Media and social inequality: Innovations in community structure research

Abstract

John Pollock has established a well-earned reputation as a productive scholar who believes that undergraduates can contribute to knowledge at the same time they are learning about the role that the media of communication play in shaping and reflecting the communities in which they will live. Professor Pollock routinely gives credit to an army of students at The College of New Jersey who have collaborated with him over the years in carving out a special niche in the literature on the relations between community structure and news media content. He does so again in his somewhat unusual introduction to this edited volume. It is unusual because it includes yet another example of Pollock's research; a test of 11 hypotheses about media coverage of the Occupy Wall Street movement, before and after the group's eviction from Zuccotti Park in New York City. Although Media and Social Inequality was originally published as a special issue of Mass Communication and Society, Pollock's expanded introduction and an analysis of newspaper coverage of the universal health insurance mandate written by Pollock and two of his former students are original contributions to this volume. The other six chapters cover a range of topics from an examination of community, or structural pluralism as a contribution to media and social theory, to a set of recommendations about how agenda-setting and community-structure approaches might be merged.

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