Politicians Attack

Party Cohesion in the Media

2010

Fostering a positive brand name is the chief benefit parties provide for their members. They do this both by coordinating their activities in the legislative process and by communicating with voters. Whereas political scientists have generally focused on the former, dismissing partisan communication as cheap talk, this book argues that a party’s ability to coordinate its communication has important implications for the study of politics. The macro-level institutional setting of a party’s communication heavily influences that party’s prospects for cohesive communication. Paradoxically, unified government presents the greatest challenge to unified communication within the president’s party. As this book argues, the challenge stems primarily from two the constitutional separation of powers and the intervening role of the news media. In this setting, internal disputes with the president or within the congressional majority are more likely to arise; these disputes are disproportionately likely to be featured by the news media, and stories of intra-party strife become the most credible and damaging type of partisan story.

#23

The Making of a European Public Sphere

Media Discourse and Political Contention

2006

This book investigates an important source of the European Union’s recent legitimacy problems. It shows how European integration is debated in mass media, and how this affects democratic inclusiveness. Advancing integration implies a shift in power between governments, parliaments, and civil society. Behind debates over Europe’s “democratic deficit” is a deeper whether democratic politics can perform effectively under conditions of Europeanization and globalization. This study is based on a wealth of unique data from seven European countries, combining newspaper content analyses, an innovative study of Internet communication structures, and hundreds of interviews with leading political and media representatives across Europe. It is by far the most far-reaching and empirically grounded study on the Europeanization of media discourse and political contention to date, and a must-read for anyone interested in how European integration changes democratic politics and why European integration has become increasingly contested.

#24

After Broadcast News

Media Regimes, Democracy, and the New Information Environment

2011

The new media environment has challenged the role of professional journalists as the primary source of politically relevant information. After Broadcast News puts this challenge into historical context, arguing that it is the latest of several critical moments, driven by economic, political, cultural, and technological changes, in which the relationship among citizens, political elites, and the media has been contested. Out of these past moments, distinct “media regimes” eventually emerged, each with its own seemingly natural rules and norms, and each the result of political struggle with clear winners and losers. The media regime in place for the latter half of the twentieth century has been dismantled, but a new regime has yet to emerge. Assuring this regime is a democratic one requires serious consideration of what was most beneficial and most problematic about past regimes and what is potentially most beneficial and most problematic about today's new information environment.

#25

Comparing Media Systems Beyond the Western World

2011

Comparing Media Systems Beyond the Western World offers a broad exploration of the conceptual foundations for comparative analysis of media and politics globally. It takes as its point of departure the widely used framework of Daniel C. Hallin and Paolo Mancini's Comparing Media Systems, exploring how the concepts and methods of their analysis do and do not prove useful when applied beyond the original focus of their "most similar systems" design and the West European and North American cases it encompassed. It is intended both to use a wider range of cases to interrogate and clarify the conceptual framework of Comparing Media Systems and to propose new models, concepts, and approaches that will be useful for dealing with non-Western media systems and with processes of political transition. Comparing Media Systems Beyond the Western World covers, among other cases, Brazil, China, Israel, Lebanon, Lithuania, Poland, Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, and Thailand.

#26

Collective Action in Organizations

Interaction and Engagement in an Era of Technological Change

2012

Challenging the notion that digital media render traditional, formal organizations irrelevant, this book offers a new theory of collective action and organizing. Based on extensive surveys and interviews with members of three influential and distinctive organizations in the United States - The American Legion, AARP, and MoveOn - the authors reconceptualize collective action as a phenomenon in which technology enhances people’s ability to cross boundaries in order to interact with one another and engage with organizations. By developing a theory of Collective Action Space, Bimber, Flanagin, and Stohl explore how people's attitudes, behaviors, motivations, goals, and digital media use are related to their organizational involvement. They find that using technology does not necessarily make people more likely to act collectively, but contributes to a diversity of “participatory styles,” which hinge on people’s interaction with one another and the extent to which they shape organizational agendas. In the digital media age, organizations do not simply recruit people into roles, they provide contexts in which people are able to construct their own collective experiences.

