I grew up and went to school in San Diego, California. While writing my Ph.D. at the University of California in Sociology of Media, I tracked journalists as they gathered news about the civil war in El Salvador in the 1980s. That experience led to a life-long interest in the ways that media shape our perceptions of war and human suffering. My third book, A Century of Media, A Century of War, won the Alpha Sigma Nu Book Award in 2007. I still write about war, recently exploring the impact of war-themed video games on our culture. As a media critic, I write about controversial issues like propaganda, censorship, corporate centralization, advertising and hypercommercialism. Those topics and more are included in the two-volume reference book: Battleground the Media. Growing up in Southern California, I spent many hours in the surf, watching birds and looking for as many marine mammals as I could find. That inspired my latest writing about travel to the globe's most stunning natural areas, and finding ways we can make it more environmentally sustainable. Look for a new book on Ecotourism soon!