Advocacy Groups and the Entertainment Industry

Michael Suman has brought together wide-ranging viewpoints of media advocates, media lawyers, academics, and entertainment industry representatives who examine the important public policy issue of how advocacy groups affect the entertainment industry.

In the first part of the book, representatives from media advocacy groups, including Action for Children's Television and Population Communications International, look at their efforts to utilize the media for policy purposes. In the second part, attorneys specializing in communications look at the ways advocacy groups have been aided as well as hindered by changes in the laws and public policy. Changes in advocacy groups as well as the entertainment industry in general are examined by various scholars in the third section. Representatives of the entertainment industry look at the impact of advocacy groups in the fourth section of the book. Scholars as well as public policy makers and those involved in entertainment oversight will find this a provocative analysis.

MICHAEL SUMAN is Research Director of the UCLA Center for Communication Policy. He has served as project coordinator of the Center's television violence monitoring project and has coauthored several nationwide surveys. Among Professor Suman's earlier publications is Religion and Prime Time Television (Praeger, 1997).

GABRIEL ROSSMAN formerly researcher at the UCLA Center for Communication Policy, where he coauthored the Center's panel survey on the social impact of the Internet. He is currently a graduate student in the Princeton University Department of sociology where he studies the sociology of culture.