#27

Digital Media and Political Engagement Worldwide

A Comparative Study

2012

This book focuses on the impact of digital media use for political engagement across varied geographic and political contexts, using a diversity of methodological approaches and datasets. The book addresses an important gap in the contemporary literature on digital politics, identifying context dependent and transcendent political consequences of digital media use. While the majority of the empirical work in this field has been based on studies from the United States and United Kingdom, this volume seeks to place those results into comparative relief with other regions of the world. It moves debates in this field of study forward by identifying system-level attributes that shape digital political engagement across a wide variety of contexts. The volume brings together research and scholars from North America, Europe, Latin America, the Middle East, and Asia. The evidence analyzed across the fifteen cases considered in the book suggests that engagement with digital environments influences users' political orientations and that contextual features play a significant role in shaping digital politics.

#28

Media Commercialization and Authoritarian Rule in China

2012

In most liberal democracies commercialized media is taken for granted, but in many authoritarian regimes the introduction of market forces in the media represents a radical break from the past with uncertain political and social implications. In Media Commercialization and Authoritarian Rule in China, Daniela Stockmann argues that the consequences of media marketization depend on the institutional design of the state. In one-party regimes such as China, market-based media promote regime stability rather than destabilizing authoritarianism or bringing about democracy. By analyzing the Chinese media, Stockmann ties trends of market liberalism in China to other authoritarian regimes in the Middle East, North Africa, sub-Saharan Africa, and the post-Soviet region. Drawing on in-depth interviews with Chinese journalists and propaganda officials as well as more than 2,000 newspaper articles, experiments, and public opinion data sets, this book links censorship among journalists with patterns of media consumption and media's effects on public opinion.

#29

Shaping Immigration News

A French-American Comparison

2013

This book offers a comprehensive portrait of French and American journalists in action as they grapple with how to report and comment on one of the most important issues of our era. Drawing on interviews with leading journalists and analyses of an extensive sample of newspaper and television coverage since the early 1970s, Rodney Benson shows how the immigration debate has become increasingly focused on the dramatic, emotion-laden frames of humanitarianism and public order. Yet even in an era of global hypercommercialism, Benson also finds enduring French-American differences related to the distinctive societal positions, professional logics, and internal structures of their journalistic fields. In both countries, less commercialized media tend to offer the most in-depth, multi-perspective, and critical news. Benson challenges classic liberalism's assumptions about state intervention's chilling effects on the press, suggests costs as well as benefits to the current vogue in personalized narrative news, and calls attention to journalistic practices that can help empower civil society. This book offers new theories and methods for sociologists and media scholars and fresh insights for journalists, policy makers, and concerned citizens.

#30

Consumer Democracy

The Marketing of Politics

2013

This book argues that marketing is inherent in competitive democracy, explaining how we can make the consumer nature of competitive democracy better and more democratic. Margaret Scammell argues that consumer democracy should not be assumed to be inherently antithetical to “proper” political discourse and debate about the common good. Instead, Scammell argues that we should seek to understand it – to create marketing-literate criticism that can distinguish between democratically good and bad campaigns, and between shallow, cynical packaging and campaigns that at least aspire to be responsive, engender citizen participation, and enable accountability. Further, we can take important lessons from commercial enjoyment matters; what citizens think and feel matters; and, just as in commercial markets, structure is key – the type of political marketing will be affected by the conditions of competition.

#31

Political Journalism in Comparative Perspective

2013

Political journalism is often under fire. Conventional wisdom and much scholarly research suggest that journalists are cynics and political pundits. Political news is void of substance and overly focused on strategy and persons. Citizens do not learn from the news, are politically cynical, and are dissatisfied with the media. This book challenges these assumptions, which are often based on single-country studies with limited empirical observations about the relation between news production, content, and journalism's effects. Based on interviews with journalists, a systematic content analysis of political news, and panel survey data in different countries, this book tests how different systems and media-politics relations condition the contents of political news. It shows how different content creates different effects, and demonstrates that under the right circumstances citizens learn from political news, do not become cynical, and are satisfied with political journalism.

