MESSAGES THE WASHINGTON POST MEDIA COMPANION

The book you hold in your hand is unusual in mass communication education. Most compilations of articles on media are on the scholarly side, and while very useful, are somewhat removed from our daily experience of media. They are glances from afar. We set out to publish something closer to the action.

The mass media today have unprecedented impact on our daily lives. We are bombarded by messages of every sort: informative, entertaining, and most of all, persuasive. We are daily persuaded to buy something, vote for someone, or think a certain way about a company or an institution or a government. In the face of this saturation it is easy to become desensitized, to stop thinking clearly or critically about the messages we are asked to process. That is a mistake, particularly for the student of communication, who like all of us is a user of media, but who one day may also be one of its creators.