New Books in Journalism: Recent Episodes
Marshall Poe
Interview with Scholars of Journalism about their New Books Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
Bookshop.org is an online book retailer that donates more than 80% of its profits to independent bookstores. Launched in 2020, Bookshop.org has already raised more than $27,000,000. In this interview, Andy Hunter, founder and CEO discusses his journey to creating one of the most revolutionary new organizations in the book world. Bookshop has found a way to retain the convenience of online book shopping while also supporting independent bookstores that are the backbones of many local communities. Andy Hunter is CEO and Founder of Bookshop.org. He also co-created Literary Hub. Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
How did the first newspaper in Macau come into being? What was the first foreign language newspaper on Chinese soil about? How was the dynamic between the Chinese and Portuguese press in the former Portuguese colony and now China’s Special Administrative Region? Hugo Pinto speaks about A Abelha da China (A Bee from China), the first newspaper in Macau, operated from September 1822 to August 1823. In a conversation with Joanne Kuai, PhD candidate at Karlstad University, Sweden, and an affiliated PhD student at NIAS, Hugo Pinto speaks about the book project on A Abelha da China to commemorate it 200th anniversary. Co-edited with Duarte Drumond Braga, the book A Abelha da China nos seus 200 Anos. Casos, Personagens e Confrontos na Experiência Liberal de Macau (The China Bee in its 200 Years. Cases, Characters and Confrontations in the Liberal Experience of Macau) was published by the Scientific and Cultural Center of Macau in 2022. Reflecting the complete historical background of its time, A Abelha da China would be taken up by other political agents. However, its legacy of insubordination would eventually live on. A newspaper that served as an official bulletin, and also as an arena for political confrontation, did not neglect a cultural and even literary dimension, as it carried within itself the mission of instructing its readers and denouncing the absolutist tyranny that, later, in reflux, would take over the newspaper itself. The Nordic Asia Podcast is a collaboration sharing expertise on Asia across the Nordic region, brought to you by the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies (NIAS) based at the University of Copenhagen, along with our academic partners: the Centre for East Asian Studies at the University of Turku, Asianettverket at the University of Oslo, and the Stockholm Centre for Global Asia at Stockholm University. We aim to produce timely, topical, and well-edited discussions of new research and developments about Asia. About NIAS: http://www.nias.ku.dk/ Transcripts of the Nordic Asia Podcasts: http://www.nias.ku.dk/nordic-asia-podcast Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
In this 2014 episode from the Institute’s Vault, we hear from Betty Medsger. Medsger was a Washington Post reporter in March 1971, and received a cache of stolen FBI files that detailed the elaborate surveillance activities the bureau was using against Vietnam war protesters and others whom J. Edgar Hoover deemed “subversive.“ All Medsger knew about the documents was that they had been stolen by a group of anonymous individuals who called themselves the Citizens Commission to Investigate the FBI. In 2014, she revisited the story in her book, The Burglary: The Discovery of J. Edgar Hoover's Secret FBI (Vintage, 2014). In it, she tells the story of an unlikely group of academics and ordinary citizens who broke into a suburban FBI office and shed light on the way the intelligence community was spying on its own citizens. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
Undaunted: How Women Changed American Journalism (Knopf, 2023) is a representative history of the American women who surmounted every impediment put in their way to do journalism's most valued work. From Margaret Fuller's improbable success to the highly paid reporters of the mid-nineteenth century to the breakthrough investigative triumphs of Nellie Bly, Ida Tarbell, and Ida B. Wells, Brooke Kroeger examines the lives of the best-remembered and long-forgotten woman journalists. She explores the careers of standout woman reporters who covered the major news stories and every conflict at home and abroad since before the Civil War, and she celebrates those exceptional careers up to the present, including those of Martha Gellhorn, Rachel Carson, Janet Malcolm, Joan Didion, Cokie Roberts, and Charlayne Hunter-Gault. As Kroeger chronicles the lives of journalists and newsroom leaders in every medium, a larger story develops: the nearly two-centuries-old struggle for women's rights. Here as well is the collective fight for equity from the gentle stirrings of the late 1800s through the legal battles of the 1970s to the #MeToo movement and today's racial and gender disparities. Undaunted unveils the huge and singular impact women have had on a vital profession still dominated by men. Jane Scimeca is Professor of History at Brookdale Community College. @JaneScimeca1 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
On today’s podcast, we are changing things up a bit. Instead of interviewing the author of a recent book, I am interviewing another podcaster about their recent narrative podcast season. So, today, I’m interviewing Joel Anderson, staff writer at Slate, co-host of Hang Up and Listen, and the host of Seasons 3, 6, and, most recently, 8 of Slow Burn. On this episode, I chop it up with Joel about Season 8 of Slow Burn, titled, Becoming Justice Thomas. Adam McNeil is a Ph.D. Candidate in History at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
When Russian President Vladimir Putin launched his unprovoked, full-scale invasion of Ukraine just before dawn on 24 February 2022, it marked his latest and most overt attempt to brutally conquer the country, and reshaped the world order. Christopher Miller, the Ukraine correspondent for the Financial Times and the foremost journalist covering the country, was there on the ground when the first Russian missiles struck and troops stormed over the border. But the seeds of Russia's war against Ukraine and the West were sown more than a decade earlier. This is the definitive, inside story of its long fight for freedom. Told through Miller's personal experiences, vivid front-line dispatches and illuminating interviews with unforgettable characters, The War Came To Us: Life and Death in Ukraine (Bloomsbury, 2023) takes readers on a riveting journey through the key locales and pivotal events of Ukraine's modern history. From the coal-dusted, sunflower-covered steppe of the Donbas in the far east to the heart of the Euromaidan revolution camp in Kyiv; from the Black Sea shores of Crimea, where Russian troops stealthily annexed Ukraine's peninsula, to the bloody battlefields where Cossacks roamed before the Kremlin's warlords ruled with iron fists; and through the horror and destruction wrought by Russian forces in Bucha, Bakhmut, Mariupol, and beyond. With candor, wit and sensitivity, Miller captures Ukraine in all its glory: vast, defiant, resilient, and full of wonder. A breathtaking narrative that is at times both poignant and inspiring, The War Came To Us is the story of an American who fell in love with a foreign place and its people - and witnessed them do extraordinary things to escape the long shadow of their former imperial ruler and preserve their independence. AJ Woodhams hosts the "War Books" podcast. You can subscribe on Apple here and on Spotify here. War Books is on YouTube, Facebook and Instagram. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
As television began to overtake the political landscape in the 1960s, network broadcast companies, bolstered by powerful lobbying interests, dominated screens across the nation. Yet over the next three decades, the expansion of a different technology, cable, changed all of this. 24/7 Politics: Cable Television and the Fragmenting of America from Watergate to Fox News (Princeton UP, 2023) tells the story of how the cable industry worked with political leaders to create an entirely new approach to television, one that tethered politics to profits and divided and distracted Americans by feeding their appetite for entertainment--frequently at the expense of fostering responsible citizenship. In this timely and provocative book, Kathryn Cramer Brownell argues that cable television itself is not to blame for today's rampant polarization and scandal politics--the intentional restructuring of television as a political institution is. She describes how cable innovations--from C-SPAN coverage of congressional debates in the 1980s to MTV's foray into presidential politics in the 1990s--took on network broadcasting using market forces, giving rise to a more decentralized media world. Brownell shows how cable became an unstoppable medium for political communication that prioritized cult followings and loyalty to individual brands, fundamentally reshaped party politics, and, in the process, sowed the seeds of democratic upheaval. 24/7 Politics reveals how cable TV created new possibilities for antiestablishment voices and opened a pathway to political prominence for seemingly unlikely figures like Donald Trump by playing to narrow audiences and cultivating division instead of common ground. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
Photography matters, writes Jerry Thompson, because of how it works--not only as an artistic medium but also as a way of knowing. With this provocative observation, Thompson begins a wide-ranging and lucid meditation on why photography is unique among the picture-making arts. In Why Photography Matters, he constructs an argument that moves with natural logic from Thomas Pynchon (and why we read him for his vision and not his command of miscellaneous facts) to Jonathan Swift to Plato to Emily Dickinson (who wrote "Tell all the Truth but tell it slant") to detailed readings of photographs by Eugène Atget, Garry Winogrand, Marcia Due, Walker Evans, and Robert Frank. Forcefully and persuasively, he argues for photography as a medium whose business is not constructing fantasies pleasing to the eye or imagination, but describing the world in the toughest and deepest way. Jerry L. Thompson is a working photographer who also writes about photography. He worked as Walker Evans’s principal assistant from 1973 to Evans’s death in 1975. He is the author of The Last Years of Walker Evans and Truth and Photography. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
British Hong Kong was a historical anomaly in the Cold War. It experienced no "hot war" or organized movement for independence, and yet it was a key battlefield of Asia's cultural Cold War thanks largely to its unique location right next to Mao's China. The large influx of filmmakers, writers, and intellectuals from the mainland after 1948-1949 made the colony a hub of mass entertainment and popular publications in the region. Po-Shek Fu’s book Hong Kong Media and Asia’s Cold War (Oxford University Press, 2023) is the first systematic study of Hong Kong's cultural Cold War. Based on untapped archival materials, contemporary sources, and numerous interviews with filmmakers, magazine editors and student activists, this book sheds lights on the contest between Communist China, Nationalist Taiwan, and the US to mobilize the colony's cinema and print media to win the hearts and minds of ethnic Chinese in Southeast Asia and around the world. At the front and centre of this propaganda and psychological warfare was the emigre media industry. British Hong Kong was, in fact, a crossroads in the Cold War where the global, the regional, and the local intersected. Dr. Fu is a Professor of History, Asian American Studies, Global Studies, where he has taught since 1995. He has also been a Distinguished Visiting Professor at Chinese University of Hong Kong and a Visiting Zijiang Professor of Humanities at East China Normal University, Shanghai. He earned his Ph.D. at Stanford. Professor Fu has been the author, editor, or co-editor of many books, including: The Cold War and Asia Cinemas (Routlege, 2019), China Forever: Shaw Brothers and the Making of A Diasporic Cinema (University of Illinois Press, 2008), Between Shanghai and Hong Kong: The Politics of Chinese Cinemas (Stanford University Press, 2003), and Passivity, Resistance, and Collaboration: Intellectual Choices in Occupied Shanghai, 1937-1945 (Stanford University Press, 1993). He has also published many articles and won major awards, including an Institute for Advanced Studies Fellowship, Fulbright Research Scholar award, a Mellon Faculty Grant, and a John D. and Catherine MacArthur Fellowship. Michael G. Vann is a professor of world history at California State University, Sacramento. A specialist in imperialism and the Cold War in Southeast Asia, he is the author of The Great Hanoi Rat Hunt: Empires, Disease, and Modernity in French Colonial Vietnam (Oxford University Press, 2018). When he’s not reading or talking about new books with smart people, Mike can be found surfing in Santa Cruz, California. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
In Imperiled Whiteness: How Hollywood and Media Make Race in "Postracial" America (University Press of Mississippi, 2023), Penelope Ingram examines the role played by media in the resurgence of white nationalism and neo-Nazi movements in the Obama-to-Trump era. As politicians on the right stoked anxieties about whites “losing ground” and “being left behind,” media platforms turned whiteness into a commodity that was packaged and disseminated to a white populace. Reading popular film and television franchises (Planet of the Apes, Star Trek, and The Walking Dead) through political flashpoints, such as debates over immigration reform, gun control, and Black Lives Matter protests, Ingram reveals how media cultivated feelings of white vulnerability and loss among white consumers. By exploring the convergence of entertainment, news, and social media in a digital networked environment, Ingram demonstrates how media’s renewed attention to “imperiled whiteness” enabled and sanctioned the return of overt white supremacy exhibited by alt-right groups in the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville in 2017 and the Capitol riots in 2021. Anna E. Lindner received her doctorate in Communication from Wayne State University. On Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
Told through the eyes of witnesses to the fall of Kabul, Walkley award-winning journalist Andrew Quilty's debut publication offers a remarkable record of this historic moment. August in Kabul: America's Last Days in Afghanistan (Bloomsbury, 2023) is the story of how America's longest mission came to an abrupt and humiliating end, told through the eyes of Afghans whose lives have been turned upside down: a young woman who harbors dreams of a university education; a presidential staffer who works desperately to hold things together as the government collapses around him; a prisoner in the notorious Bagram Prison who suddenly finds himself free when prison guards abandon their post. Andrew Quilty was one of a handful of Western journalists who stayed in Kabul as the city fell. This is his first-hand account of those dramatic final days. Andrew Quilty’s photography career began in Sydney, in the year 2000, on the day his application to a university photo elective was rejected. He quit, and set off around Australia with a surfboard and a Nikon F3 that his uncle—also a photographer—had passed down. His work in Afghanistan has been published worldwide and garnered accolades including, in 2019, a World Press Photo, a Picture of the Year International award of excellence in the category of Photographer of the Year (POYI), and prior to that, a George Polk Award, three POYI awards, a Sony World Photography award and six Walkley Awards, including the Gold Walkley, the highest honor in Australian journalism. In 2016, a selection of his work from Afghanistan was exhibited at the Visa pour L'Image Festival of Photojournalism in Perpignan, France. He has travelled to two thirds of Afghanistan's 34 provinces and continues to document the country through pictures and, increasingly, the written word. Connor Christensen is a graduate student at the University of Chicago, pursuing both an MPP at the Harris School of Public Policy and an MA at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies. His work focuses on the reintegration process of veterans of the military and non-state armed groups in contexts spanning the US, Colombia, Afghanistan, Sierra Leone, and beyond. He is a staff writer for the Chicago Policy Review, director of projects and programs at Corioli Institute, and a contributing researcher at Trust After Betrayal. He welcomes collaboration, so feel free to reach out on LinkedIn or at his email, ctchristensen@uchicago.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
The emergence of Turkish nationalism prior to World War I opened the way for various ethnic, religious, and cultural stereotypes to link the notion of the “Other” to the concept of national identity. The founding elite took up a massive project of social engineering that now required the amplification of Turkishness as an essential concept of the new nation-state. The construction of Others served as a backdrop to the articulation of Turkishness –and for Turkey in many ways, the Arab in his keffiyeh and traditional garb constituted the ultimate Other. In Arabs in Turkish Political Cartoons, 1876-1950: National Self and Non-National Other (Syracuse University Press, 2023), Ilkim Büke Okyar brings the everyday production of nationalist discourse into the mainstream political and historical narrative of modern Turkey. Okyar shifts the focus of inquiry from the abstract discourses of elite intellectuals to the visual rhetoric of popular culture, where Arabs as the non-national Others hold a front seat. Drawing upon previously neglected colloquial Turkish sources, Okyar challenges the notion that ethnoreligious stereotypes of Arabs are limited to the Western conception of the Other. She shows how the emergence of the printing press and the subsequent explosion of news media contributed to formulating the Arab as the binary opposite of the Turk. The book shows how the cartoon press became one of the most significant platforms in the construction, maintenance, and mobilization of Turkish nationalism through the perceived image of the Arab that was haunted forever by ethnic and religious origins. Reuben Silverman is a Postdoctoral Researcher at Stockholm University’s Institute for Turkish Studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
When Ed Goodwin moved with his parents to Greenwood, Tulsa, in 1914, his family joined a growing community on the cusp of becoming a national center of black life. But, just seven years later, on May 31, 1921, the teenaged Ed hid in a bathtub as a white mob descended on his neighborhood, laying waste to thirty-five blocks and murdering as many as three hundred people. The Tulsa Race Massacre was one of the most brutal acts of racist violence in U.S. history, a ruthless attempt to smother a spark of black independence. But that was never the whole story of Greenwood. The Goodwins and their neighbors soon rebuilt it into “a Mecca,” in Ed’s words, where nightlife thrived, small businesses flourished, and an underworld economy lived comfortably alongside public storefronts. Prosperity and poverty intermixed, and icons from W.E.B. Du Bois to Muhammad Ali ambled down Greenwood Avenue, alongside maids, doctors, and every occupation in between. Ed grew into a prominent businessman and bought a newspaper called the Oklahoma Eagle to chronicle Greenwood’s resurgence and battles against white bigotry. He and his wife, Jeanne, raised an ambitious family, and their son Jim, an attorney, embodied their hopes for the Civil Rights Movement in his work. But by the 1970s, urban renewal policies had nearly emptied the neighborhood, even as Jim and his neighbors tried to hold on to it. Today, while new high-rises and encroaching gentrification risk wiping out Greenwood’s legacy for good, the family newspaper remains, and Ed’s granddaughter Regina represents the neighborhood in the Oklahoma state legislature, working alongside a new generation of local activists. In Built from the Fire: The Epic Story of Tulsa's Greenwood District, America's Black Wall Street (Random House, 2023), journalist Victor Luckerson moves beyond the mythology of Black Wall Street to tell the story of an aspirant black neighborhood that, like so many others, has long been buffeted by racist government policies. Through the eyes of dozens of race massacre survivors and their descendants, Luckerson delivers an honest, moving portrait of this potent national symbol of success and solidarity—and weaves an epic tale about a neighborhood that refused, more than once, to be erased. Victor Luckerson is a journalist and author based in Tulsa who works to bring neglected Black history to light. He is a former staff writer at The Ringer and business reporter for Time magazine. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Wired, and Smithsonian. He was nominated for a National Magazine Award for his reporting in Time on the 1923 Rosewood Massacre. He also manages an email newsletter about underexplored aspects of Black history called Run It Back. Reighan Gillam is an Associate Professor in the Department of Latin American, Latino, and Caribbean Studies at Dartmouth College. Her research examines the ways in which Afro-Brazilian media producers foment anti-racist visual politics through their image creations. She is the author of Visualizing Black Lives: Ownership and Control in Afro-Brazilian Media (University of Illinois Press). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
How should we understand contemporary migration policy? In Radical Hospitality: American Policy, Media, and Immigration (Rutgers UP, 2022), Nour Halabi, an Interdisciplinary Fellow at the University of Aberdeen, explores this question by blending history, media studies, and a range of critical theory to introduce the idea of radical hospitality. Using detailed historical and contemporary case studies- from the 1880s and the Chinese Exclusion Act, through the 1920s and the National Origins Act, up to the 2000s and the Muslim travel ban- the book offers both a rethink of the history of immigration as well as a radical call for a new approach. Rich in detail and broad in scope, the book is essential reading for anyone wishing to see a better world for migrants everywhere. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
In 2018, Emily Flitter received a tip that Morgan Stanley had fired a Black employee without cause. Flitter had been searching for a way to investigate the deep-rooted racism in the American financial industry, and that one tip lit the sparkplug for a three-year journey through the shocking yet normalized corruption in our financial institutions. Examining local insurance agencies and corporate titans like JPMorgan Chase, BlackRock, and Wells Fargo and reveals the practices that have kept the racial wealth gap practically as wide as it was during the Jim Crow era. Flitter exposes hiring and layoff policies designed to keep Black employees from advancing to high levels; racial profiling of customers in internal emails between bank tellers; major insurers refusing to pay Black policyholders’ claims; and the systematic denial of funding to Black entrepreneurs. She also gives a voice to victims, from single mothers to professional athletes to employees themselves: people who were scammed, lied to, and defrauded by the systems they trusted with their money, and silenced when they attempted to speak out and seek reform. Flitter connects the dots between data, history, legal scholarship, and powerful personal stories to provide a “must-read wake-up call” (Valerie Red-Horse Mohl, president of KNOWN Holdings) about what it means to bank while Black. As America continues to confront systemic racism and pave a path forward, The White Wall: How Big Finance Bankrupts Black America (Atria/One Signal Publishers, 2022) is an essential examination of one of its most caustic contributors. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
From 2-13 March 2022 - only a week into Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine - Russian forces tried and failed to take and hold Voznesensk, a small but strategically important town 80 kilometres northwest of Mykolaiv. Looking back, the commander of the 300 professional troops that repulsed the attacks with the help of civilian volunteers concluded that this "one small, decisive and improbable victory … almost certainly saved Ukraine from a larger encirclement and most likely from the prospect of defeat". In A Small, Stubborn Town: Life, Death and Defiance in Ukraine (Ithaka, 2023), Andrew Harding tells the story of the battle for Voznesensk through the eyes of its participants - from commander "Formosa" to 32-year-old mayor Yevhenii to the "archipelago of stranded, pensionless pensioners" like Svetlana eking out a living and redefining their identities through war. Although he has been reporting from the front line for the BBC since March 2022, Andrew Harding is the BBC’s Africa correspondent and has lived in Johannesburg since 2009. Africa was the subject of his two previous books - The Mayor of Mogadishu and These Are Not Gentle People - but he began his career in Moscow and Tbilisi and has covered conflicts in Chechnya, Azerbaijan, Abkhazia, and Kosovo. *The author's own book recommendations are Invasion: Russia’s Bloody War and Ukraine’s Fight for Survival by Luke Harding (Guardian Faber Publishing, 2023) and Grey Bees by Andrey Kurkov (MacLehose Press, 2021) Tim Gwynn Jones is an economic and political-risk analyst at Medley Advisors, who also writes the Twenty-Four Two newsletter on Substack and hosts the In The Room podcast series. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
The Big Break: The Gamblers, Party Animals, and True Believers Trying to Win in Washington While America Loses Its Mind (Twelve, 2023) investigates how Washington works, and how different kinds of people try to make it work for them. Ben Terris presents an inside history of this crucial moment in Washington, reporting from exclusive parties, poker nights, fundraisers, secluded farms outside town, and the halls of Congress; among the oddballs and opportunists and true believers. This book is about the people who see the current interlude as an opportunity to build something -- for their country, for themselves -- amid the wreckage. Ben Terris is a writer in The Washington Post's Style section with a focus on national politics. Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
Who is believed in our mediated world? In Believability: Sexual Violence, Media and the Politics of Doubt (Polity Press, 2023), Sarah Banet-Weiser, Distinguished Professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication and Professor of Communication at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, and Kathryn Claire Higgins, Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg Center for Collaborative Communication, examine this question by introducing the conception of an economy of believability governing who is, and who is not, believed or doubted. Written in the wake of #MeToo, the book engages directly with key contexts such as post-truth and the commodification of sexual violence. Thinking through questions of race and class, the analysis ranges widely, covering representations of sexual violence in fiction and non-fiction media, contemporary controversies and court cases, and the backlash from men in positions of power. The book is essential reading across the humanities and social sciences, as well as for anyone seeking to understand ongoing gender inequalities in media and in society. Dave O'Brien is Professor of Cultural and Creative Industries, at the University of Sheffield. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
In the decades between the Great Depression and the advent of cable television, when daily newspapers set the conversational agenda in the United States, the best reporter in the business was a rumpled, unassuming figure named Homer Bigart. Despite two Pulitzers and a host of other prizes, he quickly faded from public view after retirement. Few today know the extent to which he was esteemed by his peers. Get the Damn Story: Homer Bigart and the Great Age of American Newspapers (Georgetown UP, 2023) is the first comprehensive biography to encompass all of Bigart’s journalism, including both his war reporting and coverage of domestic events. Writing for the New York Herald Tribune and the New York Times, Bigart brought to life many events that defined the era—the wars in Europe, the Pacific, Korea, and Vietnam; the civil rights movement; the creation of Israel; the end of colonialism in Africa; and the Cuban Revolution. Bigart’s career demonstrates the value to a democratic society of a relentless, inquiring mind examining its institutions and the people who run them. James Kates is a professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater. He has worked as an editor at The Philadelphia Inquirer, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and other publications. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
Not merely the act of representing events with words or images, a "news event" is the reciprocal relationship between the events being reported in the news and the event of the news coverage itself. In The News Event: Popular Sovereignty in the Age of Deep Mediatization (U Chicago Press, 2023), Francis Cody focuses on how imaginaries of popular sovereignty have been remade through the production and experience of such events. Political sovereignty is thoroughly mediated by the production of news, and subjects invested in the idea of democracy are remarkably reflexive about the role of publicly circulating images and texts in the very constitution of their subjectivity. The law comes to stand as both a limit and positive condition in this process of event making, where acts of legal and extralegal repression of publication can also become the stuff of news about news makers. When the subjects of news inhabit multiple participant roles in the unfolding of public events, when the very technologies of recording and circulating events themselves become news, the act of representing a political event becomes difficult to disentangle from that of participating in it. This, Cody argues, is the crisis of contemporary news making: the news can no longer claim exteriority to the world on which it reports. Atreyee Majumder is an anthropologist based in Bangalore, India. She tweets at @twitatreyee. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
The word "narrative" is now so frequently heard that some think it over used. Perhaps its ubiquity results from it being so relevant – what used to be thought of as the mundane area of misinformation has become one of the most powerful elements of political practice. Andreas Krieg discusses the latest trends in the world of story-telling with Owen Bennett-Jones. Krieg is the author of Subversion: The Strategic Weaponization of Narratives (Georgetown UP, 2023). Owen Bennett-Jones is a freelance journalist and writer. A former BBC correspondent and presenter he has been a resident foreign correspondent in Bucharest, Geneva, Islamabad, Hanoi and Beirut. He is recently wrote a history of the Bhutto dynasty which was published by Yale University Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
What is the journalism culture in Vietnam? What role does Sweden play in the transformation of Vietnamese journalism? How has Swedish media aid fulfilled its political aim to contribute to the democratic development of media in Vietnam? Andreas Mattsson speaks about how two media aid projects from Sweden were used to intervene in the development of journalism in Vietnam between 1993 and 2007.In a conversation with Joanne Kuai, PhD candidate at Karlstad University, Sweden and an affiliated PhD student at NIAS, Andreas Mattsson talks about how the Swedish media aid intervened in the Vietnamese media by contributing to a technological transition of journalism although the training in newsroom management and media ethics were challenged by conflicting journalism ideology and social norms.Drawing from interviews with Swedish trainers from the media aid projects and informed by his analysis of project documents that provide first-hand information from a period when Vietnamese journalism underwent a dramatic transition towards the digitalized media system existing today, Andreas Mattsson hopes to contribute to de-colonialize media theory to rethink the development of journalism in the Global South.Andreas Mattsson is a lecturer and program director at the School of Journalism at the Department of Communication and Media, Lund University. He is also a PhD student at the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Helsinki and an affiliated researcher at the Swedish South Asian Studies Network (SASNET) at Lund University. He has conducted research and taught about journalism practice and digital technology from a comparative international perspective. Besides his university assignments, he works as a freelance journalist for various Swedish and Nordic newspapers and magazines.The Nordic Asia Podcast is a collaboration sharing expertise on Asia across the Nordic region, brought to you by the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies (NIAS) based at the University of Copenhagen, along with our academic partners: the Centre for East Asian Studies at the University of Turku, Asianettverket at the University of Oslo, and the University of Helsinki.We aim to produce timely, topical and well-edited discussions of new research and developments about Asia.About NIAS: http://www.nias.ku.dk/Transcripts of the Nordic Asia Podcasts: http://www.nias.ku.dk/nordic-asia-podcastLearn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
How should humans respond to our ongoing human-made climate catastrophe? To answer that question, Recall this Book turned to prize-winning climate reporter Elizabeth Kolbert, who visited Brandeis this Fall. The topic was Under a White Sky, her recent book that documents the responses to the climate crisis ranging from a form of climate engineering that shoots reflective particles into the air to cool the atmosphere, to negative emission technologies that capture and inject carbon dioxide underground. "You'd have to be pretty hard-hearted not to feel called to some kind of action when you see what we humans have done." But Elizabeth wonders what the best alternatives are. Should we set aside half the earth for biodiversity? Why is it that genetic engineering has become the cultural flashpoint for fear of unintended consequences? There are no easy answers at this point. Elizabeth thinks that if you're not frightened by what's going right now, including American politics around vaccination refusal, you're not paying attention. Because this episode is associated with the annual Brandeis New Student Book Forum, first-year students Hedy Yang and Srinidhi Sriraman (who also goes by Nidhi) jump in with some thoughts. Noticing repeated mentions of Henry David Thoreau in the book, Nidhi inquires about his role in inspiring Elizabeth's writing. Hedy's question about environmental justice and the comparative agency of rich and poor countries moves Elizabeth to talk about the staggering inequities in consumption and the goal of convergence in carbon emissions. What is the mechanism by which this happens, though? Do humans have the right to implement these technologies? Is the solution to issues created by human control really more control? Mentioned in the Episode
E.O. Wilson, Half Earth
"Gene editing could revive a nearly lost tree"; the chestnut gene splicing debate in a recent Washington Post article. (Elizabeth has reported on Bill Powell's work)
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (1818)
Cormac McCarthy, The Road (2006)
Cli-fi: climate fiction in all its bleakness. For example, Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake.