#32

America's Battle for Media Democracy

The Triumph of Corporate Libertarianism and the Future of Media Reform

2014

How did the American media system become what it is today? Why do American media have so few public interest regulations compared with other democratic nations? How did the system become dominated by a few corporations, and why are structural problems like market failures routinely avoided in media policy discourse? By tracing the answers to many of these questions back to media policy battles in the 1940s, this book explains how this happened and why it matters today. Drawing from extensive archival research, the book uncovers the American media system’s historical roots and normative foundations. It charts the rise and fall of a forgotten media reform movement to recover alternatives and paths not taken. As much about the present and future as it is about the past, the book proposes policies for remaking media based on democratic values for the digital age.

#33

News Frames and National Security

Covering Big Brother

2014

Did media coverage contribute to Americans’ tendency to favor national security over civil liberties following the 9/11 attacks? How did news framing of terrorist threats support the expanding surveillance state revealed by Edward Snowden? Douglas M. McLeod and Dhavan V. Shah explore the power of news coverage to render targeted groups suspicious and to spur support for government surveillance. They argue that the tendency of journalists to frame stories around individual targets of surveillance - personifying the domestic threat - shapes citizens’ judgments about tolerance and participation, leading them to limit the civil liberties of a range of groups under scrutiny and to support "Big Brother".

#34

Young People and the Future of News

Social Media and the Rise of Connective Journalism

2017

Young People and the Future of News traces the practices that are evolving as young people come to see news increasingly as something shared via social networks and social media rather than produced and circulated solely by professional news organizations. The book introduces the concept of connective journalism, clarifying the role of creating and sharing stories online as a key precursor to collective and connective political action. At the center of the story are high school students from low-income minority and immigrant communities who often feel underserved or misrepresented by mainstream media but express a strong interest in politics and their communities. Drawing on in-depth field work in three major urban areas over the course of ten years, Young People and the Future of News sheds light on how young people share news that they think others should know about, express solidarity, and bring into being new publics and counter-publics.

#35

Networked News, Racial Divides

How Power and Privilege Shape Public Discourse in Progressive Communities

2017

Against conventional wisdom, pervasive black-white disparities pair with vitriolic public conversation in politically progressive communities throughout America. Networked News, Racial Divides examines obstacles to public dialogues about racial inequality and opportunities for better discourse in mid-sized, liberal cities. The book narrates the challenges faced when talking about race through a series of stories about each community struggling with K-12 education achievement gaps. Media expert Sue Robinson applies Bourdieusian field theory to understand media ecologies and analyze whose voices get heard and whose get left out. She explores how privilege shapes discourse and how identity politics can interfere with deliberation. Drawing on network analysis of community dialogues, interviews with journalists, politicians, activists, and citizens and deep case study of five cities, this reflexive and occasionally narrative book chronicles the institutional, cultural and other problematic realities to amplifying voices of all people while also recommending strategies to move forward and build trust.

#36

Civic Hope

How Ordinary Americans Keep Democracy Alive

2018

Civic Hope is a history of what everyday Americans say - in their own words - about the government overseeing their lives. Based on a highly original analysis of 10,000 letters to the editor from 1948 to the present published in twelve US cities, the book overcomes the limitations of survey data by revealing the reasons for people's attitudes. While Hart identifies worrisome trends - including a decline in writers' abilities to explain what their opponents believe and their attachment to national touchstones - he also shows why the nation still thrives. Civic Hope makes a powerful case that the vitality of a democracy lies not in its strengths but in its weaknesses and in the willingness of its people to address those weaknesses without surcease. The key, Hart argues, is to sustain a culture of argument at the grassroots level.

#37

From Media Systems to Media Cultures

Understanding Socialist Television

2018

In From Media Systems to Media Understanding Socialist Television, Sabina Mihelj and Simon Huxtable delve into the fascinating world of television under communism, using it to test a new framework for comparative media analysis. To understand the societal consequences of mass communication, the authors argue that we need to move beyond the analysis of media systems, and instead focus on the role of the media in shaping cultural ideals and narratives, everyday practices and routines. Drawing on a wealth of original data derived from archival sources, programme and schedule analysis, and oral history interviews, the authors show how communist authorities managed to harness the power of television to shape new habits and rituals, yet failed to inspire a deeper belief in communist ideals. This book and their analysis contains important implications for the understanding of mass communication in non-democratic settings, and provides tools for the analysis of media cultures globally.

