Steve Macek is professor and chair in the Department of Communication and Media Studies at North Central College. He teaches courses on media studies, film and TV criticism and digital communication as well as occasional courses in the area of urban studies. His research explores the politics, economics and history of the media broadly construed (newspapers, magazines, the publishing industry, television, radio, cable, film) with a special focus on media produced in and for large urban centers. He is the author of Urban Nightmares: The Media, the Right and the Moral Panic over the City (University of Minnesota Press, 2006), a critical analysis of media representations of American cities and the urban poor in the 1980s and 90s. His articles on Chicago’s radical and alternative press in the 1960s have been published in A.R.E.A. magazine and in the collection A Moment of Danger: Critical Studies in the History of US Communication since WWII (Marquette University Press, 2011). Macek is currently writing a book on the history of film censorship in Chicago and in 2014 co-curated an exhibition on the subject, Banned in Chicago: Eight Decades of Film Censorship in the Windy City, at the Museums at Lisle Station Park (Lisle, IL). Phone: 630-637-5369
The past decade has witnessed an upsurge of scholarship on the media that adopts an openly critic... more The past decade has witnessed an upsurge of scholarship on the media that adopts an openly critical, often self-consciously radical perspective. Judging from the ostensive political and theoretical commitments of the articles being published in the major media studies journals, it would seem that critical – as opposed to ‘administrative ’ – research is now a well-established presence in the field. Curiously, however, there is very little consensus among the growing army of critical media scholars about precisely what a radical or critical perspective on the media entails. Nearly everyone doing media studies these days claims to be ‘critiquing ’ the aesthetic, cultural and ideological dimensions of the phenomena that they study, yet often scholars disagree vehemently about what it is that makes this sort of work ‘critical’. Broadly speaking, critical media scholarship today falls into two different, diametrically opposed, camps. On the one hand, there is what might be labelled engage...
There is a timely and urgent need for a reasoned dialogue reassessing how Marxism can advance the... more There is a timely and urgent need for a reasoned dialogue reassessing how Marxism can advance the study of human communication and transform the social world in which it is embedded. Indeed, ongoing world-historical events -- including the vigorously organized market globalization, the corresponding insurgent global anticorporate movement, and the conflicts engendered by the U.S. invasion of Iraq -- have underscored the importance of a thorough critique of global capitalism and its telecommunication technologies and practices. This important new collection, featuring essays by leading scholars and practitioners, provides a much-needed overview and assessment of Marxism's significance to contemporary thinking in communication and media studies. Contributors demonstrate how a Marxist perspective can be usefully applied to specific case studies in communication, providing valuable insights and understandings that are not obtainable using other approaches.
Poverty is a persistent subject of news coverage. Whether as abject victims of disasters like Hur... more Poverty is a persistent subject of news coverage. Whether as abject victims of disasters like Hurricane Katrina, as beneficiaries of charity, or as the focus of social policy debates, the poor are recurring characters in journalism’s day-to-day narrative. More often than not, though, news media representations of the poor distort or obscure the structural causes of economic deprivation and promote elements of the dominant, neoliberal ideology. A number of scholars have studied how news coverage of poverty has contributed to public hostility to welfare programs, such as the now dismantled Aid to Families with Dependent Children (see, for instance, Gilens 1999). However, there has been a dearth of scholarly attention to how the dominant ideological motifs running through news coverage of poverty in advanced capitalist countries also shape the international news media’s representations of the poor in the Global South. In Blaming the Victim: How Global Journalism Fails Those in Poverty,...
There is a timely and urgent need for a reasoned dialogue reassessing how Marxism can advance the... more There is a timely and urgent need for a reasoned dialogue reassessing how Marxism can advance the study of human communication and transform the social world in which it is embedded. Indeed, ongoing world-historical events--including the vigorously organized market globalization, the corresponding insurgent global anticorporate movement, and the conflicts engendered by the US invasion of Iraq--have underscored the importance of a thorough critique of global capitalism and its telecommunication technologies and ...
The movies associated with the film noir revival of the 1990s have been distinguished both by the... more The movies associated with the film noir revival of the 1990s have been distinguished both by the heightened, often ironic self-consciousness with which they recycle noir conventions and iconography and by their willingness to indulge in ever more graphic, ever more shocking depictions of the violence and perverse sexuality that have long been central ingredients of the genre (Hirsch, Martin, Naremore). Like the dark thrillers of the 1940s and 50 s that they imitate, the neo-noir films of the past decade or so explore the seamy ...
The movies associated with the film noir revival of the 1990s have been distinguished both by the... more The movies associated with the film noir revival of the 1990s have been distinguished both by the heightened, often ironic self-consciousness with which they recycle noir conventions and iconography and by their willingness to indulge in ever more graphic, ever more shocking depictions of the violence and perverse sexuality that have long been central ingredients of the genre (Hirsch, Martin, Naremore).
This particular sequence isn't especially central to the action of the film whic... more This particular sequence isn't especially central to the action of the film which follows Sommerset and his new 30-something partner from" upstate," Detective David Mills (Brad Pitt), as they track the perpetrator of a series of demented, Biblically-inspired murders through a murky, rain-soaked metropo lis. In terms of the plot, the scene serves merely to convey the character of Sommerset from his apartment, where he restlessly ponders the exotic details of the killings, to the library where he does the research which eventually ...
