Most complaints about the media are personal. Rupert Murdoch did this, Jayson Blair did that. But the most important -- and interesting -- questions are structural.

How can newspapers support increasingly expensive international coverage, when most keep losing readers?

How can a television station afford not to trumpet disasters and scandals on its local news, when competitors that do get higher ratings?

Does concentration of ownership really matter?

Is there any longer such a thing as a broad market for the news?

"The Creation of the Media" is so thick with detail and careful in nuance that it is completely convincing as a work of scholarship.