Communications and Development: The Relevance of Media Content.

The availability of the mass media, or at least the potential for widespread use of them, is one of the major factors that makes the development setting of today's poor countries radically different from that of the developed countries a century ago. This has been widely recognized and has led to attempts to integrate communications factors into general theories of development. It has resulted in what may be called positive, negative, and neutral orientations or theories, that are held implicitly and sometimes simultaneously by media scholars. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]