Media and Democracy. James Curran. New York, NY: Routledge, 2011. 260 pp. $125 hbk. $44.95 pbk.James Curran, professor of communication and director of Leverhulme Media Research Center at Goldsmith's, University of London, is editor for Routledge Communication and Society Series. Both series and Curran's recent contribution reflect broad scope of his longstanding cultural, historical, and theoretical oversight of field. Although Media and Democracy is primarily a collection of previously published essays and research reports, Curran has made an exemplary and quite successful effort to bring them up-to-date with retrospective assessments at ends of these chapters.The book is divided into five sections that are devoted to cross-national media comparisons, media and democratic theory, new technology, and historical and cultural frameworks for analysis. Understandably, book's attention is concentrated on media in United Kingdom and Europe more generally, but evolution of media systems and institutions in United States also figures quite prominently.Indeed, book begins with a chapter devoted to assessing contributions that American media experiment has made to ways that media and democracy have developed around world. Curran offers high praise for leadership role that American prestige journalism has played, not only at home, but also as a standard against which much of tabloid media and partisan press in Europe and Asia could be compared. Although Curran also credits this journalistic tradition with serving as a model for improving journalism in newly emerging nations, he takes due note of more recent withering of those standards in face of increasing commercialization and concern about performance of media stocks as investments.On occasion, Curran's approach to comparative media analysis takes form of a critical assessment of cornerstone products of other scholars' work. One example is his dissection of Daniel Hallin and Paolo Mancini's erstwhile replacement for Four Theories of Press as the bible of media studies. Noting acclaim that Comparing Media Systems has received, Curran then compares its construction of Liberal Model with similar constructions within Harry Potter novels. In his view, both are intellectually creative but convenient fictions nonetheless. His major criticism is a suggestion that Hallin and Mancini overstate political independence of US media system, while essentially ignoring inequality that he sees as characteristic of its unique form of marketplace democracy.While delivery of pointed criticism of scholarly reflections is undoubtedly a part of his strength, Curran and his colleagues have provided a number of empirically based assessments of consequences that flow from trying to make sense of world through filtered lenses of different media systems. …