UK Media Publications: 1986

Abstract

Quantity is more evident than quality in the 1986 crop of British media books. Chronic lack of funding and opportunities for serious long-term research into the media in universities, polytechnics and colleges is reflected in a general absence of sustained reflective work in the publishers' lists. Indeed the one media book published in the UK in 1986 which is stilt likely to be of indisputable value in 1996 is an American book, Roland Marchand's meticulous account of American advertising between 1920–40, Advertising the American Dream. It is, by some distance, the best media book of the year, though it is unlikely to shift perceptions of its subject as markedly as two outstanding earlier studies, Daniel Pope's The Making of Modern Advertising (1983) and Michael Schudson's Advertising, the Uneasy Persuasion (1984).