The period marks a decisive shift toward treating media as culture, with emphasis on power, identity, and technological mediation shaping public interpretation. Framing analysis and the circuit of culture emerge as central analytic tools, linking production, representation, consumption, and regulation across media artifacts and audiences. Methodological pluralism expands to include textual analysis, audience studies, and production perspectives, uniting cultural and political communication inquiries. Historical Significance: These developments furnish durable frameworks that structure later media scholarship, enabling cross-domain inquiry into how cultural processes organize attention, fear, and policy discourse within media ecosystems.