Kim Stanley Robinson, Ministry for the Future
Rob Nixon, Slow Violence: how to see things happening at different time scales.
Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (1962)
Henry David Thoreau, "the touchstone" of American nature writing. e.g Walden (1854); dated yes, but "in most ways ahead of his time"
Des Poissons dans le Desert: Elizabeth's book title in French!
Listen to the episode here. Read the transcript here. Special credit and thanks for this episode goes to Hedy Yang and Srinidhi Sriraman, who took part in the audio editing and the preparation of the show notes, respectively. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
Robert J. Savage is a professor in the Boston College History Department and served as one of the directors of the University’s Irish Studies program for close to twenty years. He has been awarded Visiting Fellowships at Trinity College, Dublin, the University of Edinburgh, Queen’s University, Belfast and the University of Galway. Savage’s publications explore contemporary Irish and British history and include The BBC’s Irish Troubles: Television, Conflict and Northern Ireland (2015) short listed for the Ewart-Biggs Literary Award; A Loss of Innocence? Television and Irish Society 1960-1972, (2010) winner of the James S. Donnelly Sr. Book Prize from the American Conference for Irish Studies and Sean Lemass, a biography (2014). In this interview, he discusses his new book Northern Ireland, the BBC and Censorship in Thatcher’s Britain (Oxford University Press, 2022), which explores issues of censorship, paramilitary violence and British and international politics in the 1980s. Northern Ireland, the BBC and Censorship in Thatcher’s Britain is a study of how the Northern Ireland conflict was presented to an increasingly global audience during the premiership of Britain's 'Iron Lady', Margaret Thatcher. It addresses the tensions that characterized the relationship between the broadcast media and the Thatcher Government throughout the 1980s. Savage explores how that tension worked its way into decisions made by managers, editors, and reporters addressing a conflict that seemed insoluble. Margaret Thatcher mistrusted the broadcast media, especially the BBC, believing it had a left-wing bias that was hostile to her interests and policies. This was especially true of the broadcast media's reporting about Northern Ireland. She regarded investigative reporting that explored the roots of republican violence in the region or coverage critical of her government's initiatives as undermining the rule of law, and thereby providing terrorists with what she termed the 'oxygen of publicity'. She followed in the footsteps of the Labour Government that proceeded her by threatening and bullying both the BBC and IBA, promising that the draconian Prevention of Terrorism Act would be deployed to punish journalists that came into contact with the IRA. Although both networks continued to offer compelling news and current affairs programming, the tactics of her government produced considerable success. Wary of direct government intervention, both networks encouraged a remarkable degree of self-censorship when addressing 'the Troubles'. Regardless, by 1988, the Thatcher Government, unhappy with criticism of its policies, took the extraordinary step of imposing formal censorship on the British broadcast media. The infamous 'broadcasting ban' lasted six years, successfully silencing the voices of Irish republicans while tarnishing the reputation of the United Kingdom as a leading global democracy. Aidan Beatty is a historian at the Frederick Honors College of the University of Pittsburgh Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
Whenever we reach for our phones or scan a newspaper to get caught up, we are being not merely informed but also formed. News consumption can shape our sense of belonging, how we judge the value of our lives, and even how our brains function. Christians mustn't let the news replace prayer as Hegel envisioned, but neither should we simply discard the daily feed. We need a better understanding of what the news is for and how to read it well. Jeffrey Bilbro invites readers to take a step back and gain some theological and historical perspective on the nature and very purpose of news. In Reading the Times: A Literary and Theological Inquiry into the News (IVP Academic, 2021) he reflects on how we pay attention, how we discern the nature of time and history, and how we form communities through what we read and discuss. Drawing on writers from Thoreau and Dante to Merton and Berry, along with activist-journalists such as Frederick Douglass and Dorothy Day, Bilbro offers an alternative vision of the rhythms of life, one in which we understand our times in light of what is timeless. Throughout, he suggests practices to counteract common maladies tied to media consumption in order to cultivate healthier ways of reading and being. When the news sets itself up as the light of the world, it usurps the role of the living Word. But when it helps us attend together to the work of Christ--down through history and within our daily contexts--it can play a vital part in enabling us to love our neighbors. Reading the Times is a refreshing and humane call to put the news in its place. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
From Erin Keane, editor in chief at Salon, comes Runaway: Notes in the Myths that Made Me (Belt Publishing, 2022), a touching memoir about the search for truths in the stories families tell. In 1970, Erin Keane's mother ran away from home for the first time. She was thirteen years old. Over the next several years, and under two assumed identities, she hitchhiked her way across America, experiencing freedom, hardship, and tragedy. At fifteen, she met a man in New York City and married him. He was thirty-six. Though a deft balance of journalistic digging, cultural criticism, and poetic reimagining, Keane pieces together the true story of her mother's teenage years, questioning almost everything she's been told about her parents and their relationship. Along the way, she also considers how pop culture has kept similar narratives alive in her. At stake are some of the most profound questions we can ask ourselves: What's true? What gets remembered? Who gets to tell the stories that make us who we are? Whether it's talking about painful family history, #MeToo, Star Wars, true crime forensics, or The Gilmore Girls, Runaway is an unforgettable look at all the different ways the stories we tell--both personal and pop cultural--create us. Joel Tscherne is an Adjunct History Professor at Southern New Hampshire University. His Twitter handle is @JoelTscherne. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
Comics and Nation: Power, Pop Culture, and Political Transformation in Poland (Ohio State UP, 2022) offers a fresh perspective on the role of popular culture in the one-hundred-year history of the Polish state, from its foundation in 1918 to the present. Drawing on dozens of press articles, interviews, and readers' letters, Ewa Stańczyk discusses how journalists, artists, and audiences used comics to probe the boundaries of national culture and scrutinize the established notions of Polishness. Critical moments of Poland's political transformation --the establishment of the interwar Polish Republic, the Cold War, the liberalization of the 1970s, the 1989 democratic transition, the turn to memory politics in the 2000s--have all been reflected in the history of Polish comics. Stańczyk offers new insights into how the production of homegrown comics and the influx of foreign works enabled commentators to express their fears, hopes, and disillusionment with political, economic, and cultural changes in Poland and beyond. At its core, Comics and Nation rethinks the impact of popular culture and transnational exchange on Polish nation building, citizenship formation, and the legitimation of power. Roland Clark is a Reader in Modern European History at the University of Liverpool, a Senior Fellow with the Centre for Analysis of the Radical Right, and the Principal Investigator of an AHRC-funded project on European Fascist Movements. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
In August of 1945, the United States dropped an atomic bomb on two Japanese cities, Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Less than a year later, American journalist John Hersey traveled to Hiroshima and interviewed survivors of the bombing. The subsequent article was published by The New Yorker in 1946. Hiroshima was published as a book two months later. MIT Professor Christopher Capozzola discusses why he thinks every American should read Hiroshima. Christopher Capozzola is a professor of History at MIT. He is the author of Uncle Sam Wants You: World War I and the Making of the Modern American Citizen and Bound by War: How the United States and the Philippines Build America’s First Pacific Century. See more information on our website, WritLarge.fm. Follow us on Twitter @WritLargePod. Join the conversation on the Lyceum app. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
Steve Jobs called Jony Ive his "spiritual partner at Apple." The London-born genius was the second-most powerful person at Apple and the creative force who most embodies Jobs's spirit, the man who designed the products adopted by hundreds of millions the world over: the iPod, iPad, MacBook Air, the iMac G3, and the iPhone. In the wake of his close collaborator's death, the chief designer wrestled with grief and initially threw himself into his work designing the new Apple headquarters and the Watch before losing his motivation in a company increasingly devoted more to margins than to inspiration. In many ways, Cook was Ive's opposite. The product of a small Alabama town, he had risen through the ranks from the supply side of the company. His gift was not the creation of new products. Instead, he had invented countless ways to maximize a margin, squeezing some suppliers, persuading others to build factories the size of cities to churn out more units. He considered inventory evil. He knew how to make subordinates sweat with withering questions. Jobs selected Cook as his successor, and Cook oversaw a period of tremendous revenue growth that has lifted Apple's valuation to $2 trillion. He built a commanding business in China and rapidly distinguished himself as a master politician who could forge global alliances and send the world's stock market into freefall with a single sentence. Author Tripp Mickle spoke with more than 200 current and former Apple executives, as well as figures key to this period of Apple's history, including Trump administration officials and fashion luminaries such as Anna Wintour while writing After Steve: How Apple Became a Trillion-Dollar Company and Lost Its Soul (William Morrow, 2022). His research shows the company's success came at a cost. Apple lost its innovative spirit and has not designed a new category of device in years. Ive's departure in 2019 marked a culmination in Apple's shift from a company of innovation to one of operational excellence, and the price is a company that has lost its soul. Tripp Mickle is a technology and corporate reporter for the Wall Street Journal. Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network (Twitter: @caleb_zakarin). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
Together, bestselling author Julia Scheeres and award-winning journalist Allison Gilbert have written Listen, World!: How the Intrepid Elsie Robinson Became America's Most-Read Woman (Seal Press, 2022), the first biography of Elsie Robinson, the most influential newspaper columnist you've never heard of. At thirty-five, Elsie Robinson feared she'd lost it all. Reeling from a scandalous divorce in 1917, she had no means to support herself and her chronically ill son. She dreamed of becoming a writer and was willing to sacrifice everything for this goal, even swinging a pickax in a gold mine to pay the bills. When the mine shut down, she moved to the Bay Area. Armed with moxie and samples of her work, she barged into the offices of the Oakland Tribune and was hired on the spot. She went on to become a nationally syndicated columnist and household name whose column ran for over thirty years and garnered fifty million readers. Told in cinematic detail Scheeres and Gilbert's, Listen, World! is the inspiring story of a timeless maverick, capturing what it means to take a gamble on self-fulfillment and find freedom along the way. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
In Degrade and Destroy: The Inside Story of the War Against the Islamic State, from Barack Obama to Donald Trump (FSG, 2022), Wall Street Journal national security correspondent Michael R. Gordon reveals the strategy debates, diplomatic gambits, and military operations that shaped the struggle against the Islamic State. With extraordinary access to top U.S. officials and military commanders and to the forces on the battlefield, Gordon offers a riveting narrative that ferrets out some of the war's most guarded secrets. Degrade and Destroy takes us inside National Security Council meetings at which Obama and his top aides grapple with early setbacks and discuss whether the war can be won. It also offers the most detailed account to date of how President Donald Trump waged war--delegating greater authority to the Pentagon but jeopardizing the outcome with a rush for the exit. Drawing on his reporting in Iraq and Syria, Gordon documents the closed-door deliberations of U.S. generals with their Iraqi and Syrian counterparts and describes some of the toughest urban battles since World War II. As Americans debate the future of using force abroad, Gordon's book offers vital insights into how our wars today are fought against militant foes, and the enduring lessons we can draw from them. Michael R. Gordon is the national security correspondent for The Wall Street Journal and former chief military correspondent for The New York Times. Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network (Twitter: @caleb_zakarin). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
Inspired by the reading and writing habits of citizens leading up to the French Revolution, The Writing Public: Participatory Knowledge Production in Enlightenment and Revolutionary France (Cornell UP, 2021) is a compelling addition to the long-running debate about the link between the Enlightenment and the political struggle that followed. Dr. Elizabeth Andrews Bond diligently scoured France's local newspapers spanning the two decades prior to the Revolution as well as its first three years shining a light on the letters to the editor. The Writing Public is a history of the thousands of readers and writers who participated in the Enlightenment and the French Revolution by writing to their local newspapers. A form of early social media, these letters constituted a lively and ongoing conversation among readers. Bond takes us beyond the glamorous salons of the intelligentsia into the everyday worlds of the craftsmen, clergy, farmers, and women who composed these letters. As a result, we get a fascinating glimpse into who participated in public discourse, what they most wanted to discuss, and how they shaped a climate of opinion. The Writing Public offers a novel examination of how French citizens used the information press to form norms of civic discourse and shape the experience of revolution. The result is a nuanced analysis of knowledge production during the Enlightenment. The Writing Public won the David H. Pinkney Prize from the Society for French Historical Studies. Dr. Elizabeth Andrews Bond is an associate professor of History at The Ohio State University. She is a specialist in the history of print and public opinion, the social history of ideas, the cultural history of the Enlightenment, and the French Revolution. Brigid Wallace is a Graduate Student in the History Department at Lehigh University. (Twitter: @faithismine51) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
Journalist, activist, popular historian, and public intellectual, Lerone Bennett Jr. left an indelible mark on twentieth-century American history and culture. Rooted in his role as senior editor of Ebony magazine, but stretching far beyond the boundaries of the Johnson Publishing headquarters in Chicago, Bennett’s work and activism positioned him as a prominent advocate for Black America and a scholar whose writing reached an unparalleled number of African American readers. This critical biography—the first in-depth study of Bennett’s life—travels with him from his childhood experiences in Jim Crow Mississippi and his time at Morehouse College in Atlanta to his later participation in a dizzying range of Black intellectual and activist endeavors. Drawing extensively on Bennett’s previously inaccessible archival collections at Emory University and Chicago State, as well as interviews with close relatives, colleagues, and confidantes, Our Kind of Historian: The Work and Activism of Lerone Bennett Jr. (U Massachusetts Press, 2022) celebrates his enormous influence within and unique connection to African American communities across more than half a century of struggle. Hettie V. Williams Ph.D., is an Associate Professor of African American history in the Department of History and Anthropology at Monmouth University where she teaches courses in African American history and U.S. history. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
Why does the democratic establishment always avoid turning left, even when it might mean a political win? Gordon asks David Sirota. Sirota is behind the smash-hit Netflix movie Don’t Look Up! Even if you weren’t a fan of that movie this is worth a listen, because David is more than just a screenwriter. He’s a journalist who doesn’t limit his journalism to one kind of storytelling. David has written for The Guardian and for Jacobin, but he is also host and co-writer of investigative podcast series Meltdown, which documented how Obama’s lacklustre response to the financial crisis set the stage for Trump. He’s also worked as a speechwriter for Bernie Sanders. We cover a range of topics: from the limits of technocracy, the political co-option of science and expertise, the critical reaction to Don’t Look Up, and whether or not Ideocracy (2006) has bad politics. —————————-SUPPORT THE SHOW—————————- You can support the show for free by following or subscribing on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or whichever app you use. This is the best way to help us out and it costs nothing so we’d really appreciate you clicking that button. If you want to do a little more we would love it if you chip in. You can find us on patreon.com/dartsandletters. Patrons get content early, and occasionally there’s bonus material on there too. ——————-ABOUT THE SHOW—————— For a full list of credits, contact information, and more, visit our about page. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
What is the role of the press in a democracy? For nearly a century, scholars, media critics, and politicians have debated this question—in a large part thanks to Walter Lippmann. Lippmann’s 1922 book, Public Opinion, changed the conversation about how to educate voters and who should be able to vote at all. In this episode, University of British Columbia professor Heidi Tworek discusses the timeless questions and the man who asked them. Heidi Tworek is assistant professor of international history at the University of British Columbia. She is an editor of The Journal of Global History and the author of News from Germany: The Competition to Control World Communications, 1900–1945. See more information on our website, WritLarge.fm. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
A special opportunity to hear from Sara Custer, editor of The Campus (Times Higher Education), about the role of journalism and reporting in higher education. Avi and Sara cover topics ranging from the role of media in increasing cross-institution collaboration and sharing during the pandemic to how universities can do a better job supporting their junior scholars. Also, don't miss out on the opportunity to learn how you can publish in Times Higher Education yourself! Avi Staiman is the founder and CEO of Academic Language Experts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
Reenvisioning Israel Through Political Cartoons: Visual Discourses During the 2018-2021 Electoral Crisis (Lexington Books, 2022) by Matt Reingold, published by Lexington Books as part of its Lexington Studies in Jewish Literature series, offers an incisive—and prescient, given the recent dissolution of the incumbent government—consideration of how political cartoonists in Israel broaden the conversation about the various challenges faced by the country. Organized thematically around issues that emerged at various points across the three-year period under consideration (including political mudslinging, the ultra-Orthodox community, the Coronavirus pandemic, and coverage of Benjamin Netanyahu in the right-leaning press), analysis of the cartoons complemented by interviews with many of the cartoonists whose works feature in the book, Reenvisioning Israel Through Political Cartoons moves the conversation about the Jewish State away from its typically partisan (and thus limiting) vistas. Reingold shows how with humor, satirical nous, and a sophisticated awareness of their audiences, the cartoonists’ work often cut across the traditional faultlines of Israeli society (Religious/Secular; Ashkenazi/Mizrachi; Cosmopolitan/Narrow; and of course, “Left”/”Right”), engaging with a more representative (if, of necessity, less tidy) discussion about Israel today. As Israel prepares for its fifth election in three years, following the collapse of the most broad-based coalition government in the country’s history (led, not-entirely-incidentally, by the country’s first religiously observant prime minister), Reingold’s book gives nuance and context to the conversation about Israel in Israel. Matt Reinhold has a PhD in Jewish Education. He teaches Jewish history and Jewish thought at Tanenbaum CHAT, a community Jewish high school in Toronto, Canada. Akin Ajayi (@AkinAjayi) is a writer and editor, based in Tel Aviv. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
Rough Draft of History: A Century of US Social Movements in the News (Princeton UP, 2022) offers a new view of U.S. social movement history across the twentieth century by examining how movement organizations were covered in major national newspapers. The book analyzes U.S. social movements--ranging from temperance to women's suffrage to the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street--in a broad comparative fashion. Drawing on the full set of digitized newspapers from the twentieth-century (a task that as little as twenty years ago was considered impossible for researchers), the book offers both an institutional history of news--why the media covered what they covered, and to what effect--and also shows the influence of news coverage on a range of social movements, from the well-known to the obscure. Media coverage is a crucial component of movement visibility; news can draw the general public into battles over new issues but also shapes how movements are perceived. The authors show how a movement's structure--its organization, as well as the protest and non-protests activities it undertakes--influence its coverage, and consider too how macro-political conditions shape movement coverage. They reveal surprising gaps between contemporaneous coverage and current scholarly focus; for instance, the labor movement received the most journalistic attention of any movement of the twentieth century, but it is greatly understudied in comparison to how much it dominated the public sphere. Taking stock of news coverage across a century of movements thus illuminates movements that were influential in public discourse but have been neglected by scholars. Edwin Amenta is professor of sociology and political science at the University of California, Irvine. His books include When Movements Matter and Bold Relief (both Princeton). Twitter @EdwinAmenta Neal Caren is associate professor of sociology at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Twitter @HaphazardSoc Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network (Twitter: @caleb_zakarin) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
Long before the current preoccupation with “fake news,” American newspapers routinely ran stories that were not quite, strictly speaking, true. Today, a firm boundary between fact and fakery is a hallmark of journalistic practice, yet for many readers and publishers across more than three centuries, this distinction has seemed slippery or even irrelevant. We see this play in pink slime local news sites and in the proliferation of truthers claiming to do their own research because of a deep distrust in the mainstream media. In Not Exactly Lying: Fake News and Fake Journalism in American History (Columbia UP, 2022) Tucher argues that the creation of outward forms of factuality unleashed new opportunities for falsehood: News doesn’t have to be true as long as it looks true. Propaganda, disinformation, and advocacy—whether in print, on the radio, on television, or online—could be crafted to resemble the real thing. Dressed up in legitimate journalistic conventions, this “fake journalism” became inextricably bound up with right-wing politics, to the point where it has become an essential driver of political polarization. In the book and in this conversation, Tucher explores how American audiences have argued over what’s real and what’s not—and why that matters for democracy. Andie Tucher the H. Gordon Garbedian Professor and the director of the Communications Ph.D. Program at the Columbia Journalism School. Jenna Spinelle is a journalism instructor at Penn State's Donald P. Bellisario College of Communications. She's also the communications specialist for the university's McCourtney Institute for Democracy, where she hosts and produces the Democracy Works podcast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
Hello media fans - The ABC is Australia's public broadcaster, for TV, digital and radio. Think BBC and CBC and NPR. Who Needs the ABC?: How Digital Disruption and Political Dysfunction Threaten the Australian Broadcasting Corporation's Existence (Scribe, 2022) by Matthew Ricketson and Patrick Mullins (Scribe 2022), charts how, in its 90th year, the best-trusted news organisation in Australia arrived at its current plight: doing the most it ever has, with less than it needs, under a barrage of constant criticism. This book examines the profound changes that have swept through the Australian media, technology, and political landscapes in the past decade, and explores the tense relationship between the ABC and governments of both stripes over the last 40 years. It dispels any complacency about the ABC’s future by charting the very real threat now posed by the Liberal– National Party coalition, and the damage that it has done to the ABC while in office. Who Needs the ABC? identifies the vital role that the ABC plays in Australia today: in its award-winning journalism, in its vast array of cultural programming on television, on radio, and online, and in the comprehensive service it provides to people across the country. At a time when the truth has to vie with obfuscation and misinformation, this book offers a rejoinder to the ABC’s critics, points to solutions that will see the ABC thrive, and answers the question posed here: Who Needs the ABC? We all do. Bede Haines is a solicitor, specialising in litigation and a partner at Holding Redlich, an Australian commercial law firm. He lives in Sydney, Australia. Known to read books, ride bikes and eat cereal (often). bede.haines@holdingredlich.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
When independent filmmakers, activists, and amateurs document the struggle for rights, representation, and revolution, they instrumentalize images by advocating for a particular outcome. Ryan Watson calls this "militant evidence." In Radical Documentary and Global Crises: Militant Evidence in the Digital Age (Indiana UP, 2021), Watson centers the discussion on extreme conflict, such as the Iraq War, the occupation of Palestine, the war in Syria, mass incarceration in the United States, and child soldier conscription in the Congo. Under these conditions, artists and activists aspire to document, archive, witness, and testify. The result is a set of practices that turn documentary media toward a commitment to feature and privilege the media made by the people living through the terror. This footage is then combined with new digitally archived images, stories, and testimonials to impact specific social and political situations. Radical Documentary and Global Crises re-orients definitions of what a documentary is, how it functions, how it circulates, and how its effect is measured, arguing that militant evidence has the power to expose, to amass, and to adjudicate. Gustavo E. Gutiérrez Suárez is PhD candidate in Social Anthropology, and BA in Social Communication. His areas of interest include Andean and Amazonian Anthropology, as well as Film poetics and aesthetics. You can follow him on Twitter vía @GustavoEGSuarez. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
Dr. Christopher Gilbert, Assistant Professor of English at Assumption College, has a new book that examines the understanding of American national character and culture through the works of caricature and comic representations. Gilbert specifically focuses on this kind of work that is produced during moments of crisis, particularly during wartime. Wartime often prompts self-understanding for a nation, since there is a demand that the reason for war is made clear, and the role of the nation is seen in this context. Gilbert notes that in the early days of the republic, Benjamin Franklin turned to caricature to help define or start to clarify an American national character, particularly in distinction from British colonial power. And this concept of national character is different than either patriotism or nationalism, since it reflects how citizens, individually and as a whole, understand themselves as a nation, and as separate from other nations. Unique histories, characteristics, and “belonging” all contribute to this broader sense of self for a nation. Caricature and National Character: The United States at War (Pennsylvania State UP, 2021) examines the various symbols and images that have become part of the American national identity, noting, often, how those images shift and change with time and context. Gilbert notes that these recursive themes and images are distinct in different historical moments, providing a kind of complexity to the images and how and what they communicate. Consider the image of the bald eagle, which has been integrated into American national character for some time, but has been drawn and redrawn to represent imperialism, laziness, or cultural power at different points in U.S. history. Gilbert explains that humor itself is situational and situated, a sign or signal of the time, and that caricature and comic artists and political and editorial cartoonists are commenting on and positioning their work within a particular historical point, and in so doing, also reflecting American cultural politics. Caricature and National Character brings a variety of artists together in a way that intertwines their work without silo-ing them within chronological periods. Their work is made, in a certain way, to be in conversation, and to help to understand the United States as a warring nation, even if there is no shooting war transpiring at times. The artists and cartoonists are using their own membership within the national character to present ideas and commentary on what it means, in time of war, to protect national character and what it is that needs protecting. These images, which can be explored across history, carry significant weight because they are reflecting on the notion of national character, which is often more clearly on display during times of war. Lilly J. Goren is professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), as well as co-editor of Mad Men and Politics: Nostalgia and the Remaking of Modern America (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). Email her comments at lgoren@carrollu.edu or tweet to @gorenlj. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
Does the idea of a world in which facts mean nothing cause anxiety? Fear? Maybe even paranoia? Disinformation: The Nature of Facts and Lies in the Post-Truth Era (Rowman and Littlefield, 2022) cannot cure all the ills of a post-truth world, but by demonstrating how the emergence of digital technology into everyday life has knitted together a number of seemingly loosely related forces–historical, psychological, economic, and culture–to create the post-truth culture, Disinformation will help you better understand how we got to where we now are, see how we can move beyond a culture in which facts are too easily dismissed, and develop a few highly practical skills for separating truth from lies. Disinformation explains:
How human psychology—the very way our brains work—can leave us vulnerable to disinformation.
