Perseus Academic: Connecting Social Problems and Popular Culture by Karen Sternheimer

"In this well researched book, Karen Sternheimer gives lie to a full spectrum of false fears about the effects of popular culture on young people. She provides valuable correctives to innumerable myths promulgated by opportunistic politicians, advocacy groups, and journalists."
—Barry Glassner, University of Southern California; author of The Gospel of Food and The Culture of Fear

"The media and popular culture are routinely blamed for causing all the ills of the modern world. Karen Sternheimer’s book shows how blaming the media distracts attention from the real problems that affect young people today, and prevents us from understanding how they use the media in their everyday lives. Clearly written and powerfully argued, this book deserves a wide readership well beyond the academy."
—David Buckingham, Institute of Education, University of London

"Sternheimer delivers a scholarly, highly readable debunking of the enthroned culture-war herd's facile blaming of ‘pop culture’ and ‘the media’ for everything about today’s richly diverse young people the fear-mongers don’t like. Sternheimer articulately challenges those who care about youth to stop letting perpetual panics over fictional bogeys obscure genuine threats like poverty, abuse, inequality, and rising anxiety toward healthy social change."
—Mike Males, YouthFacts.org

"In Connecting Social Problems and Popular Culture, Karen Sternheimer delivers a necessary synthesis, with a devastating media analysis, in response to the prevalent cottage industry of exaggeration, myth, and invention about popular culture’s impacts on youth behavior. And in layering a critique of society, class, and race over actual evidence she produces a work of great value to those working with or teaching about youth."
—Anthony Bernier, San Jose State University

"Sternheimer unpacks the media's penchant for sensationalizing and misdirecting public discourse about the real causes of poverty, disease, materialism, sexual license and substance abuse. … Revealing how frequently—and perniciously—social research is manipulated, Sternheimer demonstrates how to hold the media accountable while addressing the more entrenched and salient problem of child poverty that she believes is to blame."
—Publishers Weekly

“The author cautions against focusing on the media as predator and turns readers’ attention to themselves and the society they create around and conceivably ‘for’ their children and families to better grasp how people create and perpetuate social problems. Well researched, with an attention to policy details, this book helps debunk the notion that media is the cause of society’s ills. Highly recommended.” —Choice