Several of the most important and influential political economists of communication working today explore a rich mix of topics and issues that link work, policy studies, and research and theory about the public sphere to the heritage of political economy. Familiar but still exceedingly important topics in critical political economy studies are well represented here: market structures and media concentration, regulation and policy, technological impacts on particular media sectors, information poverty, and media access. The book also features new topics for political economy study, including racism in audience research, the value and need for feminist approaches to political economy studies, and the relationship between the discourse of media finance and the behavior of markets.

Andrew Calabrese is associate professor of journalism and mass communication at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Colin Sparks is professor of media studies and director of the Communication and Media Research Institute of the University of Westminster.

Part 1 Part I Taking Stock of the Political Economy of Communication and Culture
Chapter 2 1 Toward a Political Economy of Culture
Chapter 3 2 The Rise of the Westminster School
Chapter 4 3 Making a Molehill out of a Mountain: The Sad State of the Political Economy in U.S. Media Studies
Part 5 Part II Capitalism, Communication, and the Public Sphere
Chapter 6 4 "The Marketplace of Ideas": A History of the Concept
Chapter 7 5 Capitalism and Communication: A New Era of Society or the Accentuation of Long-Term Tendencies?
Chapter 8 6Kugai: The Lost Public Sphere in Japanese History
Chapter 9 7 Truth Commissions, Nation Building, and International Human Rights: The South African Experience and the Politics of Human Rights Post-9/11
Part 10 Part III The Political Economy of Film and Broadcasting
Chapter 11 8 Show Me the Money: Challenging Hollywood Economics
Chapter 12 9 The Fight for Proportionality in Broadcasting
Chapter 13 10 Broadcasting and the Market: The Case of Public Television
Chapter 14 11 Living with Monsters: Can Broadcasting Regulation Make a Difference?
Part 15 Part IV New Media, the Information Society, and Other Obscure Objects
Chapter 16 12 Capitalism's Chernobyl? From Ground Zero to Cyberspace and Back Again
Chapter 17 13 New Media and the Forces of Capitalism
Chapter 18 14 Dismantling the Digital Divide: Rethinking the Dynamics of Participation and Exclusion
Chapter 19 15 Building the Information Society in EU Candidate Countries: A Long Way to Go
Chapter 20 16 Romanticism in Business Culture: The Internet, the 1900s, and the Origins of Irrational Exuberance
Chapter 21 17 The Impact of the Internet on the Existing Media
Part 22 Part IV Extending the Boundaries of Political Economy
Chapter 23 18 Audiences on Demand
Chapter 24 19 Feminist Theory and the Political Economy of Communication