Rodney Benson

Rodney Benson is an American sociologist and professor of media, culture, and communication at New York University. He is also an affiliated faculty member in the NYU Department of Sociology and has been a visiting scholar or invited lecturer at universities in France (Institut d’etudes politiques, Toulouse; Ecole des hautes etudes en sciences sociales and CELSA-Sorbonne, Paris), Germany (Universities of Bremen, Munich, and Weimar), Denmark (Copenhagen Business School, Roskilde University), Finland (University of Helsinki), and Norway (Universities of Oslo and Bergen). Before joining the NYU faculty, he was an assistant professor of international communications and sociology at the American University of Paris. He holds a PhD in sociology from the University of California, Berkeley.

Work

Benson is a leading scholar of comparative news media systems, specializing in studies of journalism in the U.S., France, Norway, Denmark, and Sweden. His most recent book
Shaping Immigration News: A French-American Comparison
''(Cambridge University Press, 2013) offers a comprehensive portrait of French and American journalists in action as they grapple with how to report on the topic of immigration. Shaping Immigration News is winner of th

and the ttp://hij.sagepub.com/site/includefiles/2015BookAwardJune2015.pdf 2015 Sage International Journal of Press/Politics Book Award He also has written extensively about cultural globalization, the production of culture, alternative media, logics of media ownership, and the social theories of Pierre Bourdieu and Jürgen Habermas.

In 2011, Benson co-authored (with Matthew Powers) the policy repor
Public Media and Political Independence: Lessons for the Future of Journalism from Around the World
(Free Press).

He is the co-editor, with Erik Neveu, of Bourdieu and the Journalistic Field (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2005), a widely cited book that helped introduce the work of Pierre Bourdieu to media and communications research. Goldsmith’s-University of London professor Nick Couldry wrote of the book: “Media research inspired by field theory, when at its most original (as represented by many essays in this fine volume), is an indispensable tool for understanding any aspects of contemporary media we are all in Benson and Neveu’s debt for putting this tool into wider circulation.”. In spring 2017, Bourdieu and the Journalistic Field was translated into Chinese.

Benson is on the editorial board of several leading sociological and communication journals, including Poetics and the ''International Journal of Press/Politics''. His comparative media research has been featured in the ''Columbia Journalism Review'', on Jay Rosen’s Pressthink blog and on the website of the media reform organization Free Press.

Benson is a frequent contributor to '' Le Monde diplomatique'', writing on U.S. and French media and politics.

Benson received a “Top Paper” award at the International Communication Association’s annual conference in 2005 for a comparative study of the French and U.S. press (co-authored with UC-San Diego political scientist Dan Hallin, and subsequently published in the ''European Journal of Communication''). Benson is the recipient of a major research grant from the Axel and Margaret Ax:son Johnson Foundation to support study of forms of media ownership in the U.S., France, and Sweden.Institutional Forms of Media Ownership And Their Modes of Power
rodneybenson.org

Education

* Ph.D. Sociology at UC-Berkeley, 2000
* MA Sociology at UC-Berkeley, 1994
* MIA International Affairs at Columbia University, 1994
* BA Journalism and Mass Communications Iowa State University, 1983

Notable publications

*''Shaping Immigration News: A French-American Comparison'' (Cambridge University Press, 2013)
*(with Matthew Powers
Public Media and Political Independence
(Washington, DC: Free Press, 2011)
*"Quarante ans d’immigration dans les médias en France et aux Etats-Unis." Le Monde Diplomatique, May 2015
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*"Commercialism and Critique: California's Alternative Weeklies." In J. Curran and N. Couldry, eds., Contesting Media Power: Alternative Media in a Networked World (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003): 111-127.
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*(with Erik Neveu, Eds.) Bourdieu and the Journalistic Field (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2005).
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References

External links

Faculty Listing for Rodney Benson at NYU


Rodney Benson Personal Website

{{DEFAULTSORT:Benson, Rodney
Living people
New York University faculty
Iowa State University alumni
University of California, Berkeley alumni
School of International and Public Affairs, Columbia University alumni
American journalism academics
Year of birth missing (living people)