The media in question - Kees L. K. Brants

This collection of innovative essays sets the agenda for a revitalized debate on the hybrid communicative practices that constitute the (post)modern media landscape and which cross the boundaries between fact and fiction, information and entertainment, public knowledge and popular culture.

In this challenging and provocative collection, the contributors rethink key issues - the meaning of the public interest, the quality of media performance and (de)regulation. In the process they raise topics rarely addressed in normative media theories, for example, the ethics of sports reporting, the moral reasoning in popular culture and the required professional standards for infotainment genres such as reality television and gossip journalism.

`The book brings together a diversity of opinions and approaches, few of them normative in a strict sense. Some clash, while some complement others. At any rate, this range provides the ammunition for debates among media theorists, students and citizen-consumer. Those who look into this collection will find diverse regulatory and moral issues historicized, as well as weighed for their value to current media challenges...the postmodernist authors offer promising, novel onsets for a media theorizing which believes in the crucial role of the media for democracy, irrespective of a survival of public broadcasting or public regulations of content' - European Journal of Cultural Studies