How the early visions of what a global computer network would and should be unintentionally laid the groundwork for the current post-truth culture.
The ways in which truth is twisted and misrepresented via propaganda and conspiracy theories.
How new technology not only spreads disinformation but may also be changing the way we think.
The ways in which the economics of information and the powerful influence of popular culture have contributed to the creation of the post-truth culture.
Unlike the far-too-numerous one-sided, politically ideological treatments of the post-truth culture, Disinformation does not seek to point the finger of blame at any individuals or groups; instead, its focus is on how a number of disparate forces have influenced human behaviors during a time when all of humanity is struggling to better understand and more effectively control (for better or worse) challenging new technologies that are straining the limits of human intellectual and emotional capacity. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
Late one night, journalist Sally Hayden received an urgent message on Facebook: “Sally, we need your help.” It was from a group of Eritrean refugees who had been held in a Libyan detention center for months. Now, Tripoli was crumbling in a scrimmage between warring factions, and the refugees remained stuck, defenseless, with only one hope: contacting her. With that begins Hayden’s staggering account of the migrant crisis across North Africa: from brutal, vindictive Libyan guards to unexpected acts of kindness; the frustration of visiting aid workers; fake marriages between detainees; the strain on real marriages; and the phenomenon of some refugees becoming oppressors after entering into Faustian bargains with their captors. With unprecedented contact with dozens of people currently inside Libyan detention centers, My Fourth Time, We Drowned (Melville House Press, 2022) will, for the first time, detail these stories. In the future, people will regard this pivotal period with fascination and horror. The failure of NGOs and corruption within the United Nations represents a collective abdication of international standards that will echo throughout history. But most importantly, this book will highlight the resilience of humans: how refugees and migrants locked up for years fall in love, support each other through the hardest times and carry out small acts of resistance in order to survive in a system that wants them to be silent and disappear. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
Eve Ng’s new book Cancel Culture: A Critical Analysis (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022), examines the phenomenon of "cancel culture" from a critical media studies perspective, as both cancel practices (what people and institutional actors do) and cancel discourses (commentary about cancelling). Ng traces multiple lines of origins for cancel practices and discourses, in the domains of Black communicative practices (e.g. cancelling relationship to "dissing"), celebrity and fan cultures, consumer culture (especially around consumer nationalist cancellings), and national politics (U.S. conservative criticisms of cancelling, and nationalist cancelling events in mainland China). Her analysis moves beyond popular press accounts about the latest targets of cancelling or familiar free speech debates, and underscores the different configurations of power associated with “cancel culture” in specific cultural and political contexts. Louisa Hann recently attained a PhD in English and American studies from the University of Manchester, specialising in the political economy of HIV/AIDS theatres. She has published work on the memorialisation of HIV/AIDS on the contemporary stage and the use of documentary theatre as a neoliberal harm reduction tool. She is currently working on a monograph based on her doctoral thesis. You can get in touch with her at louisahann92@gmail.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
Journalist Mónica Guzmán is the loving liberal daughter of Mexican immigrants who voted—twice—for Donald Trump. When the country could no longer see straight across the political divide, Mónica set out to find what was blinding us and discovered the most eye-opening tool we’re not using: our own built-in curiosity. Partisanship is up, trust is down, and our social media feeds make us sure we’re right and everyone else is ignorant (or worse). But avoiding one another is hurting our relationships and our society. In I Never Thought of It That Way: How to Have Fearlessly Curious Conversations in Dangerously Divided Times (BenBella Books, 2022), Mónica takes us to the real front lines of a crisis that threatens to grind America to a halt—broken conversations among confounded people. Drawing from cross-partisan conversations she’s had, organized, or witnessed everywhere from the echo chambers on social media to the wheat fields in Oregon to raw, unfiltered fights with her own family on election night, Mónica shows how you can put your natural sense of wonder to work for you immediately, finding the answers you need by talking with people—rather than about them—and asking the questions you want, curiously. This podcast episode is a recording of a live event co-hosted by Gather, an initiative of the Agora Journalism Center at the University of Oregon that focuses on community-centered journalism. Jenna Spinelle is a journalism instructor at Penn State's Donald P. Bellisario College of Communications. She's also the communications specialist for the university's McCourtney Institute for Democracy, where she hosts and produces the Democracy Works podcast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
In The Future of the Presidency, Journalism, and Democracy: After Trump (Routledge, 2022), Dr. Robert E. Gutsche Jr. examines the effects of Donald Trump’s presidency on journalistic practices, rhetoric, and discourses. Rooted in critical theory and cultural studies, it asks what life may be like without Trump, not only for journalism but also for American society more broadly. The book places perspectives and tensions around the Trump presidency in one spot, focusing on the underlying ideological forces in tensions around media trust, Trumpism, and the role of journalism in it all. It explores how journalists dealt with racist rhetoric from the White House, relationships between the Office of the President and social media companies, citizens, and journalists themselves, while questioning whether journalism has learned the right lessons for the future. More importantly, chapters on liberal media "bias," the First 100 Days of the Biden Presidency, gender, and race, and how journalists should adopt measures to "reduce harm" hint as to where politics and journalism may go next. Reshaping the scholarly and public discourse about where we are headed in terms of the presidency and publics, social media, and journalism, this book will be an important resource for scholars and graduate students of journalism, media studies, communication studies, political science, race and ethnic studies and sociology. Michael O. Johnston, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at William Penn University. His most recent research, “The Queen and Her Royal Court: A Content Analysis of Doing Gender at a Tulip Queen Pageant,” was published in Gender Issues Journal. He researches culture, social identity, placemaking, and media representations of social life at festivals and celebrations. He is currently working on a book titled Community Media Representations of Place and Identity at Tug Fest: Reconstructing the Mississippi River. You can learn more about Dr. Johnston on his website, Google Scholar, on Twitter @ProfessorJohnst, or by email at johnstonmo@wmpenn.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
When Communication Became a Discipline (Lexington, 2021) argues that speech and journalism professors embraced the concept of communication between 1964 and 1982. They changed the names of their scholarly societies and journals and revised their academic curricula. Five “strands” of scholarship became and remain central to this transformation. Communication is not a traditional academic discipline, but its scholars convinced their colleagues to understand and embrace it. When Communication Became a Discipline presents an argument with historical evidence that illustrates scholarly creativity at its finest. William F. Eadie is professor emeritus of journalism and media studies and director of the School of Communication at San Diego State University. William F. Eadie was former director of the School of Communication at San Diego State University, where he was responsible for leadership of a large program that encompassed all aspects of communication, media and journalism. Tom Discenna is Professor of Communication at Oakland University whose work examines issues of academic labor and communicative labor more broadly. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
Internet-enabled mobilization begins long before there is a call for protest. In the book Internet Use and Protest in Malaysia and other Authoritarian Regimes (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021), Kris Ruijgrok examines the case of Bersih – an anti-corruption movement in Malaysia – to track the sequence of events that lead citizens to take part in protest action. Contrary to the impression that social media platforms like Twitter spontaneously spark protests around the world, the book takes a longer and wider view of how the internet challenges information scarcity in authoritarian regimes, which, consequently, creates conditions for citizens to carefully consider their sympathies for a protest movement and defy their fears about state control. In this podcast, Kris discusses the reasons why the Malaysian government is unable to successfully control the digital public sphere in the same way it controlled the information environment of traditional media. He makes a case for going beyond what he considers to be technologically deterministic debate between cyber-pessimists and cyber-optimists. Instead, Kris foregrounds the importance of context – how different social conditions result to different outcomes. Kris Ruijgrok is a lecturer in the Faculty of Law at the University of Amsterdam. Like this interview? You may also be interested in: Aim Sinpeng, Opposing Democracy in the Digital Age: The Yellow Shirts in Thailand (U Michigan Press, 2021)
Nicole Curato is a Professor of Sociology in the Centre for Deliberative Democracy and Global Governance at the University of Canberra. She co-hosts the New Books in Southeast Asia Studies channel. This episode was produced in collaboration with Erron C. Medina of the Development Studies Program of Ateneo De Manila University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
In How Machines Came to Speak: Media Technologies and Freedom of Speech (Duke University Press, 2022), Jennifer Petersen constructs a genealogy of how legal conceptions of “speech” have transformed over the last century in response to new media technologies. Drawing on media and legal history, Petersen shows that the legal category of speech has varied considerably, evolving from a narrow category of oratory and print publication to a broad, abstract conception encompassing expressive nonverbal actions, algorithms, and data. She examines a series of pivotal US court cases in which new media technologies—such as phonographs, radio, film, and computer code—were integral to this shift. In judicial decisions ranging from the determination that silent films were not a form of speech to the expansion of speech rights to include algorithmic outputs, courts understood speech as mediated through technology. Speech thus became disarticulated from individual speakers. By outlining how legal definitions of speech are indelibly dependent on technology, Petersen demonstrates that future innovations such as artificial intelligence will continue to restructure speech law in ways that threaten to protect corporate and institutional forms of speech over the rights and interests of citizens. Jennifer Petersen is an Associate Professor of Communication at the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at the University of Southern California. She is the director of the graduate certificate program in Science and Technology Studies and is affiliated with the Center for Law, History, and Culture. Before arriving at USC, she worked at the University of Virginia, where she was an affiliate with the Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality. She is also a former Lenore Annenberg and Wallis Annenberg Fellow in Communication at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences (CASBS) at Stanford University. Austin Clyde is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Chicago Department of Computer Science. He researches artificial intelligence and high-performance computing for developing new scientific methods. He is also a visiting research fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School's Science, Technology, and Society program. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
Jacob Mchangama, founder and director of the think tank Justitia, has written a one-volume history of freedom of thought, which ranges from the lone Demosthenes of 4th-century BCE Athens to the recent controversies regarding Donald Trump. In Free Speech: A History from Socrates to Social Media (Basic Books, 2022), Mchangama argues that the history of freedom of thought has recurrent themes, such as a free speech entropy: the perception of rulers or governments that if speech is not restricted then social or political decline or disorder is inevitable. Mchangama also notes how restrictions usually have the unintended effect of emboldening the speakers and making the forbidden speech even more attractive to potential listeners. This history also reveals advocates of free speech less familiar to Western readers, such as the ninth-century Persian scholar Ibn al-Rawandi, a theologian and later skeptic whose life illustrates the debates possible in medieval Islam. Mchangama reviews the modern debates regarding freedom of thought and the latest iterations of arguments about whether free speech will lead to social decline and chaos. Mchangama is a champion of free speech but his history provides a fair minded account of the concerns of speech restrictionists throughout history. Ian J. Drake is Associate Professor of Jurisprudence, Montclair State University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
In this podcast Owen Bennett-Jones discusses the future of rational decision making with Professor Olivier Sibony who after 25 years with McKinsey & Company in France, is now at HEC Paris and the Saïd Business School in Oxford University. In 2021 he co-wrote the book Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment (Little, Brown Spark, 2021) with Cass R. Sunstein and Daniel Kahneman. For those trying to resist the illogicalities of the post truth world, the idea of rational decision-making is perhaps more important than ever. Yet the challenge to rationality comes not only from social media driven myths becoming accepted truths, but also bias and randomness in decision-making. Owen Bennett-Jones is a freelance journalist and writer. A former BBC correspondent and presenter he has been a resident foreign correspondent in Bucharest, Geneva, Islamabad, Hanoi and Beirut. He is recently wrote a history of the Bhutto dynasty which was published by Yale University Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
As the United States moves on from the Trump era — and perhaps begins to contemplate what a second one might look like — conversations about journalism's relationship to Trump and his ideas are cropping up all over the place. Books like News After Trump address these questions through a scholarly lens, but Covering Politics in the Age of Trump (LSU Press, 2021) looks at coverage of Trump from the perspective of journalists who cover national politics. Edited by Jerry Ceppos, the book takes a wide-ranging view of the relationship between the forty-fifth president and the Fourth Estate. In concise, illuminating, and often personal essays, two dozen top journalists address topics such as growing concerns about political bias and journalistic objectivity; increasing consternation about the media’s use of anonymous sources; the practices journalists employ to gain access to wary administration officials; and reporters’ efforts to improve journalism in an era of round-the-clock cable news. Contributors to the book include Ashley Parker of The Washington Post, McKay Coppins of The Atlantic, and Charlie Cook of the Cook Political Report. In this conversation, Ceppos discusses how news organizations are starting to "take off the straightjacket" of detachment and objectivity and what that might mean for re-establishing trust with readers and peeling back the curtain on how journalists do their work. Jerry Ceppos is the William B. Dickinson Distinguished Professor of Journalism and former of the Manship School of Mass Communications at Louisiana State University. Before entering academia, he worked for thirty-six years in newsrooms. He has contributed to several books on media ethics and journalism, including News Evolution or Revolution? The Future of Print Journalism in the Digital Age. Jenna Spinelle is a journalism instructor at Penn State's Donald P. Bellisario College of Communications. She's also the communications specialist for the university's McCourtney Institute for Democracy, where she hosts and produces the Democracy Works podcast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
Ebony Magazine and Lerone Bennett Jr.: Popular Black History in Postwar America (University of Illinois Press, 2020) reveals the previously hidden impact of Ebony magazine as a major producer and disseminator of popular black history during the second half of the twentieth century. Far from dismissing Ebony as a consumer magazine with limited political or educational importance, E. James West highlights the value editors, readers, and advertisers placed upon Ebony's role as a "history book." Benefitting from unprecedented access to new archives at Chicago State and Emory University, West also offers the first substantive biographical account of the writing and philosophy of Lerone Bennett Jr., who used his position at Ebony to emerge as one of the twentieth century's most influential popular black historians. Focusing on Lerone Bennett's role within Johnson Publishing, and assessing Ebony's broader historical coverage, this book uses the magazine as a window into the transition of black history from the margins to the center of American cultural, historical, and political representation. As an important cultural outlet with millions of readers, Ebony played a powerful role in reshaping public representations of African American history. Directed by the efforts of Bennett, the magazine produced militant depictions of black history and connected activism in the present to a longstanding history of radical black protest. However, as a black consumer magazine it also helped to legitimize and facilitate corporate mediation of black history, and to frame and limit discussions of African American history, memory, and identity. Adam McNeil is a Ph.D. Candidate in History at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
In A Strategic Nature: Public Relations and the Politics of American Environmentalism (Oxford UP, 2021), Melissa Aronczyk and Maria I. Espinoza examine public relations as a social and political force that shapes both our understanding of the environmental crises we now face and our responses to them. Drawing on in-depth interviews, ethnography, and archival research, Aronczyk and Espinoza document the evolution of PR techniques to control public perception of the environment since the beginning of the twentieth century. More than spin or misinformation, PR affects how institutions and individuals conceptualize environmental problems -- from conservation to coal mining to carbon credits. Revealing the linkages of professional strategists, information politics, and environmental standards, A Strategic Nature shows how public relations restricts alternative paths to a sustainable climate future. Melissa Aronczyk is an associate professor at Rutgers University in the School of Communication & Information. She is the author of Branding the Nation: The Global Business of National Identity (Oxford 2013). Maria I. Espinoza is a PhD candidate in the Sociology department at Rutgers University. Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube Channel. Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
In the autumn of 2014, the Royal Air Force released blurry video of a missile blowing up a pick-up truck that may have had a weapon attached to its flatbed. This was a lethal form of gesture politics: to send a £9-million bomber from Cyprus to Iraq and back, burning £35,000 an hour in fuel, to launch a smart missile costing £100,000 to destroy a truck or, rather, to create a video that shows it being destroyed. Some lives are ended—it is impossible to tell whose—so that the government can pretend that it taking effective action by creating a high-budget snuff movie. This is killing for show. Since the Vietnam War the way we see conflict – through film, photographs, and pixels – has had a powerful impact on the political fortunes of the campaign, and the way that war has been conducted. In Killing for Show: Photography, War, and the Media in Vietnam and Iraq (Rowman and Littlefield, 2020), Julian Stallabrass tells the story of post-war conflict, how it was recorded and remembered through its iconic photography. Through accounts of events such as My Lai massacre, the violent suppression of insurgent Fallujah, or the atrocities in Abu Ghraib, Stallabrass maps a comprehensive theoretical re-evaluation of the relationship between war, politics and visual culture. Julian Stallabrass talks to Pierre d’Alancaisez about the inescapable complicity of photography and media in warfare, the technical and social evolution of images as lethal weapons, and their changing role as witnesses or propaganda documents. Julian Stallabrass is an art historian, photographer, curator, and professor at the Courtauld Institute of Art.
Thomas Dworzak’s Taliban studio photographs
Documentary on Eugenie Goldberg’s Open Shutters of Iraq
Execution of Nguyễn Văn Lém, photographed by Eddie Adams
Lisa Barnard
James Bridle’s Dronestagram
Omer Fast’s 5000 feet is the Best
Pierre d’Alancaisez is a contemporary art curator, cultural strategist, researcher. Sometime scientist, financial services professional. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
White publishers and editors used their newspapers to build, nurture, and protect white supremacy across the South in the decades after the Civil War. At the same time, a vibrant Black press fought to disrupt these efforts and force the United States to live up to its democratic ideals. Journalism and Jim Crow: White Supremacy and the Black Struggle for a New America (U Illinois Press, 2021) centers the press as a crucial political actor shaping the rise of the Jim Crow South. In this interview with co-editor Kathy Roberts Forde, we explore the leading role of the white press in constructing an anti-democratic society by promoting and supporting not only lynching and convict labor but also coordinated campaigns of violence and fraud that disenfranchised Black voters. We also examine the Black press's parallel fight for a multiracial democracy of equality, justice, and opportunity for all — a losing battle with consequences that continue to impact newsrooms today. Learn more about the book and find resources for educators and newsrooms at journalismandjimcrow.com. Kathy Roberts Forde is an American journalism historian with research interests in democracy and the public sphere, the Black freedom struggle and the press, the First Amendment, literary journalism, and the history of the book and print culture. She is the Associate Dean of Equity & Inclusion in the College of Social & Behavioral Sciences. She served as Chair of UMass Journalism from 2014-2017; she is past chair of the AEJMC History Division and past associate editor of American Journalism. Jenna Spinelle is a journalism instructor at Penn State's Donald P. Bellisario College of Communications. She's also the communications specialist for the university's McCourtney Institute for Democracy, where she hosts and produces the Democracy Works podcast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
Stanislav Aseyev is a Ukrainian journalist and writer born in Donetsk, which at present remains occupied by Russia-backed militants. Sometime after the beginning of the occupation, he was captured for his political views by the militants of the occupied parts of the Donbas and sentenced to 15 years. On the eve of 2020, Aseyev was released in a prisoner exchange. Currently Stanislav Aseyev lives in Kyiv. Aseyev received a number of awards recognizing his active social and political position (including the Free Media Award (2020), the National Freedom of Expression Award (2020). He is also a recipient of the Shevchenko National Prize, the highest state prize of Ukraine for works of culture and arts. Stanislav Aseyev’s In Isolation: Dispatches from Occupied Donbas (Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, 2022; translated into English by Lidia Wolanskyj) helps understand a highly entangled and complicated background of the current Russo-Ukrainian war. This book—a chronological account of the events that started in November of 2013, on the one hand, and a collection of journalistic reflections that attempt to explain almost surreal and absurd developments, on the other—documents how the Donbas turned into another flashpoint, following Crimea, whose emergence is directly connected to the Russian Federation and provides commentaries on Russia’s role in sustaining the current war. In Isolation is written from within the zone of conflict; it emerges from the very epicenter of the war that signals not only interstate rifts but also splits that tear apart families and cause uneasiness in long-term friendships. Nataliya Shpylova-Saeed is a PhD candidate in the Department of Slavic and East European Languages and Cultures, Indiana University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
Americans are deeply polarized on many issues, including science and medicine. Where once was widespread agreement, today the differences are sharp: on one hand, posters announce, “I believe in science!” and on the other hand, dramatic videos show ICU patients affirming their anti-vax beliefs with their final breaths. What is going on? Science is supposed to be based on reason, not faith. We get into a pile of metal – our cars – every day without fear because we trust the engineers, who built cars based on science. Science is characterized by observation, empirical findings, and replication. At least that’s the way it is supposed to be. Not long ago, Americans and most people around the world trusted the integrity of science. But that trust has been in decline for years, to our collective detriment. Why did science lose so much of the public trust? How does that loss relate to the decline of trust in other institutions? What are the trust-related issues for minorities? What can the scientific enterprise do to regain our trust? Fran Kritz is a passionate journalist who has covered health and health policy for decades. Her reporting experience gives her a unique view of the changes in the relationship between the public and its medical and scientific experts. She has written for NPR, the Washington Post, Kaiser Health News, and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. Renee Garfinkel, Ph.D. is a psychologist, writer, Middle East television commentator and host of The New Books Network’s Van Leer Jerusalem Series on Ideas. Write her at reneeg@vanleer.org.il Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
How is power enacted in everyday broadcast practices? National Public Radio has a “rhetoric of impartiality” but this obscures the ideological work done by the network.” In The Sound of Exclusion: NPR and the Latinx Public (U Arizona Press, 2021), Dr. Christopher Chávez interrogates how NPR determines what it means to be American and what is deemed American news. NPR’s original mandate included engaging listeners in civic discourses and representing the diversity of the nation. Yet Chavez argues that NPR has created a "white public space" that pushes Latinx listeners to the periphery. As a result, NPR promotes the cultural logic that Latinx identity is separate from national identity – hindering Latinx participation in civic discourses. But Chavez maintains that the shared act of listening might facilitate the ways in which Latinx listeners negotiate and resist norms of what it means to belong, also known as sonic citizenship. He writes that through the act of listening, "... those without sustained access to political power might imagine alternative political possibilities in which they are included." Dr. Christopher Chávez is an Associate Professor in the School of Journalism and Communication at the University of Oregon where he also directs the Center for Latina/o and Latin American Studies. His publications include a previous book Reinventing the Latino Television Viewer: Language, Ideology, and Practice (Lexington Books, 2015). Daniella Campos served as editorial assistant for this podcast. Susan Liebell is Dirk Warren '50 Professor of Political Science at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
In the midst of the disruptions and distrust that have plagued traditional media in recent years, and a degree of polarization rarely seen in American history, a new style of journalism is emerging. Dozens of news organizations, from corporate powerhouses to home-office startups, are reviving a classic role of American journalism: inspiring and enabling Americans to do the difficult, authentic, and ultimately rewarding work of citizenship in a democratic society. News for US: Citizen-Centered Journalism (Cognella, 2021) is the first-ever guide to this new approach — one that enriches the skill set of the 21st-century journalist with the mindset of civic engagement. Authors Paula Lynn Ellis, Paul S. Voakes, and Lori Bergen illuminate the principles of citizen-centered journalism and demonstrate how today's journalists can apply them within the context of modern-day news and feature reporting. The text features engaging perspectives from leading innovators and experimenters in the field, who describe their challenges and offer guidance to readers. Paula Ellis is a national leader in journalism innovation, transformative change and employee and community engagement. A former foundation executive, senior media executive and journalist, her work focuses on civic entrepreneurship with a twin emphasis on reimagining journalism to better serve democracy and fostering more inclusive communities and work places. Jenna Spinelle is a journalism instructor at Penn State's Donald P. Bellisario College of Communications. She's also the communications specialist for the university's McCourtney Institute for Democracy, where she hosts and produces the Democracy Works podcast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
The common-sense way of thinking about what representatives should do in democracies tends to revolve around the concept of responsiveness: representatives should respond to the interests and demands of their constituents. However, this account of representation does not tell us much about how citizens form preferences. If political representatives and other actors have the ability to shape the interests and preferences of actors, this raises the specters of manipulation, voter incompetence, and false consciousness. All of these concepts question whether citizens have the capacity to form accurate beliefs about their own interests and to judge whether or not politicians are serving them. In her new book Making Constituencies: Representation as Mobilization in Mass Democracy (University of Chicago Press, 2021), my guest Lisa Disch argues that concerns about manipulation and voter competence are overwrought because they are grounded in a mistaken understanding of how representation works in democracies. Building on the “constructivist turn” in representation, Disch argues that the starting point of theorizing about how representation should work in democracies should be on the processes through which representatives of all kinds – from elected politicians to media outlets and social movements – constitute the very groups that they claim to speak for. Rather than asking how we can make politicians respond to the interests of voters, Disch argues that we should be asking how political actors, parties, and movements can mobilize constituencies for projects of social change. Lisa Disch is Professor of Political Science and Women’s Studies at the University of Michigan. Geoffrey Gordon is a PhD candidate in comparative politics at the University of Virginia. Follow him on Twitter: @geofflgordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
Political scientists have argued that Donald Trump exacerbated long-simmering changes in polarization, populism, and other aspects of politics. In their book News After Trump: Journalism's Crisis of Relevance in a Changed Media Culture (Oxford University Press, 2021), Matt Carlson, Seth C. Lewis, and Sue Robinson, argue that Trump's candidacy and presidency did the same in journalism. The question now is, how do news organizations move forward and continue to deliver informational value to the public at a time when they're just one of many information sources people see? Taking an expansive view of the contemporary media and political environment during the Trump years, News After Trump portrays a media culture in transition. As journalism's very relevance comes to be increasingly questioned, the authors focus on how different actors — from Trump to small-town newspaper editors — use their cultural power to define journalism, assess its value, and question what the news should look like. This conversation is especially important as news organizations continue to grapple with their role in standing up for democratic norms and values. Matt Carlson is associate professor at the Hubbard School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Minnesota. Seth C. Lewis is founding holder of the Shirley Papé Chair in Emerging Media in the School of Journalism and Communication at the University of Oregon. Jenna Spinelle is a journalism instructor at Penn State's Donald P. Bellisario College of Communications. She's also the communications specialist for the university's McCourtney Institute for Democracy, where she hosts and produces the Democracy Works podcast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
This interview was recorded and first published in early 2020 when the NBN had about a million downloads a month. Since then the downloads have increased more than four-fold to just below 5 million monthly downloads at the end of 2021 and the number of hosts has increased greatly as well. On the New Books Network authors to talk about their books with a specialist host. Founded in 2007 by Marshall Poe, formerly a Russian history professor from the US. The NBN has grown to be the most downloaded podcast of its type in the world.