#39

Media Ethics and Global Justice in the Digital Age

2019

Today's digital revolution is a worldwide phenomenon, with profound and often differential implications for communities around the world and their relationships to one another. This book presents a new, explicitly international theory of media ethics, incorporating non-Western perspectives and drawing deeply on both moral philosophy and the philosophy of technology. Clifford Christians develops an ethics grounded in three principles - truth, human dignity, and non-violence - and shows how these principles can be applied across a wide range of cases and domains. The book is a guide for media professionals, scholars, and educators who are concerned with the global ramifications of new technologies and with creating a more just world.

#41

Rethinking Media Research for Changing Societies

2020

This agenda-setting volume brings together leading scholars of media and public life to grapple with how media research can make sense of the massive changes rocking politics and the media world. Each author identifies a 'most pressing' question for scholars working at the intersection of journalism, politics, advocacy, and technology. The authors then suggest different research approaches designed to highlight real-world stakes and offer a path toward responsive, productive action. Chapters explore our 'datafied' lives, journalism's deep responsibilities and daunting challenges, media's inclusions (and non-inclusions), the riddle of digital engagement, and the obligations scholars must attempt to meet in an era of networked information. The result is a rich forum that addresses how media transformations carry serious implications for public life. Original, provocative, and generative, this book is international in its orientation and makes a compelling case for public scholarship.

Authors

Michael Delli Carpini

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads' database with this name. See this thread for more information.

Lynn Schofield Clark is Professor and Chair of the Department of Media, Film and Journalism Studies and Director of the Estlow International Center for Journalism and New Media at the University of Denver. An ethnographer who has studied and worked with diverse U.S. families and young people for more than 15 years, Clark is interested in how the everyday uses of digital, mobile and social media shape peoples’ identities and aspirations, particularly in the context of widening income inequality in the United States. She teaches courses in journalism, media and intersectionalities, and media studies. Clark is also a member of the Research Team YELL (Youth Engaged in Leadership & Learning), which is part of the University of Denver’s Bridge Project under the University’s Graduate School of Social Work. Clark is coauthor of Young People and the Future of News: Social Media and the Rise of Connective Journalism, published by Cambridge University Press in 2017 with Associate Professor Regina Marchi of Rutgers University. The book traces the practices that are evolving as young people come to see news increasingly as something shared via social networks and social media rather than produced and circulated solely by professional news organizations. It’s been described as “original,” “insightful,” and, by National Public Radio’s Lulu Garcia-Navarro, as “a cautionary tale” for journalists and journalism. Clark’s book The Parent App: Understanding Families in a Digital Age (Oxford University Press, 2012), was named an Outstanding Academic Title by Choice, and a nice summary of the book can be found in the University of Denver’s magazine. Clark’s first book, From Angels to Aliens: Teenagers, the Media, and the Supernatural (Oxford University Press, 2003/2005) explored how young people from varied (and no) religious backgrounds interpreted popular culture’s stories of the supernatural in relation to religious and spiritual understandings. It received the National Communication Association’s Best Scholarly Book Award from the Ethnography Division. She is also co-author of Media, Home, and Family (Routledge, 2004), which explored how families establish media policies and how those policies relate to family identity-construction practices. She is editor of Religion, Media, and the Marketplace ( Rutgers, 2007), and co-editor of Practicing Religion in the Age of the Media (Columbia University Press, 2002), and a co-editor (with Erika Polson and Radhika Gajjala) of a volume on media and class. Her work is also published in the Journal of Communication, the International Journal of Communication, Journalism, Communication Theory, Critical Studies in Media Communication, New Media & Society, Feminist Media Studies, the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, and in several other journals and edited volumes. Clark’s research has been cited in The New York Times, Chicago Tribune, LA Times, Boston Globe, Hollywood Reporter, the Independent (U.K.), and in other publications; featured on CNN, NPR, BBC-Radio, and PBS; and has been presented before audiences at Harvard, Oxford, University of Copenhagen, Haifa University, RMIT (Australia), the University of North Carolina, Indiana University, the American Academy of Religion, the International Communication Association, the American Anthropological Association, the Association of Education for Journalism and Mass Communication, and in numerous other national and international venues. She is Vice President/President Elect of the international Association of Internet Researchers and a past President of the International Society for the study of Media, Religion, and Culture. She was a Visiting Professor at the University of Copenhagen in 2009 and in 2014, Visiting Fellow at the Digital Ethnography Research Center at RMIT (Melbourne, Australia) in 2014, a 1997-98 Louisville Institute Dissertation Fellow and a 1998 nominee to the Harvard Society of Fellows. She serves on the editorial board

