Doctor of Philosophy Sociology at University of California-Berkeley, 2000
Master of Arts Sociology at University of California-Berkeley, 1994
Master of International Affairs International Affairs at Columbia University, 1994
Bachelor Journalism and Mass Communications Iowa State University, 1983.
He is also an affiliated faculty member in the New York University Department of Sociology and has been a visiting scholar or invited lecturer at universities in France (Institut d’etudes politiques, Toulouse. Ecole des hautes etudes en sciences sociales, Paris), Germany (Universities of Bremen and Weimar), Denmark (Copenhagen Business School, Roskilde University), and Norway (University of Oslo). Before joining the New York University faculty, he was an assistant professor of international communications at the American University of Paris.
Benson is a leading scholar of comparative news media systems, specializing in studies of journalism in the United States., France, and other western European countries.
His most recent book offers a comprehensive portrait of French and American journalists in action as they grapple with how to report on the topic of immigration. He also has written extensively about news coverage of cultural globalization, alternative media, and the social theories of Pierre Bourdieu and Jürgen Habermas.
He is the co-editor, with Erik Neveu, of Bourdieu and the Journalistic Field (Cambridge, United Kingdom: Polity), a widely cited book that helped introduce the work of Pierre Bourdieu to media and communications research. Goldsmith’s-University of London professor Nick Couldry wrote of the book: “Media research inspired by field theory, when at its most original (as represented by many essays in this fine volume), is an indispensable tool for understanding: we are all in Benson and Neveu’s debt for putting this tool into wider circulation.” Benson is on the editorial board of the International Journal of Press/Politics.
His comparative media research has been featured in the Columbia Journalism Review, on Jay Rosen’s Pressthink blog and on the website of the media reform organization Free Press.
Benson is the recipient of a major research grant from the Axel and Margaret Ax:son Johnson Foundation to support study of forms of media ownership in the United States., France, and Sweden.
He received a “Top Paper” award at the International Communication Association’s annual conference in 2005 for a comparative study of the French and United States. press (co-authored with University of California-San Diego political scientist Dan Hallin, and subsequently published in the European Journal of Communication).
“Bringing the Sociology of Media Back In.” Political Communication, 21 (2004): 275-292. View
A Case Study of French and United States. Immigration News Coverage.” International Journal of Press/Politics, 15, 1 (2010): 3-24.