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About your host Richard Lucas Richard is a business and social entrepreneur who founded, led and/or invested in more than 30 businesses, Richard has been a TEDx event organiser, supports the pro-entrepreneurship ecosystem, and leads entrepreneurship workshops at all levels: from pre-schools to leading business schools. Richard was born in Oxford and moved to Poland in 1991. Read more here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
Elena Poniatowska is a legendary Mexican journalist who has chronicled popular celebrities, politicians as well as important social movements in Mexico since the 1968 Tlatelolco students massacre. Today I talked to Lynn Stephen, a professor of anthropology at the University of Oregon who has described in her book Stories That Make History: Mexico through Elena Poniatowska’s Crónicas (Duke UP, 2021) how Poniatowska’s personal and political trajectory intertwined with Mexico’s growing critical public after 1968. The earthquake of 1985, the Chiapas uprising and Subcomandante Marcos as well as the recent occupation of the Zócalo in Mexico City are in Stephen’s words “historical moments when the status quo is cracked open, when people take to the streets and demand change, when another future seems possible”. These are the moments when gifted writers and artists step up and document movements and create new historical actors. We might have read Elena Poniatowska but we didn't know her. Lynn Stephen has reflected on the beautiful and strong parts of this woman who beat the odds in her own life to rewrite Mexican history. Minni Sawhney is a professor of Hispanic Studies at the University of Delhi. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
Eric Berkowitz has written a short history of a censorship, a large topic that has been a phenomenon since the advent of recorded history. In Dangerous Ideas: A Brief History of Censorship in the West from the Ancients to Fake News (Beacon Press, 2021), Berkowitz reviews the motives and methods of governments, religious authorities, and private citizens to quell freedom of thought and expression. One theme Berkowitz reveals is how ineffective many censorship efforts have been. For example, after the printing press multiplied the sources available to readers and the opportunities for the Church and governments to suppress books and pamphlets, the attempts to censor speech served to heighten interest and encourage more dissent, creating profitable black markets for forbidden topics. Some publishers actually encouraged authors to write something likely to be forbidden. Yet, Berkowitz forthrightly acknowledges the dangers under which free thinker have lived and continue to live in our contemporary world. The dangers of daring to express oneself are present not only in authoritarian polities but in our own, and Berkowitz’s history seeks to reveal the common motives of censors and their targets. Ian J. Drake is Associate Professor of Jurisprudence, Montclair State University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
How do we narrate history, both the troubling past and what we chose to remember? Clint Smith sets out to wrestle with this question and its relationship to enslavement in his first nonfiction book, How the Word is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America (Little, Brown and Company, 2021). From Monticello plantation to Angola Prison to Galveston Island, Smith guides the reader on a journey as he visits domestic and abroad landmarks. In his exploration, he includes the reactions of the people he meets, like tourists, local public historians, and teachers, illuminating how these sites and all of us participate in remembering enslavement in contemporary America. N'Kosi Oates is a Ph.D. candidate in Africana Studies at Brown University. Find him on Twitter at NKosiOates. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
Media is usually seen as a feature of the modern world enabled by the latest technologies. Scholars, educators, parents, and politicians often talk about media as something people should be wary of due to its potential negative impact on their lives. But do we really understand what media is? In Media Is Us: Understanding Communication and Moving Beyond Blame (Rowman and Littlefield, 2021), Elizaveta Friesem argues that instead of being worried about media or blaming it for what’s going wrong in society, we should become curious about uniquely human ways we communicate with each other. Media Is Us proposes five key principles of communication that are relevant both for the modern media and for people’s age-old ways of making sense of the world. In order to understand problems of the contemporary society revealed and amplified by the latest technologies, we will have to ask difficult questions about ourselves. Where do our truths and facts come from? How can we know who is to blame for flaws of the social system? What can we change about our own everyday actions to make the world a better place? To answer these questions we will need to rethink not only the term “media” but also the concept of power. The change of perspective proposed by the book is intended to help the reader become more self-aware and also empathic towards those who choose different truths. Concluding with practical steps to build media literacy through the ACE model—from Awareness to Collaboration through Empathy—this timely book is essential for students and scholars, as well as anyone who would use the new understanding of media to decrease the current levels of cultural polarization. Marci Mazzarotto is an Assistant Professor of Digital Communication at Georgian Court University in New Jersey. Her research interests center on the interdisciplinary intersection of academic theory and artistic practice with a focus on film and television studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
In the Qing dynasty (1644-1911), China experienced far greater access to political information than suggested by the blunt measures of control and censorship employed by modern Chinese regimes. A tenuous partnership between the court and the dynamic commercial publishing enterprises of late imperial China enabled the publication of gazettes in a wide range of print and manuscript formats. For both domestic and foreign readers these official gazettes offered vital information about the Qing state and its activities, transmitting state news across a vast empire and beyond. And the most essential window onto Qing politics was the Peking Gazette, a genre that circulated globally over the course of the dynasty. The Peking Gazette in Late Imperial China: State News and Political Authority (U Washington Press, 2021) presents a comprehensive history of the Peking Gazette and frames it as the cornerstone of a Qing information policy that, paradoxically, prized both transparency and secrecy. Gazettes gave readers a glimpse into the state's inner workings but also served as a carefully curated form of public relations. Historian Emily Mokros draws from international archives to reconstruct who read the gazette and how they used it to guide their interactions with the Chinese state. Her research into the Peking Gazette's evolution over more than two centuries is essential reading for anyone interested in understanding the relationship between media, information, and state power. Sarah Bramao-Ramos is a PhD candidate in History and East Asian Languages at Harvard. She works on Manchu language books and is interested in anything with a kesike. She can be reached at sbramaoramos@g.harvard.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
Matthew Ricketson joins to discuss how newsrooms, the engine rooms of reporting, have shrunk. A generation of journalists has borne witness to seismic changes in the media and this book shares their stories as essays and narrative interviews. Names include from more than 50 Australian journalists – including Amanda Meade, David Marr and Flip Prior – Upheaval: The Great Digital Disruption in Journalism and Its Aftermath (NewSouth, 2021) reveals the highs and the lows of those who were there to see it all. Matthew takes us inside frenetic and vibrant newsrooms at the peak of their influence, and the difficulties of adapting to ever-accelerating news cycles with fewer resources. Some left journalism altogether while others stayed in the media — or sought to reinvent it. Normally the ones telling other people’s stories, in Upheaval journalists share the rawness of losing their own job or watching others lose theirs. They reveal their anxieties and hopes for the industry’s future and their commitment to reporting news that matters. Matthew Ricketson is presently the professor of communication at Deakin University, previously inaugural journalism professor at the University of Canberra between 2009 and 2017. He ran the journalism program at RMIT for 11 years, and worked on staff at The Australian and Time Australia magazine. His last news media role was Media and Communications Editor at The Age. Bede Haines is a solicitor, specialising in litigation and a partner at Holding Redlich, an Australian commercial law firm. He lives in Sydney, Australia. Known to read books, ride bikes and eat cereal (often). bede.haines@holdingredlich.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
The story of the American newsroom is that of modern American journalism. In The American Newsroom: A History, 1920-1960 (University of Missouri Press, 2021), Will Mari documents a time of great change and controversy in the field, one in which journalism was produced in "news factories" by news workers with dozens of different roles, and not just once a day, but hourly, using the latest technology and setting the stage for the emergence later in the century of the information economy. While newspapers have come to be seen as an integral part of American democracy, Mari's work shows that newsrooms themselves were far from democratic during this period. They were largely not available to women and people of color, and the leadership style of some editors and mangers bordered on authoritarian. Those standards shifted over the time The American Newsroom documents, thanks in part to the rise of newsroom unions, changing practices around human resources, and the continued transformation of journalism into a professional, white-collar occupation. The American Newsroom sets the stage for many of the visions of newsrooms we see in pop culture from All The President's Men to Spotlight and demonstrates how the period from 1920-1960 expanded the notions of what journalism could and should be. Will Mari is assistant professor of media history and media law at the Manship School of Mass Communication at Louisiana State University. He received his MPhil from Wolfson College, Cambridge and his Ph.D. from the University of Washington. He studies media history, media law, and especially analog-to-digital transitions and their impact on news workers. Jenna Spinelle is a journalism instructor at Penn State's Donald P. Bellisario College of Communications. She's also the communications specialist for the university's McCourtney Institute for Democracy, where she hosts and produces the Democracy Works podcast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
Perspectives on Mass Communication is based on an in-depth filmed conversation between Howard Burton and Denis McQuail (1935-2017), who was Emeritus Professor at the University of Amsterdam and Visiting Professor at the University of Southampton. He is widely considered to be one of the most influential scholars in the history of mass communication studies. This wide-ranging conversation provides detailed insights into how examining the media, and in particular mass media, necessarily involves a careful, probing look at our societal values; the concepts, metrics and ideas that McQuail developed to measure the sociological influence of the media; the critical role of journalism in society and more. Howard Burton is the founder of the Ideas Roadshow, Ideas on Film and host of the Ideas Roadshow Podcast. He can be reached at howard@ideasroadshow.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
Mark Baker is an American journalist and travel writer. In the 1980s, he lived in Vienna and reported on the former Eastern bloc for Business International and The Economist Group. In 1991, he moved to Prague, where he worked as an editor for The Prague Post and co-founded The Globe Bookstore & Coffeehouse. He’s written 30 travel guidebooks for publishers like Lonely Planet and Fodor's on countries in Central and Eastern Europe, including the Czech Republic. Čas Proměn (Time of Changes) is his first book of historical nonfiction. Find more about Mark at his website. Steven Seegel is Professor of Slavic and Eurasian Studies at The University of Texas at Austin. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
What's it like to cover Donald Trump? In this episode, veteran American journalist Allen Salkin explains. For over three decades, Salkin has written about many things for many high-profile publications, including The New York Post, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Atlantic and others. He is also the author of a number of well-received books: Festivus: The Holiday for the Rest of Us (2008); From Scratch: The Uncensored History of the Food Network (2014); and most recently The Method to the Madness: How Donald Trump Went from Penthouse to White House in Fifteen Years--An Oral History written with political reporter Aaron Short in 2018. In this episode, we are discussing his 2019 Los Angeles Magazine piece The Biggest Loser: Why Donald Trump Couldn’t Hack It in Hollywood. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
Over the past 15 years, journalism has experienced a rapid proliferation of data about online reader behavior in the form of web metrics. These newsroom metrics influence which stories are written, how news is promoted, and which journalists get hired and fired. Some argue that metrics help journalists better serve their audiences. Others worry that metrics are the contemporary equivalent of a stopwatch-wielding factory manager. In All the News That's Fit to Click: How Metrics Are Transforming the Work of Journalists (Princeton UP 2021), Caitlin Petre offers a rare behind-the-scenes look at how metrics are reshaping the work of journalism. The book is based on Petre's interviews and ethnographic observations at Chartbeat, Gawker, and the New York Times. Across the organizations, she finds that newsroom metrics are a powerful form of managerial surveillance and discipline. However, unlike the manager's stopwatch that preceded them, digital metrics are designed to gain the trust of wary journalists by providing a habit-forming user experience that mimics key features of addictive games. She details how metrics intersect with newsroom hierarchies and norms, as well as how their ambiguity leads to seemingly arbitrary interpretations of success. As performance analytics spread to virtually every professional field, Petre's findings speak to the future of expertise and labor relations in contexts far beyond journalism. Caitlin Petre is an assistant professor of journalism and media studies at Rutgers University. Jenna Spinelle is an instructor in the Donald P. Bellisario College of Communications at Penn State and host of the Democracy Works podcast. Jenna Spinelle is a journalism instructor at Penn State's Donald P. Bellisario College of Communications. She's also the communications specialist for the university's McCourtney Institute for Democracy, where she hosts and produces the Democracy Works podcast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
In The Life and Times of Louis Lomax: The Art of Deliberate Disunity (Duke University Press, 2021), Thomas Aiello traces the complicated and fascinating life of a pioneering Black journalist and media personality. A witness to some of the most iconic moments of the 1960s, Lomax remains an important yet overlooked civil rights figure, who emerged as one of the most influential voices of the movement despite his past as an ex-con, serial liar, and publicity-seeking provocateur. Thomas Aiello is a professor of history, and Africana studies at Valdosta State University. He is the author of more than twenty books and dozens of peer-reviewed journal articles. His work helped amend the Louisiana constitution to make nonunanimous juries illegal and was cited in the United States Supreme Court as part of its decision ruling them unconstitutional. His work was also part of the effort that led Major League Baseball to include Negro Leagues statistics in its historical record. He holds PhDs in history and anthrozoology and lives in Valdosta, Georgia. Learn more at www.thomasaiellobooks.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
Until the recent political shift pushed workers back into the media spotlight, the mainstream media had largely ignored this significant part of American society in favor of the moneyed upscale consumer for more than four decades. Christopher R. Martin now reveals why and how the media lost sight of the American working class and the effects of it doing so. The damning indictment of the mainstream media that flows through No Longer Newsworthy: How the Mainstream Media Abandoned the Working Class (Cornell UP, 2019) is a wakeup call about the critical role of the media in telling news stories about labor unions, workers, and working-class readers. As Martin charts the decline of labor reporting from the late 1960s onwards, he reveals the shift in news coverage as the mainstream media abandoned labor in favor of consumer and business interests. When newspapers, especially, wrote off working-class readers as useless for their business model, the American worker became invisible. In No Longer Newsworthy, Martin covers this shift in focus, the loss of political voice for the working class, and the emergence of a more conservative media in the form of Christian television, talk radio, Fox News, and conservative websites. Now, with our fractured society and news media, Martin offers the mainstream media recommendations for how to push back against right-wing media and once again embrace the working class as critical to its audience and its democratic function. Tom Discenna is Professor of Communication at Oakland University whose work examines issues of academic labor and communicative labor more broadly. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
David Schmalz is a staff writer at the Monterey County Weekly, where his longform pieces have won numerous awards from the California News Publishers Association, including a first place for enterprise reporting in 2014 for an expose he wrote about a local church's attempt to evict residents from 98 federally subsidized apartments from a property it managed. Those residents were able to keep their homes, and the property remains the largest affordable housing complex on the Monterey Peninsula. His reporting also helped lead to the closure of the last remaining coastal sand mine in America, as well as overturning the approvals for one of the largest proposed developments in Monterey County history, which would have razed tens of thousands of coast live oaks to build single family homes and a horse-racing track. Other than the four years he's spent working or traveling abroad, Schmalz has lived and worked his entire life in California. Agata Popeda is a Polish-American journalist. Interested in everything, with a particular weakness for literature and foreign relations. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
If information is power, then so too is gossip. In Gossip Men: J. Edgar Hoover, Joe McCarthy, Roy Cohn, and the Politics of Insinuation (U Chicago Press, 2021), historian Christopher Elias shows how three men who sat at the center of the mid-century surveillance state—FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, the bellicose anticommunist Senator Joe McCarthy, and the gold-collar lawyer from New York, Roy Cohn—understood that power and used it to their advantage, elevating themselves and intimidating others. The trio investigated the private lives of their enemies, and mastered the tools of implication, sensationalism, photographic manipulation. By putting “the politics of insinuation” at the center of American culture, Elias, an assistant professor at the American University in Cairo, provides an innovative and entertaining reading of celebrity, and masculinity, and the mid-century surveillance state. More than anything, Gossip Men illustrates that many seemingly disparate historical processes in the middle decades of the twentieth century were not coincidental but intertwined. The fact that “the golden age of American gossip magazines” preceded and overlapped with the McCarthyist witch-hunts turns out to be historically significant. (Or that Roy Cohn was one of the two funders of the National Enquirer throughout the fifties.) Gossip Men should interest a wide variety of readers, from historians of the Cold War to scholars of politics and popular culture. Dexter Fergie is a doctoral student in US and global history at Northwestern University. His research examines the history of ideas, infrastructure, and international organizations. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
David Freedlander is a veteran New York City-based journalist. He writes long-form features about politics and the arts, people and ideas, and has appeared in New York Magazine, Bloomberg, Rolling Stone, ArtNews, The Daily Beast, Newsweek and a host of other publications. In this episode, we are talking about his coverage of New York Politics – the resignation of former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo and likely next mayor of the NYC, Eric Adams. Agata Popeda is a Polish-American journalist. Interested in everything, with a particular weakness for literature and foreign relations. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
Over the course of a long and successful legal career, Morris Ernst established himself as one of Americas foremost civil libertarians. Yet his advocacy of free speech – an advocacy that established the case law on which much of the subsequent jurisprudence is based – stands in stark contrast with his opposition to communism and his longstanding support for J. Edgar Hoover and his anticommunist campaigns. In The Rise and Fall of Morris Ernst, Free Speech Renegade (U Chicago Press, 2021), Samantha Barbas explores these contradictions to better understand Ernest and his legacy for our times. The son of Jewish immigrants, as a young man in college Ernst developed a gift for argumentation and an interest in progressive politics. Entering private practice after earning his law degree, he developed a reputation as a free speech crusader during the 1920s thanks to a series of high-profile legal victories and his leadership within the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). Yet even while developing a national reputation as a liberal attorney Ernst adopted a strident opposition to communism that sometimes put him at odds with his peers. Such was his antipathy to it that he emerged as one of Hoover’s most visible defenders on the left in the 1940s and 1950s, even supplying the FBI director with insider information on ACLU activities. As Barbas explains, such activities reflected his desire to remain relevant at a time when his greatest achievements increasingly lay behind him. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
Sex abuse happens in all communities, but American minority religions often face disproportionate allegations of sexual abuse. Why, in a country that consistently fails to acknowledge—much less address—the sexual abuse of women and children, do American religious outsiders so often face allegations of sexual misconduct? Why does the American public presume to know “what’s really going on” in minority religious communities? Why are sex abuse allegations such an effective way to discredit people on America’s religious margins? What makes Americans so willing, so eager to identify religion as the cause of sex abuse? In Abusing Religion: Literary Persecution, Sex Scandals, and American Minority Religions (Rutgers UP, 2020), Megan Goodwin argues that sex abuse in minority religious communities is an American problem, not (merely) a religious one. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
In considering how legislation moves forward in the American political system, we often think about elected representatives sitting in committee hearings or Senators speaking from the floor of the Senate to make a particular point. Woven into all of these ideas, which are not misguided, is the role (often behind the scenes) that congressional leaders play in trying to wrangle their caucuses to vote for or against legislation. In The Politics of Herding Cats: When Congressional Leaders Fail (U Michigan Press, 2021), Political Scientist John Lovett leads us into these processes and assumptions and unpacks the ways that congressional leaders are far less able to exert control over their caucuses because of the ways that individual members are able to pursue attention through the changing media landscape. While Lovett provides a coda at the end of the book indicating that social media, especially Twitter, has an outsized role in the ways that individual members can capture attention, the focus of the book is to look more closely at heritage media, especially The Washington Post, and trace the ways that members are able to work outside and around party and congressional leaders. By accessing media attention on their own, individual members can exercise power and have the capacity to essentially ignore the demands and requests of the party leadership within Congress. Lilly J. Goren is professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), as well as co-editor of Mad Men and Politics: Nostalgia and the Remaking of Modern America (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). Email her comments at lgoren@carrollu.edu or tweet to @gorenlj. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
Throughout her career, spanning more than two decades, Jessica Hopper, a revered and pioneering music critic, has examined women recording and producing music, in all genres, through an intersectional feminist lens. The First Collection of Criticism by a Living Female Rock Critic (MCD x Fsg Originals, 2021) features oral histories of bands like Hole and Sleater Kinney, interviews with the women editors of 1970s-era Rolling Stone, and intimate conversations with iconic musicians such as Björk, Robyn, and Lido Pimienta. Hopper journeys through the truths of Riot Grrrl's empowering insurgence; decamps to Gary, Indiana, on the eve of Michael Jackson's death; explodes the grunge-era mythologies of Nirvana and Courtney Love; and examines the rise of emo. The collection also includes profiles and reviews of some of the most-loved, and most-loathed, women artists making music today: Fiona Apple, Kacey Musgraves, M.I.A., Miley Cyrus, Lana Del Rey. Andy Boyd is a playwright based in Brooklyn, New York. He is a graduate of the playwriting MFA at Columbia University, Harvard University, and the Arizona School for the Arts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
The Value of Voice is based on an in-depth filmed conversation between Howard Burton and Nick Couldry, Professor of Media, Communications and Social Theory in the Department of Media and Communications at the London School of Economics. This wide-ranging conversation explores how the media can be used as a filter to examine power structures, political movements, economic interests, democracy and our evolving notion of culture, the importance of voice and the challenge posed by media institutions that order the social, political, cultural, economic, and ethical dimensions of our lives. Howard Burton is the founder of the Ideas Roadshow, Ideas on Film and host of the Ideas Roadshow Podcast. He can be reached at howard@ideasroadshow.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
What would it feel like to wake up inside the head of someone who writes about science for a living? John Horgan, acclaimed author of the bestseller The End of Science, answers that question in his genre-bending new book Pay Attention: Sex, Death, and Science (MIT Press, 2020), a stream-of-consciousness account of a day in the life of his alter ego, Eamon Toole--a blogger, college professor, and divorced father. This work of fact-based fiction, or "faction," follows Toole as he wakes up in his rented apartment in upstate New York, meditates with the mantra "Duh," commutes via train and subway to an engineering school in New Jersey, teaches a William James essay on consciousness to freshmen, squabbles about Thomas Kuhn with colleagues over lunch, takes a ferry to Manhattan and spends the evening with his bossy, Tarot-reading girlfriend, Emily, on whom he plans to spring a big question. Throughout the day, Toole struggles to be rational while buffeted by fears and yearnings. Thoughts of sex and death keep intruding on his ruminations over quantum spookiness, the neural code, the Singularity and free will. Pay Attention is a profane, profound meditation on the entanglements of our inner and outer worlds and the elusiveness of truth. Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. To discuss and propose the book for an interview you can reach her at galina.limorenko@epfl.ch. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
Today we are talking to a New Yorker staff writer Carrie Battan about her piece from March of this year "How Politics Tested Ravelry and the Crafting Community" – about how a quote unquote “nice website about yarn” got involved in radical politics. Battan began contributing to The New Yorker in 2015 and became a staff writer in 2018. She has contributed to the New York Times, New York magazine, GQ, Rolling Stone, and the Web site Pitchfork, where she worked as a staff writer from 2011 to 2014. She lives in Brooklyn. Agata Popeda is a Polish-American journalist. Interested in everything, with a particular weakness for literature and foreign relations. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
The legendary Magnum photo agency has long been associated with heroic lone wolf male photographers such as Frank Capa and Henri Cartier-Bresson, roaming the world in search of the “decisive moment” – the perfect shot that captured the essence of a major news story. Nadya Bair’s highly original book The Decisive Network: Magnum Photos and the Postwar Image Market (University of California Press 2020) argues that this idealized portrayal of Magnum occludes the larger networks within which these photographers operated, including the crucial roles performed by often female office staff, by picture editors and corporate clients. She sets out to show that right from the outset, Magnum was also a business operation, one that pioneered modern ideas of branding borrowed from advertising agencies and commercial partners. Drawing on extensive archival work and including numerous images of photo page spreads, The Decisive Network presents Magnum in a novel and distinctive light, as the framer of new global imaginaries that reflected the evolution of post-war capitalism. Nadya Bair is an assistant professor of art history at Hamilton College For digital explorations of the Magnum network, see Nadya’s fascinating website. Duncan McCargo is an eclectic, internationalist political scientist and literature buff: his day job is directing the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies at the University of Copenhagen. Learn more here, here, here, and here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
In First to Fall: Elijah Lovejoy and the Fight for a Free Press in the Age of Slavery (Pegasus Books, 2021), Ken Ellingwood takes readers back to the first true test of the First Amendment's guarantees of free speech and a free press through the story of abolitionist newspaper editor Elijah Lovejoy. The story unfolds during the 1830s, a period known for legal efforts to silence the abolitionist movement by states across the South and violent mobs who picked up that charge when the government could not. Lovejoy pushed back against both of those forces and ultimately succumbed to them, becoming a martyr for the abolitionist movement and a wakeup call about how essential a free press was to a free country and a thriving democracy in America. Lovejoy's story is worth revisiting now at time when attacks against journalists are again on the rise and the press is considered by some to be the "enemy of the people." Ellingwood does a wonderful job of capturing it in this book and bringing this important time in American history to light. Ken Ellingwood is an award-winning journalist, Ken Ellingwood has been posted in the San Diego, Mexico City, Jerusalem, and Atlanta bureaus of the Los Angeles Times. He is the author of the critically acclaimed (and prescient) work of investigative journalism Hard Line: Life and Death on the U.S.-Mexico Border. He currently lives in Abu Dhabi. Jenna Spinelle is an instructor in the Donald P. Bellisario College of Communications at Penn State and host of the Democracy Works podcast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
Recent protests around the world (such as the Arab Spring uprisings and Occupy Wall Street movements) have drawn renewed interest to the study of social change and, especially, to the manner in which words, images, events, and ideas associated with protestors can "move the social." What Democracy Looks Like: The Rhetoric of Social Movements and Counterpublics (U Alabama Press, 2017) is an attempt to foster a more coherent understanding of social change among scholars of rhetoric and communication studies by juxtaposing the ideas of social movements and counterpublics--historically two key factors significant in the study of social change. Foust, Pason, and Zittlow Rogness's volume compiles the voices of leading and new scholars who are contributing to the history, application, and new directions of these two concepts, all in conversation with a number of acts of resistance or social change. The theories of social movements and counterpublics are related, but distinct. Social movement theories tend to be concerned with enacting policy and legislative changes. Scholars flying this flag have concentrated on the organization and language (for example, rallies and speeches) that are meant to enact social change. Counterpublic theory, on the other hand, focuses less on policy changes and more on the unequal distribution of power and resources among different protest groups, which is sometimes synonymous with subordinated identity groups such as race, gender, sexuality, and class. Nonetheless, contributors argue that in recent years the distinctions between these two methods have become less evident. By putting the literatures of the two theories in conversation with one another, these scholars seek to promote and imagine social change outside the typical binaries.
