Product Description

A powerful critique of American mass communications by a scholar who is also an experienced practitioner, Commercial Culture scrutinizes the mass media system and shows how it might be improved. Bogart highlights four trends that together sound an urgent call for reform: the blurring of distinctions among traditional media and between individual and mass communication; the increasing concentration of media control in a disturbingly small number of powerful organizations; the shift from advertisers to consumers as the source of media revenues; and the growing confusion of information and entertainment, of the real and the imaginary. The appetite for media, Bogart argues, differs from other demands the market is left to satisfy because it shapes the public's character and values. In this work he calls for a coherent national media policy, respectful of the American tradition of free expression, and subject to vigorous public debate.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #3000087 in Books
• Published on: 1996-05-30
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Dimensions: 1.50 pounds
• Binding: Hardcover
• 396 pages

Review

"Leo Bogart is one of those rare sociologists who have achieved recognition almost entirely outside the academic world....Commercial Culture...is wise, occasionally witty, eminently well informed, an acerbic compendium of up-to-date information on the American media system."--Contemporary Sociology
"Drawing upon both an immense experience and focussed social science research, Leo Bogart has long been our premier social critic of the mass media. Commercial Culture is by all odds the most deeply informed and telling critique of mass culture in this timid time of political correctitude."--Robert K. Merton, Columbia University
"Leo Bogart's Commercial Culture is a trenchant but hopeful critique of the media, sober and radical by turns, which reaffirms the public interest in mass communication. It is a product of wide learning, long study, and patient observation...the definitive book on commercial culture."--James W. Carey, Columbia University
"In today's culture, the media do

About the Author
Leo Bogart holds Doctorate in Sociology from the University of Chicago and has taught at New York University and Columbia University.