Quarterly Spring 2011 — AEJMC Hot Topics

Book Review – War at the Wall Street Journal: Inside the Struggle to Control an American Business Empire

War at the Wall Street Journal: Inside the Struggle to Control an American Business Empire. Sarah Ellison. New York, NY: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Inc., 2010. 274 pp.

The sale of the Wall Street Journal in 2007 was a major news event, and rightly so. After all, the newspaper had (and still has) the largest circulation of any daily newspaper in the United States. Founded in 1889, it soon came to be recognized as the nation’s preeminent business publication. When it was sold by the Bancroft family, which held a controlling interest, the buyer was perhaps the best-known and most controversial figure in modern journalism: Rupert Murdoch, the owner of global media giant News Corporation. Many of the circumstances surrounding the sale only added to the story’s appeal.

Vanishing Act: The Erosion of Online Footnotes and Implications for Scholarship in the Digital Age. Michael Bugeja and Daniela V. Dimitrova. Duluth, MN: Litwin Books, 2010. 86 pp.

This book addresses an emerging issue in scholarship with some solid research by the authors, not speculation. Bugeja is director and Dimitrova a faculty member in the Greenlee School of Journalism and Communication at Iowa State University.

The issue is what happens to citations of online sources in journal articles. The title suggests many disappear. The authors address the question in two ways. They checked all the online sources mentioned in ten communication journals between 2000 and 2003. They also interviewed the editors of these journals about the question of vanishing cited sources. They asked about how often editors thought online sources were cited, how important they thought they were, and how much of a problem they thought vanishing sources were.

TV News Anchors and Journalistic Tradition: How Journalists Adapt to Technology. Kimberly Meltzer. New York, NY: Peter Lang, 2010. 215 pp.

Their audience may be declining—and old enough that most advertisers avoid appearing on their programs—but we can’t seem to read enough about television network evening news anchor people. Over the years, they have been subject to their own shelf of analytic studies, let alone show-business gossip.

Comes now Kimberly Meltzer, a visiting professor at Georgetown University, with a revision of her Annenberg School (Pennsylvania) dissertation to add to the accumulation.

Science for All: The Popularization of Science in Early Twentieth-Century Britain. Peter J. Bowler. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2009. 339 pp.

The central question raised by Science for All concerns the assumed decline of working scientists writing for the popular press after the Victorian Age in Britain. Observers of the history of science have noted that once scientists became professionalized around the turn of the twentieth century, they lost interest in writing for popular consumption and the field was taken over by journalists. Through extensive research and a good deal of meticulous detective work, Peter Bowler, a professor of the history of science at Queen’s University, Belfast, has collected a substantial body of evidence and builds a strong case that writing for the popular audience by working scientists was alive and well during the first four decades of the twentieth century.

Routledge Handbook of Applied Communication Research. Lawrence R. Frey and Kenneth N. Cissna, eds. New York, NY: Routledge, 2009. 670 pp.

I don’t understand what the intended market for this book is. The word “handbook” in the title suggests it might be used in an introductory graduate research methods course. A handbook usually tells you how to do something. This book doesn’t.

The editors are, respectively, professors of communication at the universities of Colorado and South Florida. They both are winners of the Gerald M. Phillips Award for Distinguished Applied Communication Scholarship presented by the National Communication Association. They have collected thirty-five co-authors of the twenty-four chapters that make up this “handbook,” mostly faculty members in communication or communication studies programs.

The Rise of 24-Hour News Television: Global Perspectives. Stephen Cush-ion and Justin Lewis, eds. New York, NY: Peter Lang, 2010. 350 pp.

Well before arrival of the Internet, 24/7 news from satellite and cable television services transformed public perception of what news is. Starting with CNN in mid-1980, no longer did we have to await evening television newscasts or the morning paper—we could see and hear about breaking news just as it happened. Now taken for granted by a new generation, many of us still remember the wonder of obtaining what James Curran calls “disposable news” at any hour of the day—or night.

This anthology of seventeen essays examines the first two decades of twenty-four-hour news from a variety of viewpoints and countries, assessing both its content and its impact.

Right of the Dial: The Rise of Clear Channel and the Fall of Commercial Radio. Alec Foege. London: Faber and Faber, Inc., 2008. 320 pp.

If Enron represented “extreme capitalism” whose hubris brought it crashing to the ground in 2001, its equivalent in finance was Lehman Brothers, which imploded in 2008. In radio, it was probably Clear Channel Communications. These corporate histories bear testimony to the ugliness of greed, and offer only weak hope that unregulated recklessness will surely stumble and fall.

Founded in 1972, and later to become America’s fourth largest media conglomerate, rivaling NBC and Gannett, Clear Channel passed from public ownership in 2008 (though subject to the executive leadership of co-founder Lowry Mays and his sons Mark and Randall) into the hands of two private equity firms, Bain Capital Partners and Thomas H. Lee Partners. Early in 2010, the company flirted with bankruptcy, crippled by the debt of the 2008 buy-out; the decline in radio listenership in the wake of MP3, iPod, and mobile devices; and the fall in advertising revenue after the 2008 economic crisis.

Reinventing Public Service Television for the Digital Future. Mary Debrett. Bristol, England: Intellect, 2010. 253 pp.

There has been considerable ink spent in recent years bemoaning the dour outlook of traditional public service television broadcasting in the face of growing competition from digital commercial services. Mary Debrett, a senior lecturer in media studies at La Trobe University in Melbourne, takes a different tack to that competition by examining in some detail the ongoing story of six major public service broadcasters in four countries.

Chapters deal with Britain (the BBC, of course, but also Channel Four), Australia (ABC as the national broadcaster, and SBC, the Special Broadcasting Service, which centers on indigenous people), the United States (the Public Broadcasting Service), and New Zealand (Television New Zealand). Such a choice is obviously quite narrow—all these countries speak (largely) English and are industrial democracies. Inclusion of such developing regional powers as Brazil, India, or perhaps South Africa might have produced more generalizable results.

On the Front Lines of the Cold War: An American Correspondent’s Journal from the Chinese Civil War to the Cuban Missile Crisis and Vietnam. Seymour Topping. Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 2010. 435 pp.

This book should be required reading for all journalism students and international policymakers.

More than ever in this age of social media, we need good role models for what real reporters and editors do. It would be hard to find a better one than Seymour Topping—and there is much that those who make America’s international policies can learn from a man who witnessed firsthand many of America’s worst blunders in dealing with international crises in the last half of the twentieth century, and who in this book is willing to tell the truth about them.

The Nightly News Nightmare: Media Coverage of U.S. Presidential Elections, 1988-2008. (3d ed.) Stephen J. Farnsworth and Robert Lichter. Boulder, CO: Rowman and Littlefield, 2010. 246 pp.

The conclusion I draw from this updated edition of the classic work by Stephen Farnsworth and Robert Lichter, both of George Mason University, is that the free-to-air U.S. television networks long ago reneged on the deal implied but ill-articulated by the 1936 Communications Act that, in return for free access to publicly owned spectrum, these advertising-driven operations would deliver a news product that served citizenship and democracy.

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Book Review – War at the Wall Street Journal: Inside the Struggle to Control an American Business Empire

Book Review – Vanishing Act: The Erosion of Online Footnotes and Implications for Scholarship in the Digital Age

Book Review – TV News Anchors and Journalistic Tradition: How Journalists Adapt to Technology

Book Review – Science for All: The Popularization of Science in Early Twentieth-Century Britain

Book Review – Routledge Handbook of Applied Communication Research

Book Review – The Rise of 24-Hour News Television: Global Perspectives

Book Review – Right of the Dial: The Rise of Clear Channel and the Fall of Commercial Radio

Book Review – Reinventing Public Service Television for the Digital Future

Book Review – On the Front Lines of the Cold War: An American Correspondent’s Journal from the Chinese Civil War to the Cuban Missile Crisis and Vietnam

Book Review – The Nightly News Nightmare: Media Coverage of U.S. Presidential Elections, 1988-2008