Includes index

Contents: Media institutions: Key areas and their implications for understanding media -- Media texts: Features and deconstructions -- Audiences and effects: defining audiences and exploring their relationship with texts -- The Media and violence: Questioning violence: problems with measuring effects -- Women's magazines: Manufacturing a gendered space: questions of guilt and pleasure -- Popular music: questioning the popular, questioning control, questioning the global -- Approaches to film: The Missing British film industry: audiences, gazing and meanings -- The Media and new technology: The Effects and implications of technologies for the media and their consumption -- Advertising: Its relationship with the media audience: the consequences for society and culture -- Television soaps: The Question of the gendered audience: the nature of soap operas: the effects of soaps on TV drama -- News: Different kinds of news: constructing the world -- Sport and presentation: Media making meanings about sport: sport making meanings about ideology, race and gender -- Globalization and the media: Questions of power and of cultural exchange.