Clifford Christians

Author · 2 books

Research Professor Emeritus of Communications Professor Emeritus of Media Studies Professor Emeritus of Journalism Christians is the former director of the Institute of Communications Research and chair of the doctoral program in communications, positions he held from 1987-2001 and from 2007-2009. He has been a visiting scholar in philosophical ethics at Princeton University, a research fellow in social ethics and also a visiting scholar at the University of Chicago, and a PEW fellow in ethics at Oxford University. He has a Doctor of Letters D.Litt Honoris Causa Degree from Marquette University and an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters degree from Emerson College. He was a Charles H. Sandage Distinguished Professor, has won six teaching awards, and is a faculty member in the Fulbright Specialist Program. His research is in the philosophy of technology, communication theory, and media ethics. A Festschrift Ethics and Evil in the Public Sphere has been published in his honor. He is a founding member of the International Ethics Roundtables with venues in Stellenbosch, Dubai, Delhi, and Beijing. He has lectured or given papers or taught classes in thirty-five countries. He is listed in Whos Who in America, Whos Who in the World, International Whos Who in Education, and Outstanding Scholars of the 21st Century: Communication Ethics. The Carl Couch Center for Social and Internet Research offers annually the Clifford G. Christians Ethics Research Award. He has been given academic awards such as these: Ethics Scholar Award (Lambda Pi Eta Honor Society, Duquesne University; the AEJMC Presidential Award for distinguished service and AEJMCs Paul J. Deutschmann Award for Excellence in Research; James A. Jaksa Ethics Scholar in Residence; Ralph Crossman and FIRST Scholar awards (University of Colorado); Fellow at the University of Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study; Honor Medal for Distinguished Service in Journalism (University of Missouri); Best Edited Book of the Year (with Lee Wilkins, Handbook for Media Ethics); Kappa Tau Alpha Award for Normative Theories of the Media; Distinguished Scholar Award from the National Communication Association; James W. Carey Media Research Award; First Place Faculty Research Paper award (with Stephen Ward, from Media Ethics Division, AEJMC); Louis Forsdale Award as Outstanding Educator in the Field of Media Ecology; Charles Colson Award for Outstanding Contribution to Ethics, Media and Culture; and the Guido H. Stempel III Award for Journalism and Mass Communication Research.

Philip N. Howard is a professor and author of seven books, including Democracy’s Fourth Wave? and The Digital Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy. He is a frequent commentator on the impact of technology on political life, contributing to Slate.com, TheAtlantic.com and other media outlets.

Victor Pickard is Associate Professor at the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania, where he co-directs the Media, Inequality & Change (MIC) Center. He is the author of America's Battle for Media Democracy and co-author of After Net Neutrality: A New Deal for the Digital Age.

Pippa Norris is Associate Director (Research), and Lecturer, John F. Kennedy School of Government, at Harvard University in the USA.

Louis Sandy Maisel L. Sandy Maisel is the William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Government and founding director of the Goldfarb Center for Public Affairs and Civic Engagement at Colby College, where he has taught since 1971. He is the author or editor of 17 books including American Political Parties and Elections: A Very Short Introduction and Evaluating Campaign Quality: Can the Electoral Process Be Improved? From Obscurity to Oblivion: Running in the Congressional Primary chronicled Maisel’s unsuccessful bid for the Democratic nomination for Congress in Maine’s First Congressional District in 1978. His published articles have appeared in many political science journals and anthologies, including the American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, the Journal of Politics, and the Legislative Studies Quarterly. Maisel has served as president of the New England Political Science Association, twice a member of the Council of the American Political Science Association, and chair of the APSA’s research sections that focus on Political Organizations and Parties and on Legislative Studies. Maisel and his wife, Patrice Franko, who is professor of economics and international studies at Colby, live in Rome, ME. http://www.politico.com/arena/bio/san...