Journalism in Crisis: Corporate Media and Financialization. Núria Almiron, trans. by William McGrath. New York: Hampton Press, Inc., 2010. 212 pp.

This is the most important available analysis of the crisis of journalism, exhibiting critical skills of which alarmingly few North American analysts are capable. Núria Almiron is lecturer and researcher in communication at Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona. Her political economy approach goes well beyond the platitudes of death-by-Internet sermonizing, even beyond the themes of concentration and overreach so well-rehearsed by Robert McChesney. McChesney and Nichols (2010) regret the passing of a Golden Age that preceded advertising. For Almiron, journalism is in perpetual crisis, hapless child of bourgeois parents—freedom of the press as formulated in the Declaration of Rights of the State of Virginia (1776) and in the French Revolution’s Declaration of the Rights of Man (1789), eternally abused by the “instrumentalization” of dominant classes.  [Read more...]