Political Economy of Mass Media,
A course at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona
Mariusz Ozminkowski, Ph.D.
mozminkowski@csupomona.edu
Blackboard @ CalPoly
Personal page
On Facebook
Required Textbooks:
Croteau, D & Hoynes, W. (2006). The Business of Media. Corporate Media and the Public Interest. 2nd Ed.
Leighley, J. E. (2004). Mass Media and Politics. A Social Science Perspective.
PowerPoint Presentations
From Croteau/Hoynes:
Chapter 1: Markets & Public interest
Croteau Chapters567 on one ppt
From Leighley:
Other:
EXAMINATIONS / REVIEWS
Final Exam Questions
VIDEOS:
Students from The India's Institute of Technology
You Tube
Malcolm
Gladwell on success
The Visionary: Jaron Lanier
A digital pioneer questions what technology has wrought
By Jennifer Kahn. The New Yorker
Lanier is often described as “visionary,” a word that manages to convey both a capacity for mercurial insight and a lack of practical job skills. In the nineteen-eighties, he helped pioneer the field of virtual reality, and he is often credited with having coined the term.... Last year, he published “You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto,” a provocative critique of digital technologies, including Wikipedia (which he called a triumph of “intellectual mob rule”) and social-networking sites like Facebook and Twitter, which he has described as dehumanizing and designed to encourage shallow interactions. Teen-agers, he writes, may vigilantly maintain their online reputations, but they do so “driven more by fear than by love.” In our conversation about Facebook’s face-recognition software, he added, “It’ll just create a more paranoid society with a fakey-fakey social life—much like what happened in Communist countries, where people had a fake social life that the Stasi could see, and then this underground life.”
Such objections have made Lanier an unusual figure: he is a technology expert who dislikes what technology has become. “I’m disappointed with the way the Internet has gone in the past ten years,” he told me at one point. He added, “I’ve always felt that the human-centered approach to computer science leads to more interesting, more exotic, more wild, and more heroic adventures than the machine-supremacy approach, where information is the highest goal.”
Read the entire article in The New YorkerThe future of news
The internet is taking the news industry back to the conversational culture of the era before mass media. The Economist July 7, 2011
A special report on the news industry
A little local difficulty
Reinventing the newspaper
The people formerly known as the audience
Julian Assange and the new wave
The Foxification of news
Coming full circle
University catalog: Political context of economic principles underwriting communications media. Historical and contemporary assessment of how economics of telecommunications, press, broadcasting, and the Internet interact with wider political processes, including legislative and regulatory agencies. Focus on U.S.based media; comparative international references.
1. Apply
key economic concepts to the analysis of media industries and operations
2.
Understand and critically analyze the contributions of
communications media and genres to domestic and
3.
Understand and exemplify the tripartite relationships between
economy, politics and the communications
4.
Cite significant legislation affecting the operations of media
industries, and understand the role of important
5.
Understand and apply key quantitative and qualitative
methodologies available for the political and economic
6.
Possess a critical understanding of how media economics impacts
media content, and the multi-variable ways
Suggested Books:
Robert W. McChesney (2008). The Political Economy of Media
Robert W. McChesney (2007). Communication Revolution. Critical Junctures and the Future of Media
Philip Meyer (2004). The Vanishing Newspaper. Saving Journalism in the Information Age.
Richard E. Caves (2000). Creative Industries. Contracts Between Art and Commerce.
Doris A. Graber (2002). Mass Media & American Politics.
David Halberstam (2000). The Powers That Be.
Material available on the Internet
The Grant Howell Legacy Symposium:
Examining Opinion and Bias in the News
The End of News? An article from The New York Review
Google: The Company's Daring Plan to Save the News. From The Atlantic June 2010
Rockonomics: Economics of Popular Music (full text) or see Excerpts
A report on nonprofit American theatre (2006)
Encyclopedia of Economics Online