Our world is dependent on broadcast media, and the more rapid our lives change, the more we depend on impersonal and mass-produced flows of information. Mr. Shawcross gives a deep look into the world of information flow, a flow that is not manipulated by evil, maniacs, but rather a world of flow that is about making money for owners and investors of information service providers. Presenting both the history of commercial media development and also interpretation of the personalities involved, I highly recommend this book to see beyond the hysteria of anti-media communications and see that one person can make a difference in how information is procured, packaged, and sold.
A few of my favorite quotes are:
--the new world favors those who pursue policies of which the traders approve.
--The Disruption of 1843 had little to do with theology. It was the culmination of 130 years of a bitter dispute in which the English crown had sought to control the Scottish Church by the appointment of ministers loyal to London. In the early nineteenth century a new generation of younger, more radical men had emerged in the Church of Scotland; they were known as "the wild party," or "the popular party," or the Evangelicals. Ecclesiastically and theologically conservative, yet socially and politically liberal (and some of the downright radical), they hated the controls imposed by London through the Scottish lairds.
--Free Church ministers and elders like James Murdoch tended to be active, hard-headed, well-educated, practical men who knew how to make money and how to use it wisely.
--The debate on the free flow of information would be settled by engineers, not by politicians. Governments would not for long be able to conceal the evidence of their crimes.
--"The very existence of new information channels, operating in real time and across all frontiers, will be a powerful influence for civilized behaviour. If you are arranging a massacre, it will be useless to shoot the cameraman who has so inconveniently appeared on the scene. His pictures will already be safe in the studio five thousand miles away and his final image may hang you."
--Information was being presented as entertainment.
--A really integrated media company has to be in the production of entertainment. It also has to be in news reporting.
--Nations are now increasingly defined by the extent to which knowledge is a tradable commodity in their economies.

This is not a great, classic book, but it does give valuable snippets of how global media systems operate and manipulate and are manipulated.