The Media Concentration
The headquarters of The New York Times, Condè Naste Publishing, Time Warner, the Hearst Corporation, HarperCollins, Random House, Simon & Schuster, ABC, CBS, NBC, MTV, Fox News, HBO, and Comedy Central are within a fifteen minute walk from The King’s College’s classrooms in The Empire State Building. Saturday Night Live is broadcast from Rockefeller Center, 14 blocks away. The Daily Show, and Comedy Central are a little further: about a twenty minute walk. A third of independent movies in the United States are made in New York City. By any estimation, New York City is the media capital of the world.

PPE students have the option to concentrate in Media. A concentration at The King’s College consists of five courses that a student can take in addition to the PPE major. The Media Concentration focuses on the history, economics, and cultural and political influence of mass communication. The PPE Concentration in Media is not technical training in media production. Rather it offers students the opportunity to examine in some depth what the media are and how they shape our society.

The media play a complicated role in our society, ostensibly informing and entertaining the public, but also helping to set the agenda for national discussion, persuading us as to what is important, and, more subtly by shaping our tastes. The media also reinforce one another. Oprah’s book choices on television sell far more copies of a book than does a favorable review in The New York Times Book Review. Movie soundtracks popularize singers and singers popularize movies. The Internet has become a place where many people respond to the other media with their personal comments on the news, music, movies and books.

To study the mass media, in other words, is to examine our society’s conversation with itself. The Media Concentration develops a student’s skill at listening in on that conversation and understanding how it relates to our public choices. It also trains students to analyze how our public policies in turn shape and re-shape the media. How should the government award access to the limited airwaves? Should telephone and cable companies have free access to each others’ primary markets?

The Media Concentration begins in the fall of the sophomore year with The Enterprise of Media, which examines the history of mass media from Gutenberg’s invention of movable type up to today’s media conglomerates. In the spring semester, Media students take Theories of Mass Communication, which explores how mass media create audiences. In the fall of the junior year, Media students take Media and Popular Culture, a course that illuminates how ideas spread and tastes develop in mass society. In the spring of the junior year, students take Media and Politics, which explores topics such as campaign ads, political blogging, and media bias. The final course in the Media Concentration is Emerging Media taken in the senior year, which focuses on the latest technologies and their applications.

Throughout the five courses, students in the Media Concentration meet journalists, writers, editors, TV and film producers, and other figures who work in the media in New York.