Book Review[s] – News at Work & News Talk

October 26, 2011 By Leave a Comment
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News at Work: Imitation in an Age of Information Abundance. Pablo J. Boczkowski. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2010. 272 pp.


News Talk: Investigating the Language of Journalism. Colleen Cotter. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2010. 294 pp.

Many studies of the cultural and sociopolitical effects of news stories tend to ignore the journalistic practices that have produced those texts, focusing on larger structures of power and domination. Both of these books rebalance the equation by highlighting instead how daily routines in newsrooms determine the selection, narrative, and presentation of news stories—routines that are increasingly shaped not only by professional practices but also by journalists’ expectations of what the public wants to read.  [Read more...]

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Book Review – The New York Times Reader: Science and Technology

October 26, 2011 By Leave a Comment
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The New York Times Reader: Science and Technology. S. Holly Stocking and the Writers of The New York Times. Washington, DC: CQ Press, 2011. 258 pp.

As a veteran of home ownership and the frequent repair of vehicles, buildings, toys, and appliances, I have a sizable collection of tools in my garage. I have organized those tools, some of which I know how to use, into separate toolboxes according to the job they would be used for. There are boxes for plumbing, electrical, mechanical, and general, so when the inevitable household disaster strikes, the appropriate box can be quickly located and delivered to the scene. Knowledge of which tools to keep in each box, as well as how to use them, came from a wide variety of experiences with my father, my father-in-law (who knows everything—just ask him), and my own trials and frequent failures.  [Read more...]

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Book Review – Media, NASA, and America’s Quest for the Moon

October 26, 2011 By Leave a Comment
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Media, NASA, and America’s Quest for the Moon. Harlen Makemson. New York, NY: Peter Lang Publishing, Inc., 2009. 272 pp.

Harlen Makemson has written a thorough and well-researched history of America’s lunar program through three perspectives. The charge given the National Aeronautics and Space Administration at its birth in 1958 was to provide “the widest practicable and appropriate dissemination of information concerning its activities.” But the agency had no guidelines for how to accomplish that goal. Makemson, an associate professor in the School of Communications at Elon University, details some of the internal battles within the agency and between its early public relations apparatus and the press as NASA struggled to find a balance between information control and transparency. During some early crises, critics charged that NASA actually stood for “Never A Straight Answer.”  [Read more...]

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Book Review – Lines of Attack: Conflicts in Caricature

October 25, 2011 By Leave a Comment
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Lines of Attack: Conflicts in Caricature. Neil McWilliam, ed. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010. 86 pp.

What a hoot this is! Illustrated in color and black and white, Lines of Attack is a catalogue of an exhibition of journalistic caricature as a medium of political commentary held at Duke University’s Nasher Museum of Art in the first half of 2010.  I only wish I’d seen that display. Dick Cheney and former President George Bush (the younger), both widely represented here, can be glad they didn’t.

McWilliam, who teaches art and art history at Duke, along with several student contributors from Duke and the nearby University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, range widely over two specific periods of graphic political expression to demonstrate that while artistic methods and techniques change, some of the basic visual “skewering” process remains much the same. Leaders have always been ridiculed in a variety of ways, some more obvious and blatant than others.  [Read more...]

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Book Review – Journalists in Film: Heroes and Villains

October 25, 2011 By Leave a Comment
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Journalists in Film: Heroes and Villains. Brian McNair. Edinburgh, UK: Edinburgh University Press, 2010. 256 pp.

It’s no news to anyone who watches movies that journalism is a perennial and popular subject. Tales of intrepid investigative reporters working the mean streets at home or in exotic locations abroad, and who overcome countless obstacles as they doggedly seek the truth are, as Brian McNair observes in Journalists in Film: Heroes and Villains, inherently dramatic. Toss in compelling—if flawed—personalities to add some human interest, and you have a recipe for cinematic success.