Christina Foust is an Associate Professor of Communication Studies at Metropolitan State University of Denver. Amy Pason is an Associate Professor of Communication Studies at the University of Nevada, Reno, and currently spends most of her time as Faculty Senate Chair and most recently, been elected to represent all Faculty Senate Chairs for the Nevada System of Higher Education. Kate Zittlow Rogness, Ph.D., is a faculty member in the Department of Communication at Minneapolis College. Tom Discenna is Professor of Communication at Oakland University whose work examines issues of academic labor and communicative labor more broadly. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
Raúl Diego Rivera Hernández's book Narratives of Vulnerability in Mexico's War on Drugs (Palgrave MacMillan, 2020) explores the current human rights crisis created by the War on Drugs in Mexico. It focuses on three vulnerable communities that have felt the impacts of this war firsthand: undocumented Central American migrants in transit to the United States, journalists who report on violence in highly dangerous regions, and the mourning relatives of victims of severe crimes, who take collective action by participating in human rights investigations and searching for their missing loved ones. Analyzing contemporary novels, journalistic chronicles, testimonial works, and documentaries, the book reveals the political potential of these communities' vulnerability and victimization portrayed in these fictional and non-fictional representations. Violence against migrants, journalists, and activists reveals an array of human rights violations affecting the right to safe transit across borders, freedom of expression, the right to information, and the right to truth and justice. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
The connection between local news and political polarization is a hot topic that scholars in political science, journalism, and other fields have explored from multiple angles. It's not often that a real-world experiment presents itself, but that's exactly what happened when a Google alert landed in the inboxes of Joshua P. Darr., Matthew P. Hitt, and Johanna Dunaway. During the month of July 2019, the Palm Springs Desert Sun dropped national politics from its opinion page and instead filled the space with columns from local writers and letters to the editor about local issues. In Home Style Opinion: How Local Newspapers Can Slow Polarization (Cambridge UP, 2021), the authors use a show that after this quasi-experiment in Palm Springs, politically engaged people did not feel as far apart from members of the opposing party, compared to those in a similar community whose newspaper did not change. While it may not cure all of the imbalances and inequities in opinion journalism, an opinion page that ignores national politics could help local newspapers push back against political polarization. Darr and Hitt join New Books Network host Jenna Spinelle for this conversation. Joshua P. Darr is assistant professor of political communication at Louisiana State University. Matthew P. Hitt is associate professor of political science at Colorado State University. Jenna Spinelle is an instructor in the Donald. P. Bellisario College of Communications at Penn State and host of the Democracy Works podcast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
In early twentieth century British India, prior to the arrival of digital medias and after the rise of nationalist political movements, a small-town paper from the margins of society became a key player in Urdu journalism. Published in the isolated market town of Bijnor, Madinah grew to hold influence across North India and the Punjab while navigating complex issues of religious and political identity. In Print and the Urdu Public: Muslims, Newspapers, and Urban Life in Colonial India (Oxford UP, 2020), Megan Robb uses the previously unexamined perspective of the Madinah to consider Urdu print publics and urban life in South Asia. Through a discursive and material analysis of Madinah, the book explores how Muslims who had settled in ancestral qasbahs, or small towns, used newspapers to facilitate a new public consciousness. The book demonstrates how Madinah connected the Urdu newspaper conversation both explicitly and implicitly with Muslim identity and delineated the boundaries of a Muslim public conversation in a way that emphasized rootedness to local politics and small urban spaces. The case study of this influential but understudied newspaper reveals how a network of journalists with substantial ties to qasbahs produced a discourse self-consciously alternative to the Western-influenced, secularized cities. Megan Robb augments the analysis with evidence from contemporary Urdu, English, and Hindi papers, government records, private diaries, private library holdings, ethnographic interviews, and training materials for newspaper printers. This thoroughly researched volume recovers the erasure of qasbah voices and proclaims the importance of space and time in definitions of the public sphere in South Asia. Print and the Urdu Public demonstrates how an Urdu newspaper published from the margins became central to the Muslim public constituted in the first half of the twentieth century. Raj Balkaran is a scholar, educator, consultant, and life coach. For information see rajbalkaran.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
What’s the greatest crisis facing America today? — Racism and hate crimes, exploding government debt, climate change, or the mess at the border? It may be none of these. America and many other countries are trapped in high conflict. Both sides are paralyzed by fear and anger as they demonize the other. The national narrative of "us versus them" is a threat to democracy and stops us from working together to build a better world. Best-selling author and investigative journalist, Amanda Ripley, is our guest. She is well-known for her writing in The Atlantic, Time, The Guardian, The Wall Street Journal, and many other publications. Her latest book is High Conflict: Why We Get Trapped and How We Get Out. Amanda argues that good conflict involves nuance and complexity. It can teach us to be better people, who are capable of solutions as they move past misunderstandings. Many are trapped in high conflict, which is threatening to tear us apart, creating an even deeper crisis than we have now. We discuss "conflict entrepreneurs"— cable TV personalities, talk radio hosts, and politicians from both left and right — who profit from making us angry and fearful. "Most Americans want "out" of this high conflict," Amanda tells How Do We Fix It? "They very much want to see a different way of disagreeing among their politicians and the news media. They are frequently tuning out of politics and the news, which is a big problem, but totally understandable." Recommendation: Jim enjoyed watching "Long Strange Trip", a highly-praised documentary about the rock band, the Grateful Dead. TV viewers can watch it on Amazon Prime. This is an episode of the excellent podcast "How Do We Fix It." You can find it on all the major podcast apps and here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
The future of local news and the connection between local news and democracy are two of the hottest topics in philanthropy, education, and media these days. Nikki Usher addresses both head-on in her new book, News for the Rich, White, and Blue: How Place and Power Distort American Journalism (Columbia University Press, 2021). In the book and in this conversation, Usher recasts the challenges facing journalism in terms of place, power, and inequality. She questions longstanding beliefs about the relationship between local news and civic engagement and separates observed behavior from myths about American democracy and the media's role within it. Drawing on more than a decade of field research in newsrooms across the United States, Usher illuminates how news organizations strategize about the future and offers ideas for how they can meet community information needs in an inclusive, equitable way. Nikki Usher is an associate professor in the College of Media at the University of Illinois . Jenna Spinelle is a journalism instructor in the Donald P. Bellisario College of Communications at Penn State and host of the Democracy Works podcast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
On Heels in the Middle East (Pardes Publishing, 2020) is the first book of Ksenia Svetlova, an Israeli journalist of Russian origin who covered the Middle East extensively during the last two decades. Svetlova takes us on a journey to Hizbullah dominated parts of Beirut, refugee camps in Gaza, Qaddafi's Libya and the revolutionary squares of the Arab Spring. She describes the fateful events that had changed the face of the Middle East such as the US invasion to Iraq or the second Palestinian Intifada and disengagement from Gaza from a unique point of view of female reporter, and explains the processes that culminated in revolutions, armed conflicts or peace agreements. "On heels in the Middle East" ties together first-hand impressions, rare interviews with key figures such as Yassir Arafat and Sheikh Ahmad Yassin, the founder of Hamas and expert analysis of developments in the Middle East. Ksenia Svetlova is an Israeli journalist, researcher of the Middle East and writer. She was born in Moscow and grew up in Jerusalem. Ksenia had covered the Middle East extensively during 13 years contributed to the Jerusalem Post, BBC, and other media outlets. Between 2015-2019 she served as a member of the Israeli government. She currently serves as a senior research fellow at the Institute for Policy and Strategy (at the IDC Herzliya) and runs a program for Israel-Middle East relations at Mitvim institute for regional foreign policy. Dr. Yakir Englander is the National Director of Leadership programs at the Israeli-American Council. He also teaches at the AJR. He can be reached at: Yakir1212englander@gmail.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
Many believe the solution to ongoing crises in the news industry — including profound financial instability and public distrust — is for journalists to improve connections to their audiences. Conversations about the proper relationship between the media and the public go back to Walter Lippmann and John Dewey and through the public journalism movement of the 1990s to today and what's come to be known as engaged journalism. In Imagined Audiences: How Journalists Perceive and Pursue the Public (Oxford UP, 2021), Jacob L. Nelson examines the role that audiences have traditionally played in journalism, how that role has changed, and what those changes mean for both the profession and the public. The result is a comprehensive study of both news production and reception at a moment when the relationship between the two has grown more important than ever before. Beyond the arguments in Imagined Audiences, Nelson talks with New Books in Journalism host Jenna Spinelle about how journalism researchers and practitioners can work more closely together, as well as how Nelson's students perceive engaged journalism in relationship to their own media habits. This conversation is also in many ways a companion to the recent episode with Andrea Wenzel on her book "Community-Centered Journalism." Nelson and Wenzel work together on the Engaged Journalism Exchange, a series of gatherings aiming to bridge the divide between journalism scholars and innovators. Nelson is an assistant professor at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University. Spinelle is an instructor in the Donald P. Bellisario College of Communications at Penn State and host of the Democracy Works podcast. Jenna Spinelle is a journalism instructor at Penn State's Donald P. Bellisario College of Communications. She's also the communications specialist for the university's McCourtney Institute for Democracy, where she hosts and produces the Democracy Works podcast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
Welcome to The Academic Life. You are smart and capable, but you aren’t an island, and neither are we. So we reached across our mentor network to bring you podcasts on everything from how to finish that project, to how to take care of your beautiful mind. Wish we’d bring in an expert about something? Email us at cgessler05@gmail.com or dr.danamalone@gmail.com. Find us on Twitter: The Academic Life @AcademicLifeNBN. In this episode you’ll hear about: Karin Fischer’s job as a contributing writer for the Chronicle of Higher Education, how she researches stories about international students, what the pandemic means for her work and for the students she writes about, and what she’s hopeful about. Our guest is: Karin Fischer, a higher-education journalist with a focus on international education, American colleges’ activities overseas, the globalization of the college experience, and study abroad. Her work has appeared in the Chronicle of Higher Education, the New York Times, EdSource, the Washington Monthly, and University World News. Ms. Fischer is also a research associate at the Center for Studies in Higher Education at the University of California at Berkeley and an international education leadership fellow at the University at Albany. She is a recipient of the East-West Center’s Jefferson Fellowship for reporting in Asia and the International Reporting Project fellowship. Her work has been honored by the Education Writers Association, the National Press Foundation, and the Poynter Institute. Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, a historian of women, gender, and sexuality. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
Matthew Karp is a historian of the U.S. Civil War era and its relationship to the nineteenth-century world. He received his Ph.D. in History from the University of Pennsylvania in 2011 and joined the Princeton faculty in 2013. The piece we are talking about is The Politics of a Second Gilded Age, published in February 2021 in The Jacobin. His first book, This Vast Southern Empire: Slaveholders at the Helm of American Foreign Policy (Harvard UP, 2016) explores the ways that slavery shaped U.S. foreign relations before the Civil War. Karp is now at work on a book about the emergence of anti-slavery mass politics in the United States, and in particular the radical vision of the Republican Party in the 1850s. Agata Popeda is a Polish-American journalist. Interested in everything, with a particular weakness for literature and foreign relations. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
Feeling betrayed by liberal ideals in the US and UK, how are Chinese international students dealing with rising racism during the pandemic? Bingchun Meng from LSE talks to Joanne Kuai, a visiting PhD student at NIAS, about her latest research project, “Mediated Experience of Covid-19”, based on her students' real stories and their sophisticated reflections. The author of the book The Politics of Chinese Media: Consensus and Contestation (Palgrave, 2018) shares her views on the commonalities and differences between Chinese and western media against the backdrop of a rising Chinese threat narrative. She also comments on how Chinese tech giants, such as Huawei or ByteDance’s journey expanding their businesses overseas have implicated in global geopolitics. Dr Bingchun Meng is an Associate Professor in the Department for Media and Communications at LSE, where she also directs the LSE-Fudan Global Public Policy Research Center. Her research interests include gender and the media, political economy of media industries, communication governance, and comparative media studies. She has published widely on these topic areas in leading international journals. She is currently working on a book project about technology industries in China. Joanne Kuai is a PhD candidate at the Department of Geography, Media and Communication at Karlstad University, Sweden. She is a media scholar with a research focus on data and AI for media, computational journalism, and social implications of automation and algorithms. The Nordic Asia Podcast is a collaboration sharing expertise on Asia across the Nordic region, brought to you by the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies (NIAS) based at the University of Copenhagen, along with our academic partners: the Centre for East Asian Studies at the University of Turku, Asianettverket at the University of Oslo, and the Stockholm Centre for Global Asia at Stockholm University. We aim to produce timely, topical and well-edited discussions of new research and developments about Asia. About NIAS: www.nias.ku.dk Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
In recent years Americans have experienced a range of assaults upon the truth. In The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth (Brookings Institution Press, 2021), Jonathan Rauch describes the various ways in which our understanding of truth has come under attack, and the mechanisms that exist to fight back. As Rauch explains, the challenge of determining truth is as old as civilization itself, with the system we use today a product of concepts formulated in the 17th and 18th centuries. Today this system faces an unprecedented challenge created by the digital revolution, which has inverted the social incentives on which the reality-based community depends and fractured reality for millions of people. The consequences of this today can be seen today in both the numerous agenda-driven disinformation campaigns and the coercive conformity of “cancel culture” that challenges diversity of thought. Yet for all of the threats posed to the Constitution of Knowledge, Rauch argues that within it are contained the tools with which people can fight back successfully in order to maintain our social system for turning disagreement into truth. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
At a time when trust in the media is low and "news deserts" are increasing across the United States, engaged journalism offers a framework for connecting people, community organizations, and news organizations in ways that aim to rebuild trust and ensure that news coverage is inclusive and representative of the entire community. Andrea Wenzel's book Community-Centered Journalism: Engaging People, Exploring Solutions, and Building Trust (University of Illinois Press, 2020) offers useful case studies of how media outlets across the country are breaking down silos and reaching new audiences in innovative ways. The book also explores how emerging fields like engagement journalism and solutions journalism require rethinking previously-held industry norms around objectivity and the relationship between reporters and the people they cover. Envisioning a portable, rather than scalable, process, Wenzel proposes a community-centered journalism that, once implemented, will strengthen lines of local communication and reinvigorate civic participation. Andrea Wenzel is an assistant professor of journalism, media, and communications at Temple University. Jenna Spinelle is a journalism instructor at Penn State and host of the Democracy Works podcast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
Defining the Chief Executive via flash powder and selfie sticks. In this episode, Dr. Lee M. Pierce (they & she) interviews Dr. Cara A. Finnegan about Photographic Presidents: Making History from Daguerreotype to Digital (University of Illinois Press, 2021). Lincoln's somber portraits. Lyndon Johnson's swearing in. George W. Bush's reaction to learning about the 9/11 attacks. Photography plays an indelible role in how we remember and define American presidents. Throughout history, presidents have actively participated in all aspects of photography, not only by sitting for photos but by taking and consuming them. Cara A. Finnegan ventures from a newly-discovered daguerreotype of John Quincy Adams to Barack Obama's selfies to tell the stories of how presidents have participated in the medium's transformative moments. As she shows, technological developments not only changed photography, but introduced new visual values that influence how we judge an image. At the same time, presidential photographs--as representations of leaders who symbolized the nation--sparked public debate on these values and their implications. An original journey through political history, Photographic Presidents reveals the intertwined evolution of an American institution and a medium that continues to define it. Have questions or comments? Connect with your host, Dr. Lee M. Pierce, on social media and Gmail @rhetoriclee or with guest author, Dr. Cara Finnegan on Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
Julie Golia's new book Newspaper Confessions: A History of Advice Columns in a Pre-Internet Age (Oxford UP, 2021) chronicles the history of the newspaper advice column, a genre that has shaped Americans’ relationships with media, their experiences with popular therapy, and their virtual interactions across generations. Emerging in the 1890s, advice columns became unprecedented virtual forums where readers could debate the most resonant cultural crises of the day with strangers in an anonymous yet public forum. The columns are important—and overlooked—precursors to today’s digital culture: forums, social media groups, chat rooms, and other online communities that define how present-day American communicate with each other. This book charts the rise of the advice column and its impact on the newspaper industry. It analyzes the advice given in a diverse sample of columns across several decades, emphasizing the ways that advice columnists framed their counsel as modern, yet upheld the racial and gendered status quo of the day. It shows how advice columnists were forerunners to the modern celebrity journalist, while also serving as educators to audience of millions. This book includes in-depth case studies of specific columns, demonstrating how these forums transformed into active and participatory virtual communities of confession, advice, debate, and empathy. Julie Golia is a Curator of History, Social Sciences, and Government Information, New York Public Library. Marshall Poe is the founder and editor of the New Books Network. He can be reached at marshallpoe@newbooksnetwork.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
To many mathematicians and math enthusiasts, the word "innumeracy" brings to mind popular writing like that of John Allen Paulos. But inequities in our quantitative reasoning skills have received considerable interest and attention from researchers lately, including in psychology, development, education, and public health. Innumeracy in the Wild: Misunderstanding and Misusing Numbers (Oxford University Press, 2020) is a unified treatment of these broad-ranging studies, from the ways more and less numerate people differ in our perceptions of risk and our number-based decisions to the roots of our numeric faculties and how we can make the best of them. Dr. Ellen Peters has made significant contributions to the subject and brings her expertise and an exceptional clarity to its presentation. Precious little of the research surveyed in her book could fit into this interview! We discussed the three components of numeric ability—objective numeracy, subjective numeracy, and the innate number sense—and how they vary within and across populations. We talked through some key lessons from this literature, such as the importance of calibrating our self-efficacy to our real ability and an awareness of how our cultural allegiances can drive even our mathematical reasoning. And we identified some of the essential personal habits and policy levers (early childhood education!!) available to us in our efforts to improve our individual numeracy and our collective numeric decision-making. For a firm grounding in the state of knowledge and urgent open questions, there may be no better resource for many years to come. Suggested companion works: Contributions from the labs of Isaac Lipkus, Angela Fagerlin, John Opfer, Edward Cokely, Rocio Garcia-Retamero, Jakub Traczyk, Agata Sobków, Wändi Bruine de Bruin, Keith Stanovich, and Valerie Reyna. Ellen Peters, Ph.D., is the Philip H. Knight Chair, and Director of the Center for Science Communication Research, in the University of Oregon’s School of Journalism and Communication. As a decision psychologist, she studies the basic building blocks of human judgment and decision making and their links with effective communication techniques and has published more than 150 peer-reviewed papers on these topics. She is former President of the Society for Judgment and Decision Making and a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Association for Psychological Science, the American Psychological Association, and the Society for Experimental Social Psychology. She also works with federal agencies to advance decision and communication sciences in health and health policy, including having been Chair of FDA’s Risk Communication Advisory Committee and member of the NAS’s Science of Science Communication committee. She has been awarded the Jane Beattie Scientific Recognition Award and an NIH Group Merit Award. Finally, she has received extensive funding from the National Science Foundation and National Institutes of Health. Cory Brunson is a Research Assistant Professor at the Laboratory for Systems Medicine at the University of Florida. His research focuses on geometric and topological approaches to the analysis of medical and healthcare data. He welcomes book suggestions, listener feedback, and transparent supply chains. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
In an age of mutual acrimony and closed borders, journalists were among the few individuals who crossed the Iron Curtain. Their reporting strongly influenced the ways that policy makers, pundits, and ordinary people came to understand the American or the Soviet "other." In Cold War Correspondents: Soviet and American Reporters on the Ideological Frontlines (Johns Hopkins UP, 2021), Dina Fainberg examines how Soviet and American journalists covered the rival superpower and how two distinctive sets of truth systems, professional practices, and political cultures shaped international reporting. Fainberg explores private and public interactions among multiple groups that shaped coverage of the Cold War adversary, including journalists and their sources, editors, news media executives, government officials, diplomats, American pundits, Soviet censors, and audiences on both sides. Foreign correspondents, Fainberg argues, were keen analytical observers who aspired to understand their host country and probe its depths. At the same time, they were fundamentally shaped by their cultural and institutional backgrounds--to the point that their views of the rival superpower were refracted through values of their own culture. International reporting grounded and personalized the differences between the two nations, describing the other side in readily recognizable, self-referential terms. Fundamentally, Fainberg demonstrates, Americans and Soviets during the Cold War came to understand themselves through the creation of images of each other. Drawing on interviews with veteran journalists and Soviet dissidents, Cold War Correspondents also uses previously unexamined Soviet and US government records, newspaper and news agency archives, rare Soviet cartoons, and individual correspondents' personal papers, letters, diaries, books, and articles. Striking black-and-white photos depict foreign correspondents in action. Taken together, these sources illuminate a rich history of private and professional lives at the heart of the superpower conflict. Dina Fainberg is an Assistant Professor in Modern History and History BA Director at City, University of London. She has earned her PhD in Modern Russian and Modern US History from Rutgers University in 2012. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
In this episode, we are talking to ProPublica investigative journalist Justin Elliott. Justin has been with ProPublica since 2012 and writes about business and economics, as well as money and influence in politics. He has produced stories for the New York Times and NPR. His work on TurboTax maker Intuit – a story we are discussing today -- won a Gerald Loeb Award for business journalism. The story of how 70% of Americans are eligible to file their taxes for free, but no one can pull it off has many chapters. Read about it here, here, and here. ProPublica is an independent, nonprofit newsroom that produces investigative journalism with “moral force.” Agata Popeda is a Polish-American journalist. Interested in everything, with a particular weakness for literature and foreign relations. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
Catriona McKinnon is Professor of Political Theory at the University of Exeter. Her research focuses on climate ethics and environmental justice. Much of her recent work aims at addressing denialism about climate change. The "Why We Argue" podcast is produced by the Humanities Institute at the University of Connecticut as part of the Future of Truth project. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
In this episode, we are talking to Mark Krotov, the publisher and co-editor of n + 1, a magazine of politics, essays and fiction described once: “like The Partisan Review, but not dead” (Keith Gessen, co-founder). Mark was born in Moscow and left Russia for Atlanta at the age of six. He graduated from Columbia in 2008. Before joining n + 1, he was an assistant editor at Farrar, Straus and Giroux, an editor at Overlook Press and a senior editor at Melville House. Agata Popeda is a Polish-American journalist. Interested in everything, with a particular weakness for literature and foreign relations. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
Before Winston Churchill made history, he made news. To a great extent, the news made him too. If it was his own efforts that made him a hero, it was the media that made him a celebrity - and it has been considerably responsible for perpetuating his memory and shaping his reputation in the years since his death. Discussing this topic and much more besides in Professor of History at the University of Exeter, Richard Toye, in his wonderful new book Winston Churchill: A Life in the News (Oxford UP, 2020) Churchill first made his name via writing and journalism in the years before 1900, the money he earned helping to support his political career (at a time when MPs did not get salaries). Journalistic activities were also important to him later, as he struggled in the interwar years to find the wherewithal to run and maintain Chartwell, his country house in Kent. Moreover, not only was journalism an important aspect of Churchill's political persona, but he himself was a news-obsessive throughout his life. The story of Churchill and the news is, on one level, a tale of tight deadlines, off-the-record briefings and smoke-filled newsrooms, of wartime summits that were turned into stage-managed global media events, and of often tense interactions with journalists and powerful press proprietors, such as Lords Northcliffe, Rothermere, and Beaverbrook. Uncovering the symbiotic relationship between Churchill's political life and his media life, and the ways in which these were connected to his personal life, Professor Toye asks if there was a 'public Churchill' whose image was at odds with the behind-the-scenes reality, or whether, in fact, his private and public selves became seamlessly blended as he adjusted to living in the constant glare of the media spotlight. On a wider level, this is also the story of a rapidly evolving media and news culture in the first half of the twentieth century, and of what the contemporary reporting of Churchill's life (including by himself) can tell us about the development of this culture, over a period spanning from the Victorian era through to the space age. Charles Coutinho Ph. D. of the Royal Historical Society, received his doctorate from New York University. His area of specialization is 19th and 20th-century European, American diplomatic and political history. He has written for Chatham House’s International Affairs, the Institute of Historical Research's Reviews in History and the University of Rouen's online periodical Cercles. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
