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Mass media plays a crucial role in information distribution and thus in the political market and public policy making. Theory predicts that information provided by mass media reflects the media's incentives to provide news to different types of groups in society, and affects these groups?influence in policy-making. We use data on agricultural policy from 60 countries, spanning a wide range of development stages and media markets, to test these predictions. We find that, in line with theoretical predictions, public support to agriculture is strongly affected by the structure of the mass media. In particular, a greater role of the private mass media in society is associated with policies which benefit the majority more: it reduces taxation of agriculture in poor countries and reduces subsidization of agriculture in rich countries, ceteris paribus. The evidence is also consistent with the hypothesis that increased competition in commercial media reduces transfers to special interest groups and contributes to more efficient public policies

This article focuses on recent trends in the Italian mass media. In broadcasting the first pirate stations challenged the RAI's monopoly in the first half of the 1970s. In the absence of a relevant law, chaos reigned, and gradually Fininvest, owned by Silvio Berlusconi, became the predominant protagonist in private television (in addition to being heavily involved in the media industry as a whole). The Constitutional Court repeatedly called for strict anti-trust measures. Finally, in 1990, parliament approved a new law which in fact merely confirmed the existing situation, i.e. the same company could control up to three national networks (in addition to having substantial interests in others). This law apparently contradicts the Constitutional Court's decisions. The article also analyses recent trends in the press and in the film industry, which, during the last decade, have also been subject to similar ownership concentration phenomena. In the words of a parliamentary commission `the current level of mass media concentration in Italy is now unparalleled in any other country with a market-based economy'.

Michael Massing argues that the news media is being adversely affected by the internet because of declining advertising revenue. As a result newspapers and television networks are cutting staff, especially foreign correspondents. The top-tier of newspapers has been adversely affected but second-tier newspapers like the Boston Globe and the Baltimore Sun have been devastated. As a result there is a greater reliance on fewer reporters and fewer areas of coverage. In order to increase revenues newspapers have begun to cater to affluent audiences. Thus, they have larger business section and fewer reports on poverty and labor/working class issues. Massing outlines some of the structural forces at work with reporting including the general gravitation pull to the political right as a result of constant attacks on the "liberal media" by pundits like Rush Limbaugh and Bill O'Reilly, the influence of public opinion on what gets investigate and how it is reported, and the over-reliance of the press on Washington insiders. He also takes up the reporting on Iraq and concludes that the internet cannot replace a large news organization with "deep pockets". Robert Scheer is not pessimistic about the media today because many forms of it have continued to sell like books and movies. Radio is also vibrant. He concedes that newspapers are in trouble and may need a new business model. Likewise, blogs and news aggregators like the Huffington Post and Truthdig are also trying to build economically viable ventures. Further, he argues that the internet has facilitated much more research, made access to news instantaneous and offered more perspectives on current events. He credits the media with ending the idea of US empire through exposing its costs, delegitimizing the idea of the US as a "city on a hill", and questioning the central role of markets in US society. He notes that there are a good many excellent journalists active today and journalism could be even better if academics wrote more broadly, if large corporations did not dominate the big media outlets, and if there was greater public control of the media. The accompanying audio files provide the complete recording of the two talks.

This article sets out to examine the linkages between the media and politics in Turkey. It argues that, rooted in the world of politics from the outset, Turkish media has always been marked by a high degree of political parallelism. As regulator and funder, the state, making up the political majority, exerted strong control over the media. In the 1990s, the shift to a globalized market and the explosive growth of private broadcasting did not decrease the high degree of political parallelism. Instead, it enabled media owners to use their media properties to intervene in political decisions that have a central role in capital accumulation. Today, deeply divided into two camps, media is the principal locus of bitter political strife.

Not a single mass medium sells its products or its services according to the principles involved in the laws of Supply and Demand or in the calculation of the different cost factors. The authors, who are both newspapermen and economists, urge more theory development in communications economics.

Media scholars as well as the public frequently use the terms "mass communication" and "mass media", but the meaning of these terms is often ambiguous. While it is assumed that everyone knows
what these terms mean, the few scholars who attempt to define these terms struggle to capture the essence of their meaning without including elements that are faulty, and this task is becoming even
more difficult in the new media environment. We are left with the troubling question: What are the "mass" media? This review constructs an answer to this question in a four step process. The first step features a critical analysis of the literature to identify definitional elements used by scholars. These definitional elements are subjected to four screens that evaluate their utility in a second step. The third step adds elements missing from the literature so as to make the eventual definition more useful in the new media environment. Finally, the fourth step features the construction of a working definition of "mass" media.

The objective of our work was to identify the role mass media play in crisis communication. We chose the "methanol affair" as an example of a crisis situation which seriously affected the health and lives of people. We wanted to find out whether there are links between the number of published articles and the subsequent volume of spirits sold during the crisis situation in the Czech Republic such as the methanol affair. We used regression analysis and established that the number of articles related to the methanol affair significantly influenced the sales of spirits. The publication of each article was followed by a decrease in sales of spirits and vice versa, i.e., following a decline in the number of articles, sale volumes went up. Negative consequences have also been reported by producers whose annual sales have fallen in a year-to-year comparison. Last but not least, the government also suffered a loss by collecting significantly less money from excise duty as well as other taxes (VAT, income tax). The role of mass media is crucial in crisis communication, businesses should not underestimate the cooperation with mass media and they should be the first to promptly inform the mass media so that they can maintain the confidence of consumers.