Michael Schudson (born November 3, 1946)^{[citation needed]} is an American academic sociologist working in the fields of journalism and its history, and public culture.

He was brought up in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He has an undergraduate degree from Swarthmore College, and a doctorate in sociology from Harvard University. From 1976 he was assistant professor at the University of Chicago. In 1980 he joined the faculty of University of California, San Diego, where he was a Professor of Communication and Adjunct Professor of Sociology until 2009. He is currently a full-time faculty member of The Journalism School at Columbia University.

He received a MacArthur Foundation award in 1990.

In the mid 1980s Schudson used the term "capitalist realism" to describe mainstream practices in advertising. Chapter seven of Schudson's Advertisng: The Uneasy Persuasion compares the messages and appeals of advertising to those found in the Socialist Realism of the Soviet Union. In his account, the realism of advertising promotes a way of life based on private consumption, rather than social, public achievement.

Neil Postman (March 8, 1931 – October 5, 2003) was an American author, media theorist and cultural critic, who is best known by the general public for his 1985 book about television, Amusing Ourselves to Death. For more than forty years, he was associated with New York University. Postman was a humanist, who believed that "new technology can never substitute for human values."

Postman was born and spent most of his life in New York City. In 1953, he graduated from State University of New York at Fredonia where he played basketball. He received a master's degree in 1955 and an Ed.D in 1958, both from the Teachers College, Columbia University, and started teaching at New York University (NYU) in 1959. In 1971, he founded a graduate program in media ecology at the Steinhardt School of Education originally known as SEHNAP, School of Education, Health, Nursing, and Arts Professions, of NYU. In 1993 he was appointed a University Professor, the only one in the School of Education, and was chairman of the Department of Culture and Communication until 2002. Among his students were authors Paul Levinson, Joshua Meyrowitz, Jay Rosen, Lance Strate, and Dennis Smith. He died of lung cancer in Flushing, Queens on October 5, 2003.

Michael B. Oren (Hebrew: מיכאל אורן; born Michael Scott Bornstein; 1955) is an American-born Israeli historian, author, and the Israeli ambassador to the United States. He has written books, articles, and essays on Middle Eastern history, and is the author of the best-selling Power, Faith, and Fantasy: America in the Middle East: 1776 to the Present and Six Days of War: June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East, which won the Los Angeles Times History Book of the Year Award. He was a Distinguished Fellow at the Shalem Center in Jerusalem and a contributing editor to The New Republic and the Shalem Center's quarterly journal, Azure.

Oren was born Michael Scott Bornstein in upstate New York, the son of Marilyn (née Goldstein), a marriage and family therapist, and Lester Milton Bornstein, a hospital director. His father was an officer in the U.S. Army who took part in the D-Day invasion of Normandy in 1944 and fought in the Korean War. Oren grew up in West Orange, New Jersey in a Conservative Jewish household. As the only Jewish boy in a heavily Catholic neighborhood, he says he experienced antisemitism on a daily basis. In his youth, he was an activist in Zionist and Jewish youth groups such as USY and a gold medal winning athlete in the Maccabiah Games. At age 15, he made his first trip to Israel with youth movement Habonim Dror, working on Kibbutz Gan Shmuel.

Mary Sweeney (born January 1, 1953) is an American film editor and producer best known for collaborating with the avant-garde American film director, David Lynch. Sweeney worked with Lynch on several critically acclaimed films and television series, most notably as a film editor on the cult hits Twin Peaks, Lost Highway (1997), and Mulholland Drive (2001) for Lynch's Asymmetrical Productions company. She was the co-author, with John Roach, of The Straight Story (1999).

Sweeney was for many years a domestic partner with David Lynch. The couple married in 2006 but filed for divorce one month later, citing irreconcilable differences. Together the couple has one son, Riley Sweeney Lynch, born in 1992.

A long-time Hollywood resident, Sweeney is head of The Sullivan Canyon Riders Club, a Los Angeles-based equestrian club. The club has worked to prevent land used by equestrians from being sold to developers, an effort that was supported financially by well-known film director Steven Spielberg and actress Kate Capshaw.