In this episode, we are talking to a British writer Ian Leslie, a journalist and author of acclaimed books on human behavior. His latest book, Conflicted: How Productive Disagreements Lead to Better Outcomes (Harper Business, 2021), is about how to disagree better. Ian regularly publishes in The Guardian, The New Statesman and The Economist. He co-hosted the podcast series Polarized and created a BBC radio comedy series. The piece we talked about today is "How to have Better Arguments Online" (The Guardian, February 21, 2021). Agata Popeda is a Polish-American journalist. Interested in everything, with a particular weakness for literature and foreign relations. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
Hello Everyone, and welcome to New Books in Gender and Sexuality, a channel on the New Books Network. I’m your host, Jana Byars, and I’m here today with Pallavi Guha, assistant professor in the Department of Mass Communication at Towson University in Towson, MD, to talk to her about her new book, Hear #MeToo in India: News, Social Media, and Anti-Rape and Sexual Harassment Activism, out this year, 2021 with Rutgers University Press. This book examines the role media platforms play in anti-rape and sexual harassment activism in India. Including 75 interviews with feminist activists and journalists working across India, it proposes a framework of agenda-building and establishes a theoretical framework to examine media coverage of issues in the digitally emerging Global South. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
In this episode, we are talking to writer and editor Chris Lehmann, an editor of The Baffler, a former managing editor of The New Republic and a former editor of In These Times. He was described by the TNR’s owner as someone, who “who was able to restore stability of The New Republic after a decade of incessant turmoil.” Chris is an author of political and cultural thought long-form journalism himself and the author of two books about money – Rich People Things: Real Life Secrets of the Predator Class (Haymarket, 2011) and The Money Cult: Capitalism, Christianity, and the Unmaking of the American Dream (Melville, 2017) – about the influence of Christianity on American capitalism. He is working on another book proposal. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
In this episode Astrid Norén-Nilsson of Lund University discusses her latest research about the Cambodian online news outlet Fresh News with Duncan McCargo, the Director of NIAS. Fresh News has become an indispensable source of information for Cambodia’s political and bureaucratic elite – but just how independent is the platform from the ruling Cambodian People’s Party? How can we classify the role that such new media platforms perform in a hybrid authoritarian political system? Astrid is an associate professor at Lund University’s Centre for East and Southeast Asian Studies and a leading expert on Cambodian politics. Her article “Fresh News, innovative news: popularizing Cambodia’s authoritarian turn” appeared in the journal Critical Asian Studies in November 2020. The Nordic Asia Podcast is a collaboration sharing expertise on Asia across the Nordic region, brought to you by the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies (NIAS) based at the University of Copenhagen, along with our academic partners: the Centre for East Asian Studies (CEAS) at the University of Turku, Asianettverket at the University of Oslo, and the Forum for Asian Studies at Stockholm University. About NIAS: https://www.nias.ku.dk/
Transcripts of the Nordic Asia Podcasts: https://www.nias.ku.dk/nordic-asia-podcast Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
There is no better person to start this journey than with journalist Nicholas Lemann, who has been observing the industry, also long-form journalism, for almost 50 years. Lemann started at the age of 17 in an alternative weekly in New Orleans, and since then he has been a staff writer for a number of magazines, including The New Yorker – since 1999. Lemann is also a former dean and current professor at Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. In this episode, we are talk about the piece he wrote in February 2020 for the The New York Review titled: "Can Journalism Be Saved" Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
The three decades that followed World War II were an exceptionally fertile period for American essays. The explosion of journals and magazines, the rise of public intellectuals, and breakthroughs in the arts inspired a flowering of literary culture. At the same time, the many problems that confronted mid-century America--racism, sexism, nuclear threat, war, poverty, and environmental degradation among them--proved fruitful topics for America's best minds. In The Golden Age of the American Essay: 1945–1970 (Anchor Books, 2021), Phillip Lopate assembles a dazzling array of famous writers, critics, sociologists, theologians, historians, activists, theorists, humorists, poets, and novelists. Here are writers like James Agee, E. B. White, A. J. Liebling, and Mary McCarthy, adroitly pivoting from the comic indignities of daily life to world peace, boxing, and restaurants in Paris. Here is Norman Mailer on Jackie Kennedy and Vladimir Nabokov on Lolita. Here is Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "Letter from Birmingham Jail," alongside Richard Hofstadter's "The Paranoid Style in American Politics" and Flannery O'Connor's "Some Aspects of the Grotesque in Southern Fiction." Here are Gore Vidal, Rachel Carson, James Baldwin, Susan Sontag, John Updike, Joan Didion, and many more, in a treasury of brilliant writing that has stood the test of time. Zach McCulley (@zamccull) is a historian of religion and literary cultures in early modern England and PhD candidate in History at Queen's University Belfast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
Michela Wrong’s Do Not Disturb: The Story of a Political Murder and an African Regime Gone Bad (PublicAffairs, 2021) is a glorious piece of journalism. It tells the story of Rwanda’s former head of external intelligence turned government critic, Patrick Karegeya, and his falling out with the Rwandan leadership, including current President Paul Kagame. For Wrong, the murder of Patrick Karegeya provides a passage-way into broader conversations about how Rwanda has been ruled since the 1994 genocide. Why are members of the elite like Karegeya leaving Rwanda? And what do these elite flights tell us about political stability in contemporary Rwanda? Wrong’s storytelling choices draw the reader into Rwanda’s complex post-colonial political culture while reminding us that the story of Karegeya’s murder is emblematic of how the revolution eats its own. Susan Thomson is an Associate Professor of Peace and Conflict Studies at Colgate University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
Listen to this interview of Christopher Thaiss, author of Writing Science in the Twenty-First Century (Broadview Press 2019). We talk about the research article, about writing styles, and about the uses of rhetoric to scientists. Interviewer: "Too many students learning to write in the sciences lack helpful feedback on their writing, and this causes them to experience, quite personally, that disconnect we were talking about, between doing science and writing science." Christopher Thaiss: "Feedback is one of the things I return to again and again in the book. And in my teaching, I think that one of the ways that feedback is used––I think that the most effective way that feedback is used is not so much the feedback that I give students about their writing, although the students will always say, 'We love your feedback!' But what's really important is the feedback that they learn to give and get in peer response workshops. I'm very careful in designing peer response so that students feel that sense of responsibility to give good feedback to one another, but also how to ask for feedback on the work that they're doing themselves. I think that peer response is so important in the scientific context, but it is, you know, in any writing context, and so I really try to foreground that within the course. The way I talk about it in writing in STEM is actually in the context of how research is done and how scientific discoveries and advancements are made: It's through the process of peer review. And if we can teach students early on to become good readers and then careful, conscientious givers of feedback to one another, we have achieved so much in terms of their ability to become contributing members of the scientific community." Daniel Shea, heads Scholarly Communications, a Special Series on the New Books Network. Daniel is Director of the Heidelberg Writing Program, a division of the Language Center at Heidelberg University, Germany. Just write Daniel.Shea@zsl.uni-heidelberg.de Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
Technology is breaking politics - what can be done about it? Artificially intelligent "bot" accounts attack politicians and public figures on social media. Conspiracy theorists publish junk news sites to promote their outlandish beliefs. Campaigners create fake dating profiles to attract young voters. We live in a world of technologies that misdirect our attention, poison our political conversations, and jeopardize our democracies. With massive amounts of social media and public polling data, and in-depth interviews with political consultants, bot writers, and journalists, Philip N. Howard offers ways to take these "lie machines" apart. Lie Machines: How to Save Democracy from Troll Armies, Deceitful Robots, Junk News Operations, and Political Operatives (Yale UP, 2020) is full of riveting behind the scenes stories from the world's biggest and most damagingly successful misinformation initiatives--including those used in Brexit and U.S. elections. Howard not only shows how these campaigns evolved from older propaganda operations but also exposes their new powers, gives us insight into their effectiveness, and shows us how to shut them down. As dangerous as things are now, they will only get worse; the enormous flood of data coming from the so-called Internet of Things, along with the growing sophistication of artificial intelligence, will make disinformation easier to generate and disseminate and much harder to spot and remove. Howard tackles the tough task of suggesting the changes that are needed to create a radically redesigned social media ecosystem that would reinforce, rather than erode, democracy. Medha Prasanna is an MA candidate at the Elliott School of International Affairs, George Washington University. Her current research focuses on International Organizations and Human Rights Law. You can learn more about her here or email her medp16@gwu.edu Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
Since President Nixon coined the phrase, the "War on Drugs" has presented an important change in how people view and discuss criminal justice practices and drug laws. The term evokes images of militarization, punishment, and violence, as well as combat and the potential for victory. It is no surprise then that questions such as whether the "War on Drugs" has "failed" or "can be won" have animated mass media and public debate for the past 40 years. Through analysis of 30 years of newspaper content, Debating the Drug War: Race, Politics, and Media in the War on Drugs Debate (Routledge, 2021) examines the social and cultural contours of this heated debate and explores how proponents and critics of the controversial social issues of drug policy and incarceration frame their arguments in mass media. Additionally, it looks at the contemporary public debate on the "War on Drugs" through an analysis of readers' comments drawn from the comments sections of online news articles. Through a discussion of the findings and their implications, the book illuminates the ways in which ideas about race, politics, society, and crime, and forms of evidence and statistics such as rates of arrest and incarceration or the financial costs of drug policies and incarceration are advanced, interpreted, and contested. Further, the book will bring to light how people form a sense of their racial selves in debates over policy issues tied to racial inequality such as the "War on Drugs" through narratives that connect racial categories to concepts such as innocence, criminality, free will, and fairness. Debating the Drug War offers readers a variety of concepts and theoretical perspectives that they can use to make sense of these vital issues in contemporary society. Rachel Stuart is a sex work researcher whose primary interest is the lived experiences of sex workers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
When journalist Rory Kress met Izzie, she didn’t think twice before bringing her home. She found the twelve-week-old wheaten terrier in a pet shop and was handed paperwork showing Izzie had been born in a USDA-licensed breeding facility—so she couldn’t be a puppy mill dog, right? But a few years later, as Rory embarked on her own difficult journey to become a mother, her curiosity began to tug at her. Sure, Izzie was her fur baby, but who was her dog’s real mother, and where was she now? And where did Izzie pick up her strange personality quirks? Like so many people, Rory had assumed the young puppy was a clean slate when she bought her. Those questions led Rory—with Izzie by her side—on a nationwide investigation, the first of its kind. From a dog livestock auction to the laboratory of one of the world’s leading animal behavioral scientists all the way up to the highest echelons of the USDA, they sought answers about who we’re trusting to be the watchdog for our pet dogs. The Doggie in the Window (Sourcebooks, 2018) is a story of hope and redemption. It upends the notion that purchased dogs are a safer bet than rescues, examines how internet puppy sales allow customers to get even farther from the truth of dog breeding, and offers fresh insights into one of the oldest bonds known to humanity. With Izzie’s help, we learn the real story behind the dog in the window—and how she got there in the first place. Rory Kress is a journalist and a national Emmy Award-winning television producer. She has reported on Iraqi refugees in Jordan coping through rollerblading, surrogate mothers giving birth to American babies in India, the cultural awakening of Jewish youths in Poland, and the conversions of Hispanic Americans to Islam in New Jersey. She was the news producer for NBC's Today Show and is a graduate of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and Princeton University. She lives in Denver with her family and her dog, Izzie. Mark Molloy is the reviews editor at MAKE: A Literary Magazine. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
During the middle decades of the twentieth century, the production of America’s consumer culture was centralized in New York to an extent unparalleled in the history of the United States. Every day tens of thousands of writers, editors, artists, performers, technicians, and secretaries made advertisements, produced media content, and designed the shape and feel of the consumer economy. While this centre of creativity has often been portrayed as a smoothly running machine, within these offices many white-collar workers challenged the managers and executives who directed their labours. Shannan Clark. author of The Making of the American Creative Class: New York's Culture Workers and 20th-Century Consumer Capitalism (Oxford UP, 2020), speaks with Pierre d’Alancaisez about the origins of the creative class, their labour union struggles and successes, the role of the Works Projects Administration, and institutions like the Design Laboratory and Consumer Union which foretell the experiences of today’s culture workers. Pierre d’Alancaisez is a contemprary art curator, cultural strategist, researcher. Sometime scientist, financial services professional. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
Picking up where most historians conclude, Chelsea Stieber explores the critical internal challenge to Haiti’s post-independence sovereignty: a civil war between monarchy and republic. What transpired was a war of swords and of pens, waged in newspapers and periodicals, in literature, broadsheets, and fliers. In Haiti's Paper War: Post-Independence Writing, Civil War, and the Making of the Republic, 1804-1954 (NYU Press, 2020) — her analysis of Haitian writing that followed independence — Stieber composes a new literary history of Haiti, that challenges our interpretations of both freedom struggles and the postcolonial. By examining internal dissent during the revolution, Stieber reveals that the very concept of freedom was itself hotly contested in the public sphere, and it was this inherent tension that became the central battleground for the guerre de plume — the paper war — that vied to shape public sentiment and the very idea of Haiti. Alejandra Bronfman is Associate Professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies Latin American, Caribbean & U.S. Latino Studies at SUNY, Albany. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
Sophia Rosenfeld is Walter H. Annenberg Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of Democracy and Truth: A Short History. The "Why We Argue" podcast is produced by the Humanities Institute at the University of Connecticut as part of the Future of Truth project. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
What is the relationship between print culture, religious identity, and formations of social consciousness in the modern period? In her brilliant new book, Print and the Urdu Public: Muslims, Newspapers, and Urban Life (Oxford UP, 2020), Megan Robb explores this question through a vigorous and exciting micro-history of a major 20th-century Urdu newspaper Madinah that was at the center of critical political, theological, and sociological currents in Muslim South Asia. The distinguishing feature of this book lies in its focus on the place and space of the qasbah, or small towns, as fascinating and often overlooked theaters of individual and communal identity formation and contestation. What competing notions of Islam, politics, and time emerge in a marketplace of ideas animated and engine by the technology and materiality of print culture, especially, the newspaper? Robb examines this question through a probing analysis that brings together vivid portraits of social and intellectual life in early 20th-century Northern India, with productive theoretical interventions on conceptualizing the interaction of print, religion, and politics in colonial modernity. SherAli Tareen is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Franklin and Marshall College. His research focuses on Muslim intellectual traditions and debates in early modern and modern South Asia. His book Defending Muhammad in Modernity (University of Notre Dame Press, 2020) received the American Institute of Pakistan Studies 2020 Book Prize. His other academic publications are available here. He can be reached at sherali.tareen@fandm.edu. Listener feedback is most welcome. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
Who were your heroes during your formative years? As a child of the 1970s, many of mine were journalists, especially those reporting on war and revolution in Southeast Asia and Latin America. I wanted to be Mel Gibson in The Year of Living Dangerously, James Woods in Salvador, or even Nick Nolte in Under Fire. It was all so exciting and glamorous, but all of these role models were men. As a teenager I idealized that romantic image of the hard drinking, rugged, tough guy journalist. When I read When the War was Over for a college seminar on the politics of revolution, I added a real-life heroine to my pantheon: Elizabeth Becker. She covered the horrors of the American bombing of Cambodia, the barbaric civil war, and the unfathomable brutality of the Khmer Rouge. She was there, on the ground in Cambodia, when so much of the world turned away. Now she has written a book about her heroes, three female journalists who covered the American War in Vietnam, the Second Indochina War, and the way it spilled into Cambodia. You Don't Belong Here: How Three Women Rewrote the Story of War is a profile of these three journalists, but it also works as a narrative of the war in Vietnam and in Cambodia. Obviously, this book genders our understanding of the war and the reporters who told the world about this war. Like the three women she profiles in You Don't Belong Here: How Three Women Rewrote the Story of War (PublicAffairs, 2021), Elizabeth Becker began her career as a war correspondent in Southeast Asia. She arrived Cambodia in early 1973. Writing for the Washington Post, she covered the American bombing and the war between the Lon Nol government and the Khmer Rouge. She wrote a major exposé of the Khmer Rouge leadership. During the Khmer Rouge regime, she was one of a handful of Westerners allowed into the country and met Pol Pot. She was almost killed by assassins during that surreal trip. She has been the Senior Foreign Editor for National Public Radio and a New York Times correspondent covering national security, economics and foreign policy. She has won accolades from the Overseas Press Club and was part the Times team that won the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service for coverage of 9/11. She is the author of When the War was Over: Cambodia and the Khmer Rouge Revolution, which has been in print for 35 years and remains one of the best books on the Khmer Rouge. She has also written Bophana, America’s Vietnam War: A Narrative History, and Overbooked: The Exploding Business of Travel and Tourism, an exposé of the travel industry. She also served as an expert witness in the Khmer Rouge genocide trials in Phnom Penh. Michael G. Vann is a professor of world history at California State University, Sacramento. A specialist in imperialism and the Cold War in Southeast Asia, he is the author of The Great Hanoi Rat Hunt: Empires, Disease, and Modernity Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
On June 4, Federal Police raided the home of Walkley award-winning journalist Annika Smethurst, changing her life forever. The police claimed they were investigating the publication of classified information, her employer called it a 'dangerous act of intimidation'. Annika believes she was simply doing her job. Ms Smethurst became the accidental poster woman for press freedom. Politicians even debated the merits of police searching through her underwear drawer. On Secrets (Hachette, 2020) considers the impact this invasion has had on her life, and examines press freedom. Annika Smethurst is a Walkley award-winning journalist. She is the Daily Telegraph's and Sunday Herald Sun's political editor. Bede Haines is a solicitor, specialising in litigation and a partner at Holding Redlich, an Australian commercial law firm. He lives in Sydney, Australia. Known to read books, ride bikes and eat cereal (often). bede.haines@holdingredlich.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
Can your zip code predict when you will die? Should you space out childhood vaccines? Does talcum powder cause cancer? Why do some doctors recommend e-cigarettes while other doctors recommend you stay away from them? Health information―and misinformation―is all around us, and it can be hard to separate the two. A long history of unethical medical experiments and medical mistakes, along with a host of celebrities spewing anti-science beliefs, has left many wary of science and the scientists who say they should be trusted. How can we unravel the knots of fact and fiction to find out what we should really be concerned about, and what we can laugh off? In Viral BS: Medical Myths and Why We Fall for Them (Johns Hopkins UP, 2021), medical journalist, doctor, professor, and former CDC disease detective Seema Yasmin, driven by a need to set the record straight, dissects some of the most widely circulating medical myths and pseudoscience. Exploring how epidemics of misinformation and disinformation can spread faster than microbes, Dr. Yasmin asks why bad science is sometimes more believable and contagious than the facts. Each easy-to-read chapter covers a specific myth, whether it has endured for many years or hit the headlines more recently. Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. To discuss and propose the book for an interview you can reach her at galina.limorenko@epfl.ch. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
We are joined today by Meenakshi Gigi Durham, Professor in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Iowa in the writers’ heaven that is Iowa City, Iowa. She also holds a joint appointment in the Department of Gender, Women’s Studies, and Sexuality Studies at Iowa. She is here today to talk to us about her upcoming book: Me Too: The Impact of Rape Culture in the Media (Polity Press, 2021). Professor Durham is the author of the quite famous The Lolita Effect: The Media Sexualization of Young Girls and What We Can Do About It (Overlook Press, 2008) and Technosex: Precarious Corporealities, Mediated Sexualities, and the Ethics of Embodied Technics (Palgrave 2016) – both of which address modern, mass media explorations of the sexuality and gender. In the wake of the MeToo movement, revelations of sexual assault and harassment continue to disrupt sexual politics across the globe. Reports of recurrent and widespread misconduct - in workplaces from doctors' offices to factory floors - are precipitating firings, legal actions, street protests, and policy punditry. Meenakshi Gigi Durham situates media culture as a place in which these broader social struggles are enacted and reproduced. The media figures whose depravity sparked the #MeToo movement are symbolic markers of the complexities of sexual desire and consent. Pop culture sparks controversies about rape culture; social media users have launched feminist resistance that turned to real-world activism; investigative journalists have broken stories of assault, offering a platform for survivors to speak truth to patriarchal power. Arguing that the media are a linchpin in these events, Durham provides a feminist account of the interrelated contexts of media production, representation, and reception. She situates media as the key site where the establishment of sexuality and social relations takes place and traces the media's powerful role in both reifying and challenging rape culture. Jana Byars is the Academic Director of Netherlands: International Perspectives on Sexuality and Gender. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
On January 28 2011 WikiLeaks released documents from a cache of US State Department cables stolen the previous year. The Daily Telegraph in London published one of the memos with an article headlined 'Egypt protests: America's secret backing for rebel leaders behind uprising'. The effect of the revelation was immediate, helping set in motion an aggressive counter-narrative to the nascent story of the Arab Spring. The article featured a cluster of virulent commentators all pushing the same story: the CIA, George Soros and Hillary Clinton were attempting to take over Egypt. Many of these commentators were trolls, some of whom reappeared in 2016 to help elect Donald J. Trump as President of the United States. Nathaniel Greenberg's book How Information Warfare Shaped the Arab Spring: The Politics of Narrative in Egypt and Tunisia (Edinburgh UP, 2019) tells the story of how a proxy-communications war ignited and hijacked the Arab uprisings and how individuals on the ground, on air and online worked to shape history. Marci Mazzarotto is an Assistant Professor of Digital Communication at Georgian Court University in New Jersey. Her research interests center on the interdisciplinary intersection of academic theory and artistic practice with a focus on film and television studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
We are just over a year from when global news first reported a new type of pneumonia emerging in the Chinese city of Wuhan. A lockdown of Wuhan on January 23rd, 2020, was the first indication that these stories were more serious than originally thought. All of us know what happened next: COVID-19 spread from China to other countries in Asia, then to Europe, then to North America, then worldwide. To slow the spread, countries frantically imposed travel restrictions on those coming from places affected by COVID-19: a massive shift away from the increasingly open borders seen over the past two decades. One traveller caught up in these new restrictions was Ethan Lou, author of Field Notes From a Pandemic: A Journey Through a World Suspended (Signal, 2020). Ethan arrives in China in early 2020 to visit his family, as the first leg of a trip around the world. On each leg of his journey, he sees how different parts of the world are transformed by the global pandemic. Field Notes From a Pandemic, named among the CBC’s best Canadian non-fiction books of 2020, is one half travelogue, one half commentary, in and about a changed world. In this interview, Ethan and I talk about his journey around the world, and how COVID-19 made a routine trip exceptionally complicated. He shares how he saw the world change in real-time, and which of those changes may end up sticking around. Ethan Lou is a former Reuters reporter and has served as a visiting journalist at the University of British Columbia. His writing has appeared in the Guardian, the Globe and Mail, Maclean's, the South China Morning Post, the Walrus, and the Washington Post. His next book is Once a Bitcoin Miner: Scandal and Turmoil in the Cryptocurrency Wild West. He can be found on Twitter at @Ethan_Lou, and his work can be found at https://ethanlou.com/. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Field Notes From a Pandemic. Follow on Facebook or on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. In his day job, he’s a researcher and writer for a think tank in economic and sustainable development. He is also a print and broadcast commentator on local and regional politics. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
