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‪Ronald N. Jacobs is Professor of Sociology at the University at Albany, State University of New York. He is co-editor of the American Journal of Cultural Sociology (Center for Cultural Sociology, Yale University). His research covers a wide terrain, ranging from studies of the social organization of the television news room, the history of African-American media, the differences between African-American and “mainstream” news coverage of racial crisis, the history and organization of opinion media, the relationship between news and entertainment media, and the cross-national comparison of different media systems. In this text, Ronald N. Jacobs describes four main premises that underlie his work: the symbolic dimensions of public arenas; the existence of multiple, overlapping publics; the role of media organizations; the importance of identities.