Alarming Reports: Communicating Conflict in the Daily News. Andrew Arno. New York, NY: Berghahnbooks, 2009. 216 pp.
Based on an unusual anthropological approach, Alarming Reports offers sharp insights into the dynamics of the news as it moves through complex social systems. The first published monograph in the University of Hawaii’s new Anthropology of Media series, Andrew Arno’s work contributes to a new media anthropology. The book thus is part of advancing the theory of media and communication studies in ways that dovetail with cultural activism (e.g., Ginsburg, 2008), transnational media (e.g., Mankekar, 2008), and so forth. However, Arno goes beyond these methods by deploying an anthropological approach to news as a special speech genre. Alarming Reports is thus refreshingly original, and deserves the special attention of media and communications scholars. [Read more...]