In the early decades of the twentieth century, tens of thousands of Yiddish speaking immigrants actively participated in the American Socialist and labor movement. They formed the milieu of the hugely successful daily Forverts (Forward), established in New York in April 1897. In Transatlantic Russian Jewishness: Ideological Voyages of the Yiddish Daily Forverts in the First Half of the Twentieth Century (Academic Studies Press, 2020), Gennady Estraikh describes how the Forverts’ editorial columns and bylined articles―many of whose authors, such as Abraham Cahan and Sholem Asch, were household names at the time―both reflected and shaped the attitudes and values of the readership. Estreikh focuses on the newspaper’s reaction to the political developments in the home country. Profound admiration of Russian literature and culture did not mitigate the writers’ criticism of the czarist and Soviet regimes. Gennady Estraikh is a Clinical Professor of Hebrew and Judaic Studies at New York University. Previously he was the Managing Editor of the Yiddish literary journal Sovetish Heymland (Soviet Homeland) from 1988 to 1991. Estraikh’s scholarship focuses on Jewish intellectual history in the 19th and 20th centuries with an accent on Yiddish literary milieus. He has written fifteen co-edited scholarly volumes, and several books in Yiddish. Schneur Zalman Newfield is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York, and the author of Degrees of Separation: Identity Formation While Leaving Ultra-Orthodox Judaism (Temple University Press, 2020). Visit him online at ZalmanNewfield.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
In Citizens of Scandal: Journalism, Secrecy, and the Politics of Reckoning in Mexico (Duke University Press, 2020), Vanessa Freije develops a new rich thesis about the role of the press in Mexican civil society. In this well researched monograph, Freije shows how journalists played a key role in producing scandalous spectacles that brought an otherwise authoritarian PRI to account. Simultaneously, each chapter explores the limitations and drawbacks of Mexican muckraking as bribery, violence, and social networks blunted the most dangerous challenges to the regime. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
For nearly eighty years, a huge portion of coastal South Africa was closed off to the public. With many of its pits now deemed “overmined” and abandoned, American journalist Matthew Gavin Frank sets out across the infamous Diamond Coast to investigate an illicit trade that supplies a global market. Immediately, he became intrigued by the ingenious methods used in facilitating smuggling?particularly, the illegal act of sneaking carrier pigeons onto mine property, affixing diamonds to their feet, and sending them into the air. Entering Die Sperrgebiet (“The Forbidden Zone”) is like entering an eerie ghost town, but Frank is surprised by the number of people willing―even eager―to talk with him. Soon he meets Msizi, a young diamond digger, and his pigeon, Bartholomew, who helps him steal diamonds. It’s a deadly game: pigeons are shot on sight by mine security, and Msizi knows of smugglers who have disappeared because of their crimes. For this, Msizi blames “Mr. Lester,” an evil tall-tale figure of mythic proportions. From the mining towns of Alexander Bay and Port Nolloth, through the “halfway” desert, to Kleinzee’s shores littered with shipwrecks, Frank investigates a long overlooked story. Weaving interviews with local diamond miners who raise pigeons in secret with harrowing anecdotes from former heads of security, environmental managers, and vigilante pigeon hunters, Frank reveals how these feathered bandits became outlaws in every mining town. Interwoven throughout this obsessive quest are epic legends in which pigeons and diamonds intersect, such as that of Krishna’s famed diamond Koh-i-Noor, the Mountain of Light, and that of the Cherokee serpent Uktena. In these strange connections, where truth forever tangles with the lore of centuries past, Frank is able to contextualize the personal grief that sent him, with his wife Louisa in the passenger seat, on this enlightening journey across parched lands. Blending elements of reportage, memoir, and incantation, Flight of the Diamond Smugglers: A Tale of Pigeons, Obsession, and Greed Along Coastal South Africa (Liveright, 2021) is a rare and remarkable portrait of exploitation and greed in one of the most dangerous areas of coastal South Africa. With his sovereign prose and insatiable curiosity, Matthew Gavin Frank “reminds us that the world is a place of wonder if only we look” (Toby Muse). Emily Anthes is a science journalist and author. Her books include Frankenstein’s Cat: Cuddling Up to Biotech’s Brave New Beasts and The Great Indoors: The Surprising Science of How Buildings Shape Our Behavior, Health, and Happiness. Read more about her work at emilyanthes.com or follow her on Twitter at @emilyanthes. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
A reporter uncovers the secrets behind the scientific scam of the century. The news breaks first as a tale of fear and pity. Doctors at a London hospital claim a link between autism and a vaccine given to millions of children: MMR. Young parents are terrified. Immunization rates slump. And as a worldwide ‘anti-vax’ movement kicks off, old diseases return to sicken and kill. But a veteran reporter isn’t so sure, and sets out on an epic investigation. Battling establishment cover-ups, smear campaigns, and gagging lawsuits, he exposes rigged research and secret schemes, the heartbreaking plight of families struggling with disability, and the scientific deception of our time. Brian Deer's The Doctor Who Fooled the World: Andrew Wakefield's War on Vaccines (Johns Hopkins UP, 2020) tells the troubling story of Andrew Wakefield: a man in search of greatness, who stakes his soul on big ideas that, if right, might transform lives. But when the facts don’t fit, he can’t face failure. He’ll do whatever it takes to succeed. Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. To discuss and propose the book for an interview you can reach her at galina.limorenko@epfl.ch. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
In Little Lindy Is Kidnapped: How the Media Covered the Crime of the Century (Columbia University Press, 2020), Thomas Doherty offers a lively and comprehensive cultural history of the media coverage of the abduction and its aftermath. Beginning with Lindbergh’s ascent to fame and proceeding through the trial and execution of the accused kidnapper, Doherty traces how newspapers, radio, and newsreels reported on what was dubbed the “crime of the century.” He casts the affair as a transformative moment for American journalism, analyzing how the case presented new challenges and opportunities for each branch of the media in the days before the rise of television. Coverage of the Lindbergh story, Doherty reveals, set the template for the way the media would treat breaking news ever after. An engrossing account of an endlessly fascinating case, Little Lindy Is Kidnapped sheds new light on an enduring quality of journalism ever since: the media’s eye on a crucial part of the story—itself. Thomas Doherty is professor of American studies at Brandeis University. His previous Columbia University Press books include Hollywood and Hitler, 1933–1939 (2013) and Show Trial: Hollywood, HUAC, and the Birth of the Blacklist (2018). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
In Pleasure in the News: African American Readership and Sexuality in the Black Press (University of Illinois Press, 2020), Dr. Kim Gallon examines how Black newspaper editors and journalists created and fostered Black sexual publics during the 1920s and 1930s. She demonstrates that editors strategically elected to publish stories about marital scandals, divorces, homosexuality, and gender non-conformity, imagining that this coverage was a source of pleasure and debate for Black readers. Gallon argues that this editorial practice actually exposed class, gender, and sexuality divisions between different groups of African Americans. At the same time, this coverage revealed the tenuous position of lesbians, gay men, and female impersonators in a public sphere that sometimes silenced and marginalized their voices. Along with advancing racial solidarity, which Gallon takes as the Black presses’ starting point, the press revealed the diversity of Black people and created a discursive space in which sexual knowledge was produced, debated, and enjoyed. To learn more about Professor Gallon’s digital scholarship and stay informed about how her work is meeting the demands of our moment, follow @BlackDigitalHum and @COVIDBlk on Twitter. Amanda Joyce Hall is a Ph.D. Candidate in History and African American Studies at Yale University. She is writing an international history on the global movement against South African apartheid during the 1970s and 1980s. She tweets from @amandajoycehall. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
Sharon Marcus’s new book, The Drama of Celebrity (Princeton UP, 2020), sets out to help us understand celebrity culture and how it has shifted and evolved since its contemporary inception in the early 1800s. Marcus highlights the celebrity concept throughout western history, indicating some of the same dynamics at work in classical Greece that we see in our current popular culture landscape. This culture has three components that are generally all present in some form: the celebrities themselves, who may achieve that role through some form of performance or other attention-generating experience or event, a media of some kind (radio, newspaper, magazines, social media) that focuses attention on individual celebrities, and the fans or citizens who engage with the celebrities. Marcus delineates this “three-legged stool” of celebrity culture and notes that while aspects of it have changed over the years—especially the form of media—the structure and foundation continues to operate as an interactive ecosystem. Marcus opens up her tracing of this culture with Sarah Bernhardt, who embodied a kind of prototype of what we see and consider modern celebrity culture. With Bernhardt as an iconic example as well as a Virgil-like guide, Marcus explores contemporary celebrity, and also the critique of celebrity, asking the question of how we should understand these phenomena in the age of Trump, both in the United States and elsewhere. The Drama of Celebrity also dives into the racial and gender dynamics that have long been at work in the value placed on those who achieve fame and celebrity status. Without shifting the thesis to focus only on the role of gender and celebrity, Marcus teases out the dichotomous approach to male celebrity and female celebrity, and the different standards that are applied to both the individual celebrity themselves and their fans. As we move through different media and different performative formats that promote or garner an individual fame and celebrity, Marcus also compels the reader to consider the opposing ideas of American individualism and the production of mass culture, and how these antithetical dimensions are united within celebrity culture. This is a fascinating examination of the idea and the mechanics of celebrity and will be of interest to a broad array of readers. Lilly J. Goren is professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), as well as co-editor of Mad Men and Politics: Nostalgia and the Remaking of Modern America (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
Bombastic headlines about science and technology are nothing new. To cut through the constant stream of information and misinformation on social media, or grab the attention of investors, or convince governments to take notice, strident headlines or bold claims seem necessary to give complex, nuanced information some wow factor. But hype has a dark side, too. It can mislead. It can distract. It can blinker us from seeing what is actually going on. From AI, quantum computing and brain implants, to cancer drugs, future foods and fusion energy, science and technology journalist Gemma Milne reveals hype to be responsible for fundamentally misdirecting or even derailing crucial progress. Hype can be combated and discounted, though, if you're able to see exactly where, how and why it is being deployed. Smoke and Mirrors: How Hype Obscures the Future and How to See Past It (Robinson, 2021) is your guide to doing just that. Marci Mazzarotto is an Assistant Professor of Digital Communication at Georgian Court University in New Jersey. Her research interests center on the interdisciplinary intersection of academic theory and artistic practice with a focus on film and television studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
Listen to this interview of Elisa De Ranieri, Editor-in-Chief of Nature Communications. We talk about knowing the research you have done, but communicating the message you want said. Interviewer: "When a submission lands on your desk, or better said, you call it up on your screen, what are you pleased to see, what makes your work easier?" Elisa De Ranieri: "Yeah, well, I guess what makes the job easier for an editor is to receive a paper that is well-written and well-constructed and where the authors are so experienced that they know how to pitch their story. It's nice because it, obviously, spares the editor the trouble of having to unpick what's being said. You know, there are papers where––I'm not saying that they're badly written––but they are so dense because it's not a story, it's a dump of facts, so that you have to start unpicking the facts until you've made your own version of the story that the authors are trying to tell, and only then can you assess that story based on your criteria." Daniel Shea, heads Scholarly Communications, a Special Series on the New Books Network. Daniel is Director of the Writing Program at Heidelberg University, Germany. Just write Daniel.Shea@zsl.uni-heidelberg.de Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
Harvey Araton’s new book Our Last Season: A Writer, a Fan, a Friendship (Penguin, 2020), reads like a mix between Tuesdays with Morrie and a sequel to his book When the Garden was Eden (which chronicled the New York Knicks’ early-70s title teams). It’s a book about friendship, aging and of course, basketball. Harvey Araton is one of New York's--and the nation's--best-known sports journalists, having covered thousands of Knicks games over the course of a long and distinguished career. But the person at the heart of Our Last Season, Michelle Musler, is largely anonymous--except, that is, to the players, coaches, and writers who have passed through Madison Square Garden, where she held season tickets behind the Knicks bench for 45 years. In that time, as she juggled a successful career as a corporate executive and single parenthood of five children, she missed only a handful of home games. The Garden was her second home--and the place where an extraordinary friendship between fan and sportswriter was forged. That relationship soon grew into something much bigger than basketball, with Michelle serving as a cherished mentor and friend to Harvey as he weathered life's inevitable storms: illness, aging, and professional challenges and transitions. During the 2017-18 NBA season, as Michelle faces serious illness that prevents her from attending more than a few Knicks games, Harvey finally has the chance to give back to Michelle everything she has given him: reminders of all she's accomplished, the blessings she's enjoyed, and the devoted friend she has been to him. Paul Knepper was born and raised in New York and currently resides in Austin. His first book, The Knicks of the Nineties: Ewing, Oakley, Starks and the Brawlers Who Almost Won It All, is available on Amazon and other sites. You can reach Paul at paulknepper@gmail.com and follow him on Twitter @paulieknep. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
Social media has become a crucial avenue for political discourse in Southeast Asia, given its potential as a “liberation technology” in both democratising and authoritarian states. Yet the growing decline in internet freedom and increasingly repressive and manipulative use of social media tools by governments means that social media is now an essential platform for control. “Disinformation” and “fake news” production is growing rapidly, and national governments are creating laws which attempt to address this trend, but often only exacerbate the situation of state control. In this episode, Dr Aim Sinpeng and Dr Ross Tapsell discuss their new book, From Grassroots Activism to Disinformation: Social Media in Southeast Asia (ISEAS Publishing, 2020), with Dr Thushara Dibley, and explore some of the more recent controversies surrounding social media use in Southeast Asia. Aim Sinpeng is a Senior Lecturer in Comparative Politics at the University of Sydney. Her research interests centre on the relationships between digital media, political participation and political regimes in Southeast Asia. Aim is particularly interested in the role of social media in shaping state-society relations and inducing political and social change. Aim received Facebook research grants to study hate speech in the Asia Pacific (with Fiona Martin) and the effectiveness of countering misinformation strategies (with Denis Stukal). Her other scholarly works examine popular movements against democracy in democratising states. She is co-editor of From Grassroots Activism to Disinformation: Social Media in Southeast Asia (ISEAS Publishing, 2020). She is the author of a forthcoming book, Opposing Democracy in the Digital Age: the Yellow Shirts in Thailand (University of Michigan Press). You can follow Aim on Twitter: @aimsinpeng. Ross Tapsell is a Senior Lecturer and researcher at the Australian National University’s College of Asia and the Pacific, specialising in Southeast Asian media. He is the author of Media Power in Indonesia: Oligarchs, Citizens and the Digital Revolution (Rowman & Littlefield, 2017) and co-editor of Digital Indonesia: Connectivity and Divergence (ISEAS Publishing, 2017) and From Grassroots Activism to Disinformation: Social Media in Southeast Asia (ISEAS Publishing, 2020). He has written for The New York Times, The Guardian, VICE and other publications in the Southeast Asian region. Ross is currently Director of the ANU's Malaysia Institute, and is involved in the ANU's Indonesia Project and the academic blog New Mandala. You can follow Ross on Twitter: @RossTapsell. For more information or to browse additional resources, visit the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre’s website here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
While Hollywood’s images present a veneer of fantasy for some, the work to create such images is far from escapism. In Manufacturing Celebrity: Latino Paparazzi and Women Reporters in Hollywood (Duke University Press, 2020), anthropologist Vanessa Díaz examines the raced and gendered hierarchies and inequalities that are imbricated within the work of producing celebrity in Los Angeles, CA. Díaz’s ethnography follows reporters and paparazzi to examine their everyday practices of work and labor that bring celebrity images and stories into being on the pages of celebrity magazines. Grounded in media workers’ perspectives and everyday life, this book carefully situates Latino paparazzi and women reporters in relationship to the particular vulnerabilities that they face. For example, Díaz traces a shift in the demographic of the paparazzi from white men to Latino men, and with it a significant shift in the tone of insults levied against them. Women reporters remain vulnerable to sexual harassment and other dangers in carrying out their work. Hollywood presents itself to its audience through its carefully crafted films, images, and stories. Díaz’s work troubles this facade by centering the work and challenges of the everyday laborers who produce it. Vanessa Díaz is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Chicana/o and Latina/o Studies at Loyola Marymount University. Reighan Gillam is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Southern California. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
Surfers are the ultimate bad boys, living the counter-culture life of decadence and hedonism as they travel the world in search of the perfect wave, partying hard along the way. So, it’s not surprising that these social misfits and dropouts created a sub-culture tied to drugs. While most might associate surfing Jeff Spicoli with smoking marijuana in Fast Times at Ridgemont High or hippies dropping acid in late 1960s Hawai’i, Chas Smith argues that cocaine and surfing are much more intertwined. Actually, it’s not so much surfing as the “surf industry”, the fashion industry’s big money marketing of the surfing lifestyle. In this exploration of the commodification of counter-culture, Chas Smith illustrates the lines from The Clash song: “They think it’s funny, turning rebellion into money”. But like a coke binge, the surf industry has come crashing down and once massive international corporations have gone bankrupt. More gonzo journalism than academic history, Cocaine + Surfing: A Sordid History of Surfing’s Greatest Love Affair (Rare Bird, 2018) is a wild thrill ride through several decades of surfing’s love affair with addiction. Irreverent, cynical, and surprisingly erudite, Chas Smith tells us time and time again that he hates being a surf journalist and despise the surfing industry. “I was supposed to have waved goodbye to this shallow end of the swimming pool years ago. I was supposed to be a Pulitzer Prize-winning war reporter by now, spilling valuable words on the plight of Syrian refugees while dodging bullets. Or maybe in the White House briefing room being shouted down by the press secretary for speaking truth to power. Or front row at the Fendi show in Paris, across from Anna Wintour … anywhere but here.” But there he is. Bopping about Southern California’s heart of the surfing industry. Driving from surf industry event to surf industry event, surrounded by increasingly desperate surf industry figures grinding their jaws and trying to get into the bathroom to snort a few lines. All the while, he sardonically observes the surfing industry’s free fall as he gulps down yet another vodka cocktail. Doing his best to find meaning in perhaps the shallowest subculture we could imagine. He is a detached and disgusted observer of the surf industry’s apocalypse who delivers his dispatches in insightful and often hilarious prose. Even if you don't know which side on the surfboard to wax, you’ll find it hard not to be drawn into Chas Smith’s history of surfing. Michael G. Vann is a professor of world history at California State University, Sacramento. A specialist in imperialism and the Cold War in Southeast Asia, he is the author of The Great Hanoi Rat Hunt: Empires, Disease, and Modernity in French Colonial Vietnam (Oxford, 2018). When he’s not quietly reading or happily talking about new books with smart people, Mike can be found surfing in Santa Cruz, California. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
Michael Stamm’s book Dead Tree Media: Manufacturing the Newspaper in Twentieth-Century North America (Johns Hopkins UP, 2018) begins with the simple but thought-provoking premise that, not too long ago, newspapers were almost exclusively physical objects made out of paper. This meant that producing a newspaper implied industrial production, mills, and a distribution system that could deliver daily-produced issues to individual consumers. But most of all, it meant trees. Lots and lots of trees. Newspapers acquired timber lands, chopped down trees, and managed international supply chains. A simple premise then opens up an entire world of industrial processes that might appear distant from us denizens of the digital age. In this highly innovative work of media history, Stamm, a Professor of history at Michigan State University, pulls readers into that world, guiding them through newspaper boardrooms in big American cities, lumber camps and company towns across Canada, and laboratories that were experimenting with newsprint waste so as to synthesize new products and squeeze ever more revenue out of the process (who knew that the parent company of the Chicago Tribune was one of the largest manufacturers of synthetic vanilla in the 1950s?). The book will interest communications scholars, media historians, historical scholars of political economy, and many others. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
"Few freedoms in the United States are as cherished as freedom of the press." So begins Chapter One of Democracy Without Journalism?: Confronting the Misinformation Society (Oxford University Press, 2020). The book by Victor Pickard, Professor of Media Policy and Political Economy at the Annenberg School for Communication makes it clear, however, that mainstream American news media are not really free at all, but have been pressed into service over more than a century to generate profits for a few rich owners bent on selling eyeballs and ears to advertisers. Dr. Pickard points out that this system of "toxic commercialism” is in crisis as advertisers flee to cheaper social media outfits like Facebook. In this NBN interview, he says the old TV news adage, "If it bleeds it leads," has been supplemented by a new one, "If it's outrageous, it's contagious" as internet platforms profit from misinformation and even outright lies that engage (and enrage) their readers and keep them coming back for more. Democracy Without Journalism? argues that the unexpected victory of Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election is symptomatic of three core failures that are baked into the structure of American news media: the excessive commercialism that made giving billions of dollars of free publicity to Trump "damn good for CBS"; the tidal waves of misinformation circulating so profitably on social media and, the sharp decline in the number of working journalists. The book points out, for example, that in the last 20 years, print newsrooms have shed more than half of their workers and that local news “deserts” have spread into more and more American communities. Victor Pickard argues that journalism is as essential to democracy as other social goods such as education, libraries and national healthcare. He writes therefore, that journalism should receive substantial public funding just as it does in other western democracies. Dr. Pickard contends that the current crisis in American journalism is an opportunity that "allows us to reimagine what journalism could be." Bruce Wark is a freelance journalist and retired journalism professor based in the Sackville, New Brunswick. Laura Landon is a librarian at Mount Allison University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
Louis Austin and the Carolina Times: A Life in the Long Black Freedom Struggle (University of North Carolina Press, 2018) by Jerry Gershenhorn is a history of the struggle for Black equality in North Carolina from 1927 to 1971 as told through the life and activism of Black newspaperman Louis Austin. Austin, as editor of the Carolina Times, was involved in nearly every facet of the long Black freedom struggle in North Carolina. He was an outspoken editor and a staunch social justice advocate who championed Black voter’s rights, school desegregation, and economic equality for nearly fifty years. Gershenhorn utilizes the phrase “long black freedom struggle” instead of the customary “long civil rights movement” in his narrative noting that in the 1930s and 1940s many of the customary characteristics of the Civil Rights Movement had not matured at this time in North Carolina and that during this time “mass direct action was the exception not the norm” (3). This text contains an “Introduction” section, seven concise chapters, and an “Epilogue.” In his “Introduction,” Gershenhorn makes the case that Austin supported and engaged in the type of activism that ultimately came to define the Civil Rights Era, including embracing the sit-ins and school desegregation, unlike several other Black newspapermen in the South who were more accommodationist in their approaches. The first few Chapters trace Austin’s formative years as “the grandson of slaves” who grew up in a home that emphasized Black respectability and dignity. These Chapters also highlight the emergence of Austin as an “advocacy journalist” in North Carolina. Louis Austin and the Carolina Times is a critical text in helping us to understand the history of the Black freedom struggle in the South, Black journalism, and the integral role of the Black press in advancing racial equality for African Americans. Hettie V. Williams Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor of African American history in the Department of History and Anthropology at Monmouth University where she teaches courses in African American history and U.S. history. She has published book chapters, essays, and edited/authored five books. Her latest publications include Bury My Heart in a Free Land: Black Women Intellectuals in Modern U.S. History (Praeger, 2017) and, with Dr. G. Reginald Daniel, professor of historical sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, Race and the Obama Phenomenon: The Vision of a More Perfect Multiracial Union (University Press of Mississippi 2014). Follow me on twitter: @DrHettie2017 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
Nature is the premier weekly journal of science, the journal where specialists go to read and publish primary research in their fields. But Nature is also a science magazine, a combination unusual in journal publishing because in an issue of Nature, research stands side by side with editorials, news and feature reporting, and opinion articles. In fact, over two-thirds of the pieces Nature publishes are journalism and opinion content. This is the remit of Helen Pearson. Helen Pearson is Chief Magazine Editor of Nature. After her PhD, Helen wanted a "broader view" of science, and so she chose science journalism. Helen has written award-winning journalism, and she is the author of The Life Project, voted 2016's best science book by The Observer and a best book of the year by The Economist. Today, Helen can look back on a distinguished career at Nature, where she continues to make a significant contribution to conversations around and in the scientific communities Nature aims to reach. Scholarly Communications is the podcast series about how knowledge gets known. Scholarly Communications adheres to the principle that research improves when scholars better understand their role as communicators. Give scholars more opportunities to learn about publishing, and scholars will communicate their research better. Daniel Shea, heads Scholarly Communications, a Special Series on the New Books Network. Daniel is Director of the Writing Program at Heidelberg University, Germany. Just write Daniel.Shea@zsl.uni-heidelberg.de Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
