This book is one of a series of five readers which provide a comprehensive series of resources for media studies courses. This first volume illustrates and exemplifies the variety of ways in which the mass media have been researched over the past fifty or more years. It provides extracts from seminal works and relates them to developments in the field as a whole and to later works. The volume identifies the major divisions within the field, including mass society theory, the media effects tradition, political economy, the public sphere, media occupations and professionals, cultural hegemony, feminism and 'new' audience research.