Selling the Air or Economics and the Law

Selling the Air: A Critique of the Policy of Commercial Broadcasting in the United States

Author: Thomas Streeter

In this interdisciplinary study of the laws and policies associated with commercial radio and television, Thomas Streeter reverses the usual take on broadcasting and markets by showing that government regulation creates rather than intervenes in the market. Analyzing the processes by which commercial media are organized, Streeter asks how it is possible to take the practice of broadcasting—the reproduction of disembodied sounds and pictures for dissemination to vast unseen audiences—and constitute it as something that can be bought, owned, and sold.
With an impressive command of broadcast history, as well as critical and cultural studies of the media, Streeter shows that liberal marketplace principles—ideas of individuality, property, public interest, and markets—have come into contradiction with themselves. Commercial broadcasting is dependent on government privileges, and Streeter provides a searching critique of the political choices of corporate liberalism that shape our landscape of cultural property and electronic intangibles.

Booknews

A sociological look at how the creation and maintenance of American commercial radio and television has been shaped by ideas about markets, property, individuals, social process, politics, work, and the home. Not an attack on commercial broadcasting, but an inquiry into the conditions under which the technical process of disseminating disembodied sounds and pictures can become a commodity to be bought, owned, and sold. The treatment also reflects on the meaning of the ideas that are so manifest. Paper edition (unseen), $16.95. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Table of Contents:

	Acknowledgments
	Introduction
1	The Fact of Television: A Theoretical Prologue	3
2	Liberalism, Corporate Liberalism	22
3	A Revisionist History of Broadcasting, 1900-1934	59
4	Inside the Beltway as an Interpretive Community: The Politics of Policy	113
5	Postmodern Property: Toward a New Political Economy of Broadcasting	163
6	"But Not the Ownership Thereof": The Peculiar Property Status of the Broadcast License	219
7	Broadcast Copyright and the Vicissitudes of Authorship in Electronic Culture	256
8	Viewing as Property: Broadcasting's Audience Commodity	275
9	Toward a New Politics of Electronic Media	309
	Index	329

Interesting book: The Ultimate Weight Solution Cookbook or Vice Busting Diet

Economics and the Law: From Posner to Post-Modernism

Author: Nicholas Mercuro

This is an expanded second edition of Nicholas Mercuro and Steven Medema's influential book Economics and the Law, whose publication in 1998 marked the most comprehensive overview of the various schools of thought in the burgeoning field of Law and Economics. Each of these competing yet complementary traditions has both redefined the study of law and exposed the key economic implications of the legal environment. The book remains true to the scope and aims of the first edition, but also takes account of the field's evolution.

At the book's core is an expanded discussion of the Chicago school, Public Choice Theory, Institutional Law and Economics, and New Institutional Economics. A new chapter explores the Law and Economics literature on social norms, today an integral part of each of the schools of thought. The chapter on the New Haven and Modern Civic Republican approaches has likewise been expanded. These chapters are complemented by a discussion of the Austrian school of Law and Economics. Each chapter now includes an "At Work" section presenting applications of that particular school of thought.

By providing readers with a concise, noncritical description of the broad contours of each school, this book illuminates the fundamental insights of a field with important implications not only for economics and the law, but also for political science, philosophy, public administration, and sociology.