Leisure and mass communications have an established and increasingly intimate relationship. The two institutions have developed in parallel and in consort, with communication across time and space essential to the popularization and extension of leisure structures and practices, and the media constituting important sites of leisure in their own right. This chapter will, therefore, focus on two key aspects of the leisure—mass communications nexus. First, it will examine the uses of media as forms of leisure activity such as watching television and film; reading newspapers, magazines and books; listening to recorded music and radio; and ‘surfing’ the internet. Here it can be seen that mass communications and leisure are virtually inseparable in the contemporary world — to the consternation of those who see in this trend a threat to ‘serious’ and ‘healthy’ forms and values of leisure. But the apparatus of mass communications also sometimes takes leisure as its object — the leisure of looking at leisure. Second, therefore, the representation of leisure in the media will be considered and analysed as it appears in such forms as tourist brochures and leisure advertisements, and leisure-oriented television programmes and internet sites. Leisure is also represented and scrutinized, more critically, by the media as a social object in relation to such phenomena as health, the body, sexuality, deviancy, violence, labour, idleness and so on. Here media representations of leisure are the means to the exploration of social issues and, frequently, constructed as opportunities for what Cohen (1980: xx) describes as ‘moral entrepreneurship’, whereby a social problem is identified and solutions proposed under conditions of a self-sustaining ‘moral panic’.