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, Germany, Denmark, Finland, and Norway. 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 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 the and the . 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 the policy report . He is the co-editor, with Erik Neveu, of Bourdieu and the Journalistic Field, 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, is an indispensable tool for understanding : 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. He is a frequent contributor to Le Monde Diplomatique, writing on U.S. and French media and politics. He 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. 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.
Shaping Immigration News: A French-American Comparison
"Quarante ans d’immigration dans les médias en France et aux Etats-Unis." Le Monde Diplomatique, May 2015.
"Commercialism and Critique: California's Alternative Weeklies." In J. Curran and N. Couldry, eds., Contesting Media Power: Alternative Media in a Networked World : 111-127.
