aejmc quarterly — AEJMC Hot Topics

Book Review – Winning with Words: The Origins and Impact of Political Framing

Winning with Words: The Origins and Impact of Political Framing. Brian Schaffner and Patrick Sellers, eds. New York, NY: Routledge, 2009. 200 pp.

With this book, political scientists Brian Schaffner and Patrick Sellers set out to bring some clarity to a set of issues that had troubled their own investigations into the nature of public opinion, public policy, and the role that message-framing might play in the process. They convened a conference of scholars at American University in 2007, and this unique little book is the result. In it, they and their contributors have managed to clarify some important distinctions between approaches to the study of elite framing strategy and practice, and those that are focused on understanding the factors that govern the impact of those frames on audiences, and on the policy process more generally. [Read more...]

Book Review – What Really Happened to the 1960s: How Mass Media Culture Failed American Democracy

What Really Happened to the 1960s: How Mass Media Culture Failed American Democracy. Edward P. Morgan. Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2010. 405 pp.

The late A. J. Liebling, press critic for The New Yorker, proclaimed from time to time that, “By not reporting there are a lot of things you can avoid finding out.” In this book, Edward P. Morgan, university distinguished professor of political science at Lehigh University, recounts what we avoided finding out about the 1960s and how that has shaped our stereotypes of the decade. This book is a must-read for journalists and journalism students not only because it tells us of important media history, but also because of the implications of that history for today. [Read more...]

Book Review – War with Mexico! America’s Reporters Cover the Battlefront

War with Mexico! America’s Reporters Cover the Battlefront. Tom Reilly, edited by Manley Witten. Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2010. 335 pp.

From the perspective of the early twenty-first century, the U.S. war against Mexico (1846-1848) is easy to overlook. It was a relatively short war, after all, pitting the nascent power of the United States against a divided Mexico and its irrepressible leader, Gen. Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna.

Yet the Mexican War looms large in the history of American war reporting as the first U.S. foreign conflict covered by an enterprising band of professional journalists and amateur correspondents. As documented by the late Tom Reilly, a journalism historian at California State University-Northridge, Mexican War reporting was an important test of American journalism’s newfound energy and its fraught relations with the military, issues that would surface in later U.S. wars. [Read more...]

Book Review – Terror Post 9/11 and the Media

Terror Post 9/11 and the Media. David L. Altheide. New York, NY: Peter Lang, 2009. 214 pp.

It has been a decade since that awful landmark day of smoke and fire that we now know as 9/11. Among other things that changed with those attacks in New York and Washington was a growing need to know more about “terrorism,” its perpetrators, what they hope to accomplish, and how they can be stopped.

The media, of course—oriented to either news or popular culture more generally—have played a substantial role in communicating what has been learned and what is still unknown. This is the focus of David L. Altheide’s latest study. [Read more...]

Book Review – Shadow of the Racketeer: Scandal in Organized Labor

Shadow of the Racketeer: Scandal in Organized Labor. David Witwer. University of Illinois Press, 2009. 336 pp.

The connection between organized crime and organized labor has long been a subject of contention among scholars of the history of the United States. The most recurrent narrative involves good men who rise through the ranks of labor only to be seduced by power and money, leading them to pair with ruffians. While the membership suffers and business owners tremble with fear, criminal enterprises are allowed to fester while an inert and ineffective government fails to curtail this menace. Only through the grace of crusading outsiders, such as journalists, will the corruption meet its end. [Read more...]

Book Review – Rude Democracy: Civility and Incivility in American Politics

Rude Democracy: Civility and Incivility in American Politics. Susan Herbst. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2010. 216 pp.

Like an exciting classroom discussion, Rude Democracy opens with the shock of a counterintuitive challenge. Author Susan Herbst suggests that the incivility so rife in our politics can be a valid tactic, and that condemning it outright is “banal and unsophisticated.”

From there, she constructs a nuanced argument that some incivility, but not too much, stimulates healthy debate. Rather than wasting time trying to drum it out of politics, she maintains, we should educate our students and citizenry to deal more thoughtfully with the inevitable discord. [Read more...]

Book Review – Representing Disability in an Ableist World: Essays on Mass Media

Representing Disability in an Ableist World: Essays on Mass Media. Beth A. Haller. Louisville, KY: The Advocado Press, 2010. 213 pp.

Sophisticated and highly readable, Representing Disability in an Ableist World is a work that can be appreciated both by those who are already familiar with disability studies scholarship concerning media and by those who are seeking a comprehensive introduction to it. Written by Beth A. Haller, a professor of journalism at Towson University as well as the author of the popular blog Media dis&dat (http://media-dis-n-dat.blogspot.com/), the work surveys important issues surrounding the representation of disability in culture. [Read more...]

Book Review – Reorienting Global Communication: Indian and Chinese Media Beyond Borders

Reorienting Global Communication: Indian and Chinese Media Beyond Borders. Michael Curtin and Hemant Shah, eds. Champaign, IL: University of Illinois, 2010. 328 pp.

The world is watching India and China, with their liberalized market economies, more than one billion people each, their ancient history with past glories and cultural riches; together, they are seen as formidable competition to the developed world. Yet books focusing on the mass media of these two Asian superpowers are scarce. One is Marcus Franda’s China and India Online: The Politics of Information Technology in the World’s Largest Nations (2002). There are books on media and information and communication technology in the Asian region generally, but most of these are already dated. After more than two decades of liberalization and market growth, the importance of measuring the media’s social and cultural impact in this important region cannot be overemphasized. [Read more...]

Book Review – Refiguring Mass Communication: A History

Refiguring Mass Communication: A History. Peter Simonson. Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press “History of Communications” series, 2010. 261 pp.

This is a rhetorical and historical study into what the term “mass communication” has meant since (and even well before) the term first appeared nearly a century ago.

A member of the University of Colorado communication faculty who began his academic work in religious studies and then turned to intellectual history, Peter Simonson organizes his argument around narrative accounts of five key figures and their own communicative worlds—three of them predating the modern conceptions of mass communication. Indeed, he redefines the very concept by using these significant but overlooked rhetorical episodes in its history. As he puts it in the introduction, his is a study of changes in “mass communication as a social concept, a rhetorical utterance, and a heterogeneous family of social forms.” [Read more...]

Book Review – Prime Time Prisons on U.S. TV: Representation of Incarceration

Prime Time Prisons on U.S. TV: Representation of Incarceration. Bill Yousman. New York, NY: Peter Lang, 2009. 200 pp.

In the last two decades of the twentieth century, the number of incarcerated Americans quadrupled, resulting in two million-plus citizens in prisons and jails. Bill Yousman, former managing director of the progressive nonprofit Media Education Foundation and now a lecturer in communications at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, takes the mass media to task over the invisibility of this vast population of prisoners. He situates the gap in the larger context of a critical social problem—the incarceration of millions nationwide—and the distortions that are rife in media representations of multiple aspects of crime in general. Analyzing both nonfiction (news) and fictional (drama) representations, he finds little to commend. [Read more...]