This work features 40 selections on enduring intellectual value - classic articles, book excerpts, and research studies - that have shaped the study of mass media and our contemporary understanding of it. Included are carefully edited selections from the works of the most distinguished observers of the mass media, past and present, from Harold D. Lasswell, Hadley Cantril, and Neil Postman to Kathleen Hall Jamieson, Michael Eric Dyson, and Annette Kuhn.