Foreign Rights

Media holds an essential role in our democratic society: that of creating and protecting a venue for the public to engage in intelligent and meaningful debate. But under the pressure to turn a profit, journalistic practice is moving further and further away fromthis ideal. This aberration transforms the citizen into a stunned consumer of infotainment that no longer strives to do anything but capture a large enough audience to ensure as much advertising revenue as possible. This little five-step guide suggests a progressive criticismof the logic driving the world ofmedia. In the spirit of synthesis and popularization, the author employs a different theoretical device at each stage (such as those of Chomsky and Herman, Bourdieu, Gramsci). By way of successive recaps, this approach allows the reader to break out of the box and gradually amass an arsenal of tools with which to conduct their own media critiques.