Interviewed by Tom Goldstein, Professor of Journalism and Mass Communications and Director of Mass Communications Program.

Paul Starr is Professor of Sociology at Princeton University and co-editor of The American Prospect. He is the author of The Social Transformation of American Medicine, and winner of several awards including: the 1984 Pulitzer Prize for Nonfiction, Bancroft Prize in American History, C. Wright Mills Award, and James Hamilton Prize of the American College of Healthcare Executives.

Professor Starr’s new book, The Creation of the Media, was published by Basic Books in March 2004. A study of the shaping of communications in Europe and the United States from the seventeenth to the mid-twentieth centuries, the book argues that political decisions from the founding of the republic led to America’s comparative advantage in communications and to the American media’s considerable power.

Professor Starr has written extensively on American society, politics, and public policy. In 1990, with Robert Kuttner and Robert Reich, he co-founded The American Prospect, a liberal magazine about politics, policy, and ideas. Published quarterly in its early years, the magazine now appears monthly and has a print circulation of more than 50,000 as well as two active websites: www.prospect.org and www.movingideas.org.