In his compelling evaluation of Cold War popular culture, Pulp Vietnam: War and Gender in Cold War Men’s Adventure Magazines (Cambridge UP, 2020), Gregory Daddis explores how men's adventure magazines helped shape the attitudes of young, working-class Americans, the same men who fought and served in the long and bitter war in Vietnam. The 'macho pulps' - boasting titles like Man's Conquest, Battle Cry, and Adventure Life - portrayed men courageously defeating their enemies in battle, while women were reduced to sexual objects, either trivialized as erotic trophies or depicted as sexualized villains using their bodies to prey on unsuspecting, innocent men. The result was the crafting and dissemination of a particular version of martial masculinity that helped establish GIs' expectations and perceptions of war in Vietnam. By examining the role that popular culture can play in normalizing wartime sexual violence and challenging readers to consider how American society should move beyond pulp conceptions of 'normal' male behavior, Daddis convincingly argues that how we construct popular tales of masculinity matters in both peace and war. Rebekah Buchanan is an Assistant Professor of English at Western Illinois University. Her work examines the role of narrative–both analog and digital–in people’s lives. She is interested in how personal narratives produced in alternative spaces create sites that challenge traditionally accepted public narratives. She researches zines, zine writers and the influence of music subcultures and fandom on writers and narratives. You can find more about her on her website, follow her on Twitter @rj_buchanan or email her at rj-buchanan@wiu.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
Selling Antislavery: Abolition and Mass Media in Antebellum America (University of Pennsylvania Press) is a richly illustrated history of the American Anti-Slavery Society and its print, material, and visual artifacts. Beginning with its establishment in the early 1830s, the American Anti-Slavery Society (AASS) recognized the need to reach and consolidate a diverse and increasingly segmented audience. To do so, it produced a wide array of print, material, and visual media: almanacs and slave narratives, pincushions and gift books, broadsides and panoramas. Building on the distinctive practices of British antislavery and evangelical reform movements, the AASS utilized innovative business strategies to market its productions and developed a centralized distribution system to circulate them widely. In Selling Antislavery, Teresa A. Goddu shows how the AASS operated at the forefront of a new culture industry and, by framing its media as cultural commodities, made antislavery sentiments an integral part of an emerging middle-class identity. She contends that, although the AASS's dominance waned after 1840 as the organization splintered, it nevertheless created one of the first national mass markets. Goddu maps this extensive media culture, focusing in particular on the material produced by AASS in the decade of the 1830s. She considers how the dissemination of its texts, objects, and tactics was facilitated by the quasi-corporate and centralized character of the organization during this period and demonstrates how its institutional presence remained important to the progress of the larger movement. Exploring antislavery's vast archive and explicating its messages, she emphasizes both the discursive and material aspects of antislavery's appeal, providing a richly textured history of the movement through its artifacts and the modes of circulation it put into place. Featuring more than seventy-five illustrations, Selling Antislavery offers a thorough case study of the role of reform movements in the rise of mass media and argues for abolition's central importance to the shaping of antebellum middle-class culture. Teresa A. Goddu is Associate Professor of English and American Studies at Vanderbilt University and author of Gothic America: Narrative, History, and Nation. Dr. Christina Gessler’s background is in women’s history, and literature. She specializes in the diaries written by rural American women in the 19th century. In seeking the extraordinary in the ordinary, Gessler writes the histories of largely unknown women, poems about small relatable moments, and takes many, many photos in nature. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
When weekly newsreels launched in the early twentieth century, they offered the U.S. public the first weekly record of events that symbolized “indisputable evidence” of the news. In News Parade: The American Newsreel and the World as Spectacle (University of Minnesota Press), Joseph Clark examines the history of the newsreel and how it changed the way Americans saw the world. He combines an examination of the newsreel’s methods of production, distribution, and reception with an analysis of its representational strategies to understand the newsreel’s place in the history of twentieth-century American culture and film history. Joseph Clark is lecturer in the School for the Contemporary Arts at Simon Fraser University. Joel Tscherne is an Adjunct History Professor at Southern New Hampshire University. His Twitter handle is @JoelTscherne. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
In this episode, I speak with fellow New Books in Education host, Jonathan Haber, about his book, Critical Thinking (The MIT Press, 2020). This book explains the widely-discussed but often ill-defined concept of critical thinking, including its history and role in a democratic society. We discuss the important role critical thinking plays in making decisions and communicating our ideas to others as well as the most effective ways teachers can help their students become critical thinkers. Haber oversees the projects, Critical Voter, LogicCheck, and Degree of Freedom, and can be reached at jonathan@degreeoffreedom.org. His recommended resources included the following:
Thank You for Arguing, Fourth Edition: What Aristotle, Lincoln, and Homer Simpson Can Teach Us About the Art of Persuasion by Jay Heinrichs (Broadway Books, 2020)
Think Again I: How to Understand Arguments
Critical Thinker Academy
The Dream of Reason: A History of Western Philosophy from the Greeks to the Renaissance by Anthony Gottlieb (W. W. Norton & Company, 2016)
Trevor Mattea is an educational consultant and speaker. His areas of expertise include deeper learning, parent involvement, project-based learning, and technology integration. He can be reached by email at tsmattea@pm.me or on Twitter at @tsmattea. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
How are algorithms changing journalism? In Metrics at Work: Journalism and the Contested Meaning of Algorithms (Princeton University Press), Angèle Christin, an assistant professor in the Department of Communication at Stanford University, explores the impact of metrics and analytics on the newsrooms of New York and Paris. Using an ethnography of two organisations, the book demonstrates the complexity, ambivalence, and difference in the use of metrics to make editorial and journalistic judgements. Covering a vast range of issues, from the history of journalism, through methods of managing organisations, to careers and pay, the book gives important insights into the current, and future, practices of our news organisations. As a result, the book is essential reading for social science and humanities scholars, as well as for anyone interested in how we get the news we have today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
Despite her nearly two decades as the publisher of the largest newspaper in a politically pivotal state, the role of Nackey Scripps Loeb in American political and media history has been unjustly forgotten. In Political Godmother: Nackey Scripps Loeb and the Newspaper That Shook the Republican Party (Potomac Books, 2020), Meg Heckman describes the ways in which she shaped both journalism in New Hampshire and presidential politics in America. An heiress to the Scripps publishing empire, Nackey enjoyed a childhood that was privileged yet unorthodox After a first marriage ended acrimoniously, she married William Loeb, the right-wing publisher of the Manchester Union-Leader, and together they ran the newspaper from their ranch in Nevada. After the twin tragedies of a crippling car accident and the death of her husband from cancer, Nackey took over the newspaper and maintained both its independence and its stridently conservative voice. As Heckman explains, the newspaper’s location in the state hosting the nation’s first presidential primary gave Nackey an outsized political influence, one which she used to promote conservative Republican presidential candidates, most notable Pat Buchanan in his disruptive primary challenge to President George H. W. Bush in 1992. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
What do medieval knights, suicide bombers and "victimhood culture" have in common? Betraying Dignity: The Toxic Seduction of Social Media, Shaming, and Radicalization (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press) argues that in the second decade of the twenty-first century, individuals, political parties and nations around the world are abandoning the dignity-based culture we established in the aftermath of two world wars, less than a century ago. Disappointed or intimidated, many turn their backs on the humanitarian, universalistic culture that presumes our inherent human dignity and celebrates it as the basis of every individual's equal human rights. Instead, people and nations are returning to a much older, honor-based cultural structure. Because its ancient logic and mentality take new forms (such as social network shaming and certain aspects of "victimhood culture") -- we fail to recognize them, and overlook the pitfalls of the old honor-based structure. Narrating the history of honor-based societies, this book distinguishes their underlying principle from the post-WWII notion of dignity that underlies human rights. It makes the case that in order to revive and strengthen dignity-based culture, the concept of human dignity must be defined narrowly and succinctly, and enhanced with the principle of respect. Continuing its historical and cultural narrative, the book discusses contemporary phenomena such as al-Qaeda terrorists, shaming via social network, FoMO, and some features of the emerging "victimhood culture". The book pays homage to Erich Fromm's classic Escape from Freedom. Orit Kamir is founder and academic head of the Center for Human Dignity in Israel, and has taught law and culture studies at universities in Israel, the United States, and Europe. Dr. Yakir Englander is the National Director of Leadership programs at the Israeli-American Council. He also teaches at the AJR. He is a Fulbright scholar and was a visiting professor of Religion at Northwestern University, the Shalom Hartman Institute and Harvard Divinity School. His books are Sexuality and the Body in New Religious Zionist Discourse (English/Hebrew and The Male Body in Jewish Lithuanian Ultra-Orthodoxy (Hebrew). He can be reached at: Yakir1212englander@gmail.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, we’re hearing an awful lot about the fraught relationship between science and media. In his book, News from Mars: Mass Media and the Forging of a New Astronomy, 1860-1910 (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019), historian of science Joshua Nall shows us that a blurry boundary between science and journalism was a key feature—not a bug—of the emergence of modern astronomy. Focusing on objects and media, such as newspapers, encyclopedias, cigarette cards, and globes, Nall offers a history of how astronomers’ cultivation of a mass public shaped their discipline as it managed controversies over the possibility of canals on Mars, and even interplanetary communication. This book is strongly recommended for historians of science and communication, as well as those with an eye for material culture. Joshua Nall is curator of modern sciences at the Whipple Museum of the History of Science in the Department of the History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge. Mikey McGovern is a PhD candidate in Princeton University’s Program in the History of Science. He is writing a dissertation on how people used statistics to make claims of discrimination in 1970s America, and how the relationship between rights and num- bers became a flashpoint in political struggles over bureaucracy, race, and law. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
Mexico today is one of the most dangerous places in the world to report the news, and Mexicans have taken to the street to defend freedom of expression. As Benjamin T. Smith demonstrates in his history of the press and civil society, The Mexican Press and Civil Society, 1940-1976: Stories from the Newsroom, Stories from the Street (University of North Carolina Press, 2018) the cycle of violent repression and protest over journalism is nothing new. He traces it back to the growth in newspaper production and reading publics between 1940 and 1976, when a national thirst for tabloids, crime sheets, and magazines reached far beyond the middle class. As Mexicans began to view local and national events through the prism of journalism, everyday politics changed radically. Even while lauding the liberty of the press, the state developed an arsenal of methods to control what was printed, including sophisticated spin and misdirection techniques, covert financial payments, and campaigns of threats, imprisonment, beatings, and even murder. The press was also pressured by media monopolists tacking between government demands and public expectations to maximize profits, and by coalitions of ordinary citizens demanding that local newspapers publicize stories of corruption, incompetence, and state violence. Since the Cold War, both in Mexico City and in the provinces, a robust radical journalism has posed challenges to government forces. Benjamin T. Smith is professor of history at the University of Warwick and the author of The Roots of Conservatism in Mexico and Pistoleros and Popular Movements. Ethan Besser Fredrick is a PhD candidate in Latin American History at the University of Minnesota. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
James West speaks with Jerry Gershenhorn, Julius L. Chambers Professor of History at North Carolina Central University, about Louis Austin and the Carolina Times: A Life in the Long Black Freedom Struggle (University of North Carolina Press, 2018), ahead of the book's paperback release. Gershenhorn's award-winning study recovers the life and activism of Louis Austin and the influence of his newspaper, the Carolina Times, the preeminent Black newspaper in the state. Spanning much of the twentieth century, this absorbing account explores the long Black freedom struggle in North Carolina from a fresh vantage point, shedding new light on the role of the Black press in the twentieth century. James West is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in American History at Northumbria University, Newcastle. He is the author of Ebony Magazine and Lerone Bennett Jr.: Popular Black History in Postwar America (Illinois, 2020) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
For too long the Religious Right has masqueraded as a social movement preoccupied with a number of cultural issues, such as abortion and same-sex marriage. In her deeply reported investigation, The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism, Katherine Stewart reveals a disturbing truth: this is a political movement that seeks to gain power and to impose its vision on all of society. America’s religious nationalists aren’t just fighting a culture war, they are waging a political war on the norms and institutions of American democracy. Stewart pulls back the curtain on the inner workings and leading personalities of a movement that has turned religion into a tool for domination. She exposes a dense network of think tanks, advocacy groups, and pastoral organizations embedded in a rapidly expanding community of international alliances and united not by any central command but by a shared, anti-democratic vision and a common will to power. She follows the money that fuels this movement, tracing much of it to a cadre of super-wealthy, ultraconservative donors and family foundations. She shows that today’s Christian nationalism is the fruit of a longstanding antidemocratic, reactionary strain of American thought that draws on some of the most troubling episodes in America’s past. It forms common cause with a globe-spanning movement that seeks to destroy liberal democracy and replace it with nationalist, theocratic and autocratic forms of government around the world. Religious nationalism is far more organized and better funded than most people realize. It seeks to control all aspects of government and society. Its successes have been stunning, and its influence now extends to every aspect of American life, from the White House to state capitols, from our schools to our hospitals. The Power Worshippers is a brilliantly reported book of warning and a wake-up call. Stewart’s probing examination demands that Christian nationalism be taken seriously as a significant threat to the American republic and our democratic freedoms. Katherine Stewart writes about politics, policy, and religion for The New York Times, Washington Post, NBC, and The New Republic. Her previous book, The Good News Club, was an examination of the religious right and public education. Kirk Meighoo is a TV and podcast host, former university lecturer, author and former Senator in Trinidad and Tobago. He hosts his own podcast, Independent Thought & Freedom, where he interviews some of the most interesting people from around the world who are shaking up politics, economics, society and ideas. You can find it in the iTunes Store or any of your favorite podcast providers. You can also subscribe to his YouTube channel. If you are an academic who wants to get heard nationally, please check out his free training at becomeapublicintellectual.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
During his nearly four decades as a newspaper editor and politician, Horace Greeley embraced a range of controversial causes. In his book Horace Greeley: Print, Politics, and the Failure of American Nationhood (Johns Hopkins UP, 2019), James M. Lundberg finds within his seemingly contradictory positions a consistent belief in the power of print to forge American nationalism. This Lundberg traces to his upbringing in a Protestant American culture which valued greatly the power of reading. Upon arriving in New York City in 1831 Greeley embarked on a career as a journalist and editor, and was a key figure in the shift away from relatively expensive periodicals to the mass-produced daily newspapers. His New-York Tribune gave Greeley a prominent platform from which he advocated for his nationalist vision, and he was a visible participant in the increasingly divisive political debates of the 1840s and 1850s. As an opponent of both slavery and secession, Greeley championed both a vigorous prosecution of the war and, with the Union’s victory in 1865, a swift reconciliation of the two sides, with the latter stance alienating many of his former allies and playing a key role in his nomination as Ulysses S. Grant’s challenger in the presidential election of 1872. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
Caracas, the capital of Venezuela, has been ranked as one of the most violent cities in the world. In Deadline: Populism and the Press in Venezuela (University of Chicago Press, 2019), Robert Samet undertakes ethnography with crime journalists on their reporting practices to offer a compelling argument about the relationship between populist politics and the news. Samet participates with and observes a group of crime reporters as they traverse the city, investigating crimes, recording interviews with victims, and writing up their stories. Reporters commonly collected and publicized denuncias, victims’ accusations or denouncements of wrongdoing that can also include calls for justice. Samet details the substance and variation of such denuncias to demonstrate how the ubiquity and prevalence of these pronouncements articulate a popular will. This book contributes to studies of media and journalism, Latin American politics and society, and political anthropology in order to expand our understanding of the role of journalism in amplifying the will of the people. Reighan Gillam is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Southern California. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
Words That Matter: How the News and Social Media Shaped the 2016 Presidential Campaign (Brookings Institution Press, 2020) comes out of a broader collaboration between social scientists at the University of Michigan, Georgetown University, Gallup, Inc. This collaboration, which is on-going, has a number of foci, and this book project came out of work that combined expertise from political scientists, computer scientists, and data experts, concentrating specifically on social media, traditional media, and new Gallup survey data acquired over the course of the 2016 election cycle. The eight authors of Words that Matter brought distinct areas of expertise to analyze and explain not only the data that Gallup amassed through open-ended questions asked over the course of a number of months leading up to the general election in 2016, but also to pull together media analysis to use as contextual framing to examine and understand the responses provided to the Gallup surveys. Ceren Budak, Jonathan Ladd, and Michael Traugott spoke with me on behalf of the rest of the book’s authors as well, explaining this extended and unique ongoing collaboration while diving into the book’s particular research schema. Lilly J. Goren is professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), as well as co-editor of Mad Men and Politics: Nostalgia and the Remaking of Modern America (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
New mothers face a barrage of confounding decisions during the life-cycle of early motherhood which includes... Should they change their diet or mindset to conceive? Exercise while pregnant? Should they opt for a home birth or head for a hospital? Whatever they “choose,” they will be sure to find plenty of medical expertise from health practitioners to social media “influencers” telling them that they’re making a series of mistakes. As intersectional feminists with two small children each, Bethany L. Johnson and Margaret M. Quinlan draw from their own experiences as well as stories from a range of caretakers throughout. You’re Doing it Wrong! Mothering, Media and Medical Expertise (Rutgers University Press, 2019) investigates the storied history of mothering advice in the media, from the newspapers, magazines, doctors’ records and personal papers of the nineteenth-century to today’s websites, Facebook groups, and Instagram feeds. Johnson and Quinlan find surprising parallels between today’s mothering experts and their Victorian counterparts, but they also explore how social media has placed unprecedented pressures on new mothers, even while it may function as social support for some. They further examine the contentious construction of prenatal and baby care expertise itself, as individuals such as everyone from medical professionals to experienced moms have competed to have their expertise acknowledged in the public sphere. Exploring potential health crises from infertility treatments to “better babies” milestones, You’re Doing it Wrong! provides a provocative look at historical and contemporary medical expertise during conception, pregnancy, childbirth, postpartum, and infant care stages. Bethany L. Johnson (MPhil, M.A.) is a doctoral student in the history of science, technology and the environment at the University of South Carolina and an associate member to the graduate faculty and research affiliate faculty in the department of communication studies at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. Margaret M. Quinlan (PhD) is an associate professor in the Department of Communication Studies and core faculty in the interdisciplinary Health Psychology Ph.D. Program at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. Dr. Christina Gessler’s background is in anthropology, women’s history, and literature. She works as a historian, poet, and photographer. In seeking the extraordinary in the ordinary, Gessler writes the histories of largely unknown women, poems about small relatable moments, and takes many, many photos in nature. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
Are you overwhelmed at the amount, contradictions, and craziness of all the information coming at you in this age of social media and twenty-four-hour news cycles? Fake News, Propaganda, and Plain Old Lies (Rowman & Littlefield, 2018) will show you how to identify deceptive information as well as how to seek out the most trustworthy information in order to inform decision making in your personal, academic, professional, and civic lives.
Learn how to identify the alarm bells that signal untrustworthy information.
Understand how to tell when statistics can be trusted and when they are being used to deceive.
Inoculate yourself against the logical fallacies that can mislead even the brightest among us.
Donald A. Barclay, a career librarian who has spent decades teaching university students to become information literate scholars and citizens, takes an objective, non-partisan approach to the complex and nuanced topic of sorting deceptive information from trustworthy information. Marci Mazzarotto is an Assistant Professor of Digital Communication at Georgian Court University in New Jersey. Her research interests center on the interdisciplinary intersection of academic theory and artistic practice with a focus on film and television studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
Brian Greene is a Professor of Mathematics and Physics at Columbia University in the City of New York, where he is the Director of the Institute for Strings, Cosmology, and Astroparticle Physics, and co-founder and chair of the World Science Festival. He is well known for his TV mini-series about string theory and the nature of reality, including the Elegant Universe, which tied in with his best-selling 2000 book of the same name. In this episode, we talk about his latest popular book Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe (Random House, 2020) Until the End of Time gives the reader a theory of everything, both in the sense of a “state of the academic union”, covering cosmology and evolution, consciousness and computation, and art and religion, and in the sense of showing us a way to apprehend the often existentially challenging subject matter. Greene uses evocative autobiographical vignettes in the book to personalize his famously lucid and accessible explanations, and we discuss these episodes further in the interview. Greene also reiterates his arguments for embedding a form of spiritual reverie within the multiple naturalistic descriptions of reality that different areas of human knowledge have so far produced. John Weston is a University Teacher of English in the Language Centre at Aalto University, Finland. His research focuses on academic communication. He can be reached at john.weston@aalto.fi and @johnwphd. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
In recent years, questions around the nature of truth and facts have reentered public debate, often in discussions around journalistic bias, and whether politically neutral reporting is possible, or even desirable. Many pundits have tried to place blame for the increasingly slippery and fickle nature of truth in reporting on the ideas developed in much 20th-century philosophy, particularly postmodern theory. Santiago Zabala, however, argues that this is to mistake a diagnosis with the condition itself, and makes the case in his recent book, Being at Large: Freedom in the Age of Alternative Facts (McGill-Queen's University Press, 2020), that much of the hermeneutic and postmodern philosophical traditions can help us navigate these times out of joint. Santiago Zabala is a philosopher and cultural critic and ICREA Research Professor of Philosophy at the Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona. He is author of many books, including Why Only Art Can Save Us: Aesthetics and the Absence of Emergency (Columbia University Press, 2017). His opinion articles have appeared in the Guardian, the New York Times, and Al-Jazeera among other international media outlets. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
Why should we care about having true beliefs? And why do demonstrably false beliefs persist and spread despite bad, even fatal, consequences for the people who hold them? In The Misinformation Age: How False Beliefs Spread (Yale University Press, 2018), Cailin O’Connor and James Weatherall argue that social factors, rather than individual psychology, are what’s essential to understanding the spread and persistence of false beliefs. It might seem that there’s an obvious reason that true beliefs matter: false beliefs will hurt you. But if that’s right, then why is it (apparently) irrelevant to many people whether they believe true things or not? The Misinformation Age, written for a political era riven by “fake news,” “alternative facts,” and disputes over the validity of everything from climate change to the size of inauguration crowds, shows convincingly that what you believe depends on who you know. If social forces explain the persistence of false belief, we must understand how those forces work in order to fight misinformation effectively. Renee Garfinkel, Ph.D. is a Jerusalem-based psychologist, Middle East television commentator, and host of the Van Leer Series on Ideas with Renee Garfinkel. Contact: R.Garfinkel@yahoo.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
The Economist is a curious publication. It always takes a point of view (as opposed to the all-the-news-that’s-fit-to-print approach). It maintains a uniform voice (editors and writers are typically handpicked from the same elite British universities, and rarely are there author bylines). And it has lasted a long time, originating back in London’s free-trade debates of the 1840s and continuing to be one of the most widely read magazines in the world. The Economist was a guiding hand in debates over imperialism, decolonization, and globalization. For all these reasons, The Economist also provides a useful window through which to peer into the history of liberalism. This is exactly what Alexander Zevin does in his perspicuous and provocative new book Liberalism at Large: The World According to the Economist (Verso Books, 2019). By examining The Economist, Zevin, an assistant professor of history at City University of New York and an editor at The New Left Review, helps us see what he calls “really existing liberalism”––that is, a liberalism that rooted for empire, embraced finance, and has always wielded an ambivalence towards democracy. This is a book that we will be talking about for a long time. Dexter Fergie is a PhD student of US and global history at Northwestern University. He is currently researching the 20th century geopolitical history of information and communications networks. He can be reached by email at dexter.fergie@u.northwestern.edu or on Twitter @DexterFergie. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
Punjab was the arena of one of the first major armed conflicts of post-colonial India. During its deadliest decade, as many as 250,000 people were killed. This book makes an urgent intervention in the history of the conflