political book reviews — 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 – 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 – Lines of Attack: Conflicts in Caricature

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...]

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

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...]

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

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...]

Book Review – Explaining News

Explaining News. Cristina Archetti. New York, NY: Palgrave/Macmillan, 2010. 257 pp.

Cristina Archetti is a British political scientist with teaching experience in Washington and Amsterdam and an interest in international news. Explaining News is her ambitious study of eight newspapers in four countries that explores what shapes the news. The book, based on her Ph.D. thesis at the University of Leeds, is a tough read. It is clearly written, but densely packed with data, hypotheses, and theories. Advanced graduate students and faculty can perhaps fully appreciate it, especially for its wealth of data. [Read more...]

Book Review – War and the Media: Essays on News Reporting, Propaganda and Popular Culture

War and the Media: Essays on News Reporting, Propaganda and Popular Culture. Paul M. Haridakis, Barbara S. Hugenberg, and Stanley T. Wearden, eds. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, Inc., 2009. 265 pp.

A collection assembled under such a broad title might invite doubts as to coherence. Yet the editors, all of Kent State University, have meaningfully coordinated a thoughtful, critical volume of twelve U.S.-focused case studies. Part I focuses on images of war from music, photography, film, and animation, World War I to Vietnam. The theme of Part II is institutionalized propaganda of both world wars, covering advertising, comics, government discourses, and public relations. And Part III considers the effects of news coverage of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. [Read more...]