The Media Revolution in America and Western Europe

Abstract

This wide-ranging and informative volume has two purposes, according to its editors, (Intro XI). They are: To familiarize North American communication researchers with European work; and to further the intellectual merger of empirical and critical approaches to communication studies. While these are admirable goals, the volume contributes to the former, but it not as convincing in championing the latter. It seems safer to assume with Steven Chaffee and John Hochheimer that "empirical research findings need to be interpreted in the context of the historical time and place in which the data were gathered," (290). and these social contexts remain vastly different in Canada, the United States and Europe.