The past decade has witnessed an upsurge of scholarship on the media that adopts an openly critic... more The past decade has witnessed an upsurge of scholarship on the media that adopts an openly critical, often self-consciously radical perspective. Judging from the ostensive political and theoretical commitments of the articles being published in the major media studies journals, it would seem that critical–as opposed to 'administrative'–research is now a wellestablished presence in the field. Curiously, however, there is very little consensus among the growing army of critical media scholars about precisely what a radical or ...
The past decade has witnessed an upsurge of scholarship on the media that adopts an openly critic... more The past decade has witnessed an upsurge of scholarship on the media that adopts an openly critical, often self-consciously radical perspective. Judging from the ostensive political and theoretical commitments of the articles being published in the major media studies journals, it would seem that critical – as opposed to ‘administrative ’ – research is now a well-established presence in the field. Curiously, however, there is very little consensus among the growing army of critical media scholars about precisely what a radical or critical perspective on the media entails. Nearly everyone doing media studies these days claims to be ‘critiquing ’ the aesthetic, cultural and ideological dimensions of the phenomena that they study, yet often scholars disagree vehemently about what it is that makes this sort of work ‘critical’. Broadly speaking, critical media scholarship today falls into two different, diametrically opposed, camps. On the one hand, there is what might be labelled engage...
There is a timely and urgent need for a reasoned dialogue reassessing how Marxism can advance the... more There is a timely and urgent need for a reasoned dialogue reassessing how Marxism can advance the study of human communication and transform the social world in which it is embedded. Indeed, ongoing world-historical events -- including the vigorously organized market globalization, the corresponding insurgent global anticorporate movement, and the conflicts engendered by the U.S. invasion of Iraq -- have underscored the importance of a thorough critique of global capitalism and its telecommunication technologies and practices. This important new collection, featuring essays by leading scholars and practitioners, provides a much-needed overview and assessment of Marxism's significance to contemporary thinking in communication and media studies. Contributors demonstrate how a Marxist perspective can be usefully applied to specific case studies in communication, providing valuable insights and understandings that are not obtainable using other approaches.
Poverty is a persistent subject of news coverage. Whether as abject victims of disasters like Hur... more Poverty is a persistent subject of news coverage. Whether as abject victims of disasters like Hurricane Katrina, as beneficiaries of charity, or as the focus of social policy debates, the poor are recurring characters in journalism’s day-to-day narrative. More often than not, though, news media representations of the poor distort or obscure the structural causes of economic deprivation and promote elements of the dominant, neoliberal ideology. A number of scholars have studied how news coverage of poverty has contributed to public hostility to welfare programs, such as the now dismantled Aid to Families with Dependent Children (see, for instance, Gilens 1999). However, there has been a dearth of scholarly attention to how the dominant ideological motifs running through news coverage of poverty in advanced capitalist countries also shape the international news media’s representations of the poor in the Global South. In Blaming the Victim: How Global Journalism Fails Those in Poverty,...
There is a timely and urgent need for a reasoned dialogue reassessing how Marxism can advance the... more There is a timely and urgent need for a reasoned dialogue reassessing how Marxism can advance the study of human communication and transform the social world in which it is embedded. Indeed, ongoing world-historical events--including the vigorously organized market globalization, the corresponding insurgent global anticorporate movement, and the conflicts engendered by the US invasion of Iraq--have underscored the importance of a thorough critique of global capitalism and its telecommunication technologies and ...
The movies associated with the film noir revival of the 1990s have been distinguished both by the... more The movies associated with the film noir revival of the 1990s have been distinguished both by the heightened, often ironic self-consciousness with which they recycle noir conventions and iconography and by their willingness to indulge in ever more graphic, ever more shocking depictions of the violence and perverse sexuality that have long been central ingredients of the genre (Hirsch, Martin, Naremore). Like the dark thrillers of the 1940s and 50 s that they imitate, the neo-noir films of the past decade or so explore the seamy ...
The movies associated with the film noir revival of the 1990s have been distinguished both by the... more The movies associated with the film noir revival of the 1990s have been distinguished both by the heightened, often ironic self-consciousness with which they recycle noir conventions and iconography and by their willingness to indulge in ever more graphic, ever more shocking depictions of the violence and perverse sexuality that have long been central ingredients of the genre (Hirsch, Martin, Naremore).
This particular sequence isn't especially central to the action of the film whic... more This particular sequence isn't especially central to the action of the film which follows Sommerset and his new 30-something partner from" upstate," Detective David Mills (Brad Pitt), as they track the perpetrator of a series of demented, Biblically-inspired murders through a murky, rain-soaked metropo lis. In terms of the plot, the scene serves merely to convey the character of Sommerset from his apartment, where he restlessly ponders the exotic details of the killings, to the library where he does the research which eventually ...
The past decade has witnessed an upsurge of scholarship on the media that adopts an openly critic... more The past decade has witnessed an upsurge of scholarship on the media that adopts an openly critical, often self-consciously radical perspective. Judging from the ostensive political and theoretical commitments of the articles being published in the major media studies journals, it would seem that critical–as opposed to 'administrative'–research is now a wellestablished presence in the field. Curiously, however, there is very little consensus among the growing army of critical media scholars about precisely what a radical or ...
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