Critical Explorations of Media and Inequality - (Discourse, Power and Society) by Majka Ryan & Martin J Power & Eoin Devereux (Hardcover)

About the Book

This book reveals how mainstream media both reflect and reinforce structural inequalities by obscuring systemic causes and framing those most affected.

Book Synopsis

Media discourses play a powerful role in shaping public understanding of inequality-yet they often obscure, distort, or individualize its causes.
Critical Explorations of Media and Inequality examines how mainstream media systems reproduce and legitimize unequal social structures by marginalizing, sensationalizing, or blaming those most affected. Bringing together leading and emerging scholars, this edited collection explores the persistent gaps, tensions, and ideological forces at work in media representations of class, poverty, homelessness, welfare, and immigration across diverse global contexts. Organized around the themes of changing media work practices, authoritative voices, representations, and implications, the chapters interrogate how neoliberalism and shifting journalistic norms continue to shape-and limit-the public conversation on inequality. Through rich empirical analysis and interdisciplinary insight, this volume offers a timely intervention into the politics of media framing and the structural silences that sustain social injustice.

Review Quotes

Against any presumption that the fragmentation of mass media and its audiences, the disorienting chatter of online platforms, or the decline of 'legacy' journalism might negate our capacity for critique, Critical Explorations of Media and Inequality calls our attention to the alwayspolitical character of the media and to diverse manifestations of its continuing power. Interdisciplinary and internationalist in spirit, contributions to this engaging volume highlight how inequality both constitutes andis constituted by our encounters with media. Embracing a plurality of contexts and actors-from local to global, from newsrooms to cinema, from soap operas to online and print outlets-it offers accessible and generative analyses of the contemporary politics of media access, representation and voice.
Rosie R. Meade, University College Cork, IRL

This book is both challenging and provocative. On the one hand, it makes us think deep and hard about inequality in the media space in ways that are not often thought of. On the other, it leaves us with the concerning anxiety about media dynamics in which inequality seems to be constantly misrepresented or obscured. It is a must read!
Jairo Lugo-Ocando, University of Sharjah, UAE

About the Author

Majka Ryan is associate professor in work and employment at the University of Limerick.
Martin J. Power is associate professor of sociology at the University of Limerick.
Eoin Devereux is professor of sociology at the University of Limerick.