Book Review – Art and Freedom of Speech

October 20, 2011 By Leave a Comment
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Art and Freedom of Speech. Randall P. Bezanson. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2009. 313 pp.

Art has frequently caused firestorms of scandal in a context of sex, impiety, or cultural irreverence—think Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain (1917), Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ (1987), or Kurt Westergaard’s Muhammad (2005). Art’s abstract or subjective nature has complicated legal categorization; First Amendment scholars have engaged a social notion of art, but few have displayed author Randall P. Bezanson’s felicity with complex legal theory, which he discusses fluidly, or his deep compassion for human creativity. [Read more...]

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Book Review – Arguing for a General Framework for Mass Media Scholarship

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Arguing for a General Framework for Mass Media Scholarship. W. James Potter. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2009. 416 pp.

James Potter has undertaken a monumental task: He sought to create a framework for the whole of mass media research.

The author, a professor in the Department of Communication at the University of California-Santa Barbara and former editor of The Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media, began this effort by reading and rereading the literature of the field for a decade. Then he began writing to bring what he had read into focus. This book is the ninth major revision of his first effort to make sense of the field. [Read more...]

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Book Review – America’s First Network TV Censor: The Work of NBC’s Stockton Helffrich

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America’s First Network TV Censor: The Work of NBC’s Stockton Helffrich. Robert Pondillo. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2010. 255 pp.

A member of the media faculty at Middle Tennessee State University, Pondillo relates the story of probably the best known (though today, largely forgotten) man who was the prime gatekeeper over what could appear or be discussed on NBC’s television network during its first dozen years. From the network’s start in 1948 until 1960, Helffrich’s word was law concerning the broad acceptability of program or advertising content.  [Read more...]

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Book Review[s] – Abolition and the Press & Horace Greeley’s New-York Tribune

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Abolition and the Press: The Moral Struggle Against Slavery. Ford Risley. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2008. 248 pp.

Horace Greeley’s New-York Tribune: Civil War-Era Socialism and the Crisis of Free Labor. Adam Tuchinsky. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009. 336 pp.

The Civil War era continues to be one of the most prolific fields of study in journalism history. These two books significantly advance scholarship and teaching—one with a compact survey of the abolitionist press, a crucial early success in the history of American advocacy journalism, and the other with a detailed research monograph about Horace Greeley’s socialism, an often glossed-over facet of one of the most influential U.S. editors.  [Read more...]

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