You also have a useful—if also flawed—teaching tool. I have included popular films in both my media law and media ethics classes for many years. Although some purport to be docudramas adopting a serious and reverential tone—All the President’s Men (1976) and Good Night, and Good Luck (2005) immediately come to mind—many are unabashed comedies. Even though no one would take literally the satire of His Girl Friday (1940), films with humor appeal to students, and can, by eliciting laughter, prompt thoughtful discussion and debate.  [Read more...]

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Book Review – International Blogging: Identity, Politics, and Networked Publics

October 25, 2011 By Leave a Comment
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International Blogging: Identity, Politics, and Networked Publics. Adrienne Russell and Nabil Echchaibi, eds. New York, NY: Peter Lang, 2009. 205 pp.

Everybody (or so it seems) writes them and presumes that somebody beyond family and close friends just might read them. Blogs have become the most democratic of media, with their low entry costs and widespread free distribution, although our understanding of their audiences and impact is a mite constricted.

This new study approaches blogs globally, and explores the way blogging is being conceptualized across and within different countries. Russell teaches digital media studies at the University of Denver, while Echchaibi is at the University of Colorado-Boulder.  [Read more...]

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Book Review – Intellectuals Incorporated: Politics, Art and Ideas Inside Henry Luce’s Media Empire

October 25, 2011 By Leave a Comment
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Intellectuals Incorporated: Politics, Art and Ideas Inside Henry Luce’s Media Empire. Robert Vanderlan. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010. 384 pp.

This is a study about the intellectual tensions that filled the editorial side of Henry Luce’s Time, Fortune, and, to a much lesser degree, Life magazines. It is a study of self-defined intellectuals and how they operated within Luce’s control from the 1920s to the 1950s and eventually broke free—though often later fibbing about why they had really left the well-paying jobs they held with Luce’s magazines.  [Read more...]

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Book Review – Identity Games: Globalization and the Transformation of Media Cultures in the New Europe

October 25, 2011 By Leave a Comment
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Identity Games: Globalization and the Transformation of Media Cultures in the New Europe. Anikó Imre. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009. 257 pp.

Though it has now been more than two decades since the fall of the Iron Curtain, many of us still have little knowledge about life or media in Central or Eastern Europe—let alone experience. Identity Games should help fill that gap, as author Anikó Imre examines the corporate transformation of the post-communist media landscape in the region.

Avoiding both uncritical techno-euphoria and the nostalgic projections (by some) of a simpler and thus better media world under communism, Imre, a faculty member at the University of Southern California’s School of Cinema Arts, argues that the demise of Soviet-backed regimes and the transition to transnational capitalism have had crucial implications for understanding the relationships among growing nationalist pride, media globalization, and identity.  [Read more...]

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Book Review – A History of Communications: Media and Society from the Evolution of Speech to the Internet

October 25, 2011 By Leave a Comment
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A History of Communications: Media and Society from the Evolution of Speech to the Internet. Marshall T. Poe. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2011. 337 pp.

This has all the signs of becoming a very important book in the field, possibly a landmark study, though such global judgments will have to await both further time and more critical reaction. In any case, understand that this is by no means just another standard media history book.

A professor of history at the University of Iowa with a number of books about Russian history to his credit, Poe has developed a new theoretical approach to the wide sweep of communications change from initial efforts at speech to the present digital era.  [Read more...]

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Book Review – The Frontier Newspapers and the Coverage of the Plains Indian Wars

October 25, 2011 By Leave a Comment
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The Frontier Newspapers and the Coverage of the Plains Indian Wars. Hugh J. Reilly. Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2010. 162 pp.

Nineteenth-century U.S. press culpability in encouraging heavy-handed military solutions regarding the troublesome Plains Indians is always worth a study. In a word, then, Hugh J. Reilly’s The Frontier Newspapers and the Coverage of the Plains Indian Wars is best described as useful.

Reilly, an associate professor of communication and Native American studies at the University of Nebraska at Omaha, has collected newspaper accounts and editorials of nearly thirty years of press coverage of what he calls “watershed” events involving primarily Sioux, Cheyenne, and Nez Perce Indians, and their tragic relationships with the U.S. government.  [Read more...]

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