Quarterly Winter 2010 — AEJMC Hot Topics

Book Review – When Religion Meets New Media

When Religion Meets New Media. Heidi A. Campbell. New York, NY: Routledge, 2010. 232 pp.

Computers had scarcely been networked before users began to use them for religious reasons. In 1983, religious discussions so dominated the miscellaneous discussion group section of Usenet that net.religion was set up as a forum for exchanges on religious and ethical subjects. Net.religion begat net.religion.jewish and then net.religion.christian. Ecunet, H-Judaic, and BuddhaNet followed. A variety of cyberchurches and cybertemples emerged soon thereafter. Many believers encountered networked computers and saw that they were good.

Of course, religious communities do not always embrace new communication technologies. As late as 1957, the president of evangelical Houghton College proclaimed, “Christians do not attend the movies.” An evangelical minister thirty years later decried television as unwholesome and addictive in his remarkably entitled booklet, “What Jesus Taught About Television.” Some Amish still limit their access to telephones by sharing community telephones located in shanties at the intersection of several farms.

Watchdog Journalism: The Art of Investigative Reporting. Stephen J. Berry. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2009. 304 pp.

Even seasoned journalism instructors with substantial industry experience face the same problem year after year—how can journalistic writing, particularly about complex topics, be “taught?” Having students read example after example of interpretive stories, investigative stories, or other samples of long-form journalism — complete with discussion — seems like the simplest way, although many students quickly get bored with this case-study approach.

Television Truths: Forms of Knowledge in Popular Culture. John Hartley. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2008. 290 pp.

John Hartley’s name has been on the short list of influential television studies scholars for over thirty years. He has held numerous academic posts and is now distinguished professor, Australian Research Council Federation Fellow, and research director of the Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation at Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia. He has earned the right to use a similarly authoritative and profound primary title for his most recent book.

What is “truth” with regard to a medium? In Television Truths, Hartley addresses the TV via lenses of epistemology, ethics/politics, aesthetics, and metaphysics. He does so by dividing the book into four parts, each headed by a question: Is TV true? Is TV a polity? Is TV beautiful? What can TV be? While perhaps not entirely or definitively answered, they are the types of questions that cut to the very core of television’s being. Hartley covers both the breadth and depth in an eminently portable book.

Sourcing the News: Key Issues in Journalism — An Innovative Study of the Israeli Press. Zvi Reich. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 2009. 244 pp.

As a cynical academic, I admit I become suspicious when an author feels compelled to use the subtitle of his/her book to state how original or “innovative” the study is. Surely show-don’t-tell applies to academic writing, too? In this case, however, the book fully lives up to the title. This is truly an innovative study, and it tackles one of the key issues of journalism studies — journalist-source relations — in a comprehensive, never-seen-before fashion.

Skyful of Lies and Black Swans: The New Tyranny of Shifting Information Power in Crises. Nik Gowing. Oxford, UK: Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, 2009. 84 pp. £13 pbk. Free download from http:// reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/ publications/risj.html.

Nik Gowing’s career as a media professional, pundit, and scholar gives his insights into how news works considerable credibility. In this 2009 paper for the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, the longtime BBC commentator wonders and wanders through new media’s impact on public policy, and ponders “the new fragility and brittleness” of social institutions. Are government, military, and corporate bosses powerless or ineffectual when what Gowing calls “fast proliferating and almost ubiquitous breed of ‘information doers’” can set and frame the debate before the institutions of power can in gear?

Satire TV: Politics and Comedy in the Post-Network Era. Jonathan Gray, Jeffrey P. Jones, and Ethan Thompson, eds. New York, NY: New York University Press, 2009. 283 pp.

Humor is delicate to dissect. If you explain a joke, it may cease to be funny and the humor falls apart. But taking apart satire leads to understanding humor’s critical capacity to attack and disarm its subjects. This is especially true when it comes to the politically and socially oriented humor addressed in Satire TV. Dissecting satire—and similar humor tropes such as parody and irony —requires careful work. And the editors as well as authors of this collection do just that, working to understand satire as a form of critique, as challenger to the status quo of news and politics, and as contributor to political and civic discourses.

The Routledge Companion to News and Journalism. Stuart Allen, ed. New York, NY: Routledge Publications, 2010, 642 pp.

This is an important as well as very substantial and valuable undertaking—a multi-national (and multi-author) scholarly survey of the whole academic field of journalism studies. With no fewer than fifty-six papers in seven categories, the majority written by researchers outside the United States, this is a comprehensive assessment of what we know about the fast-changing state of journalism here and abroad. Coverage is wide, indeed, such that the main section headings can only suggest the real breadth of this compilation. Documentation is thorough as well.

The Restructuring of Scholarly Publishing in the United States, 1980-2001: A Resource-Based Analysis of University Presses. Barbara G. Haney Jones. Lewiston, ME: Edward Mellen Press, 2009. 452 pp.

Of interest to serious researchers who may be seeking to get their monographs accepted by a good academic press, this study may open some eyes, for all is not well in the world of scholarly publishing. But it must be said at the outset that to some extent this is a book of history.

Note the dates in the title—most of the discussion here predates the full impact of the Internet on publishing. Further, many of the trends described here have greatly expanded over the years since—the decline in library book-buying, for example. So the detailed discussion, based on data largely from the mid-1990s, has a rather quaint feel to it a decade and more later. Add in the recent economic slump, and the book seems even more outmoded. That is not to say, however, that it has little value.

Remote Relationships in a Small World. Samantha Holland, ed. New York, NY: Peter Lang, 2008. 296 pp.

One need only read collections of historic written correspondence (such as the letters exchanged between Abigail and John Adams around the time of the American Revolution) to realize that the phenomenon of “remote relationships” is by no means a product of the Internet age, or even the Industrial Age. Until the advent of relatively rapid transit in the twentieth century, many people around the world established and maintained relationships via letters (pen pals, letters from home, love letters, care packages, etc.) and, later, electronic communication such as the telephone, two-way radio, and even recorded messages on tape or video mailed to others. But there is no question that the Internet has dramatically expanded and enhanced remote relationships in the twenty-first century, and the advent of online virtual communities and social networking sites has made remote relationships nearly ubiquitous in the lives of many. And that is why Remote Relationships in a Small World offers a good starting point for scholars wanting to conduct research into online relationships.

Public Relations and Social Theory: Key Figures and Concepts. Øyvind Ihlen, Betteke van Ruler, and Magnus Fredriksson, eds. New York: NY: Routledge Publications, 2009. 376 pp.

The editors of this much-needed book have set forth to conquer a challenging task: to break public relations free from what some see as an intellectual silo and place both the practice and study of public relations into a larger context. By encouraging interdisciplinarity in the study of public relations, they have both acknowledged the increasing role of public relations in our society, and suggested a way that we can study how the practice of public relations affects our world.

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Book Review – When Religion Meets New Media

Book Review – Watchdog Journalism: The Art of Investigative Reporting

Book Review – Television Truths: Forms of Knowledge in Popular Culture

Book Review – Sourcing the News: Key Issues in Journalism

Book Review – Skyful of Lies and Black Swans

Book Review – Satire TV: Politics and Comedy in the Post-Network Era

Book Review – The Routledge Companion to News and Journalism

Book Review – The Restructuring of Scholarly Publishing in the United States, 1980-2001

Book Review – Remote Relationships in a Small World