Professor of Media, Culture and Communication, New York University
Rodney Benson is Professor in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication and an affiliated faculty member in the Department of Sociology at New York University. He holds a PhD in sociology from the University of California, Berkeley.
He is the author of Shaping Immigration News: A French-American Comparison (Cambridge, 2013), winner of the 2014 AEJMC Tankard Book Award and the 2015 International Journal of Press/Politics Best Book Award. Silvio Waisbord, editor of the Journal of Communication, has praised the book as “a sophisticated, elegant, and evidence-packed cross-national analysis that will be a go-to reference for comparative media research.”
Benson is also editor (with Erik Neveu) of Bourdieu and the Journalistic Field (Polity 2005; Chinese translation 2017) and co-author (with Matthew Powers) of Public Media and Political Independence: Lessons for the Future of Journalism from Around the World (Free Press, 2011).
He is currently working on a new book, How Media Ownership Matters (Oxford, under contract), with Mattias Hesserus and Julie Sedel. Drawing on interviews and organizational data from Sweden, France, and the United States, the book goes beyond the standard media concentration debate to explore how different forms of media ownership (commercial, civil society, and public) facilitate different types of journalism.
Saving the news media means moving beyond the benevolence of billionaires
Feb 15, 2024 06:08 am UTC| Insights & Views
For the journalism industry, 2024 is off to a brutal start. Most spectacularly, the Los Angeles Times recently slashed more than 20% of its newsroom. Though trouble had long been brewing, the layoffs were...
The slippery slope of the oligarchy media model
Aug 13, 2017 23:27 pm UTC| Insights & Views
On July 28, Apple heiress Laurene Powell Jobs bought a majority stake in The Atlantic. Its the latest media purchase by the billionaire class, a group that includes Amazon founder Jeff Bezos (the Washington Post),...
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