Introduction

A comparative approach to media and communication research plays an important, if not indispensable, role in achieving a core mission of researchers: to delimit the generality and specificity of media and communication theories, enabling researchers to more readily identify the influence of social, political and cultural contexts in shaping media and communication phenomena. To de-Westernize and internationalize media and communication studies has thus become the way forward for overcoming the parochialism of mainstream media and communication studies. This volume reflects on what comparative media and communication research has achieved or failed to achieve, the epistemological and theoretical challenges it is facing, and the new directions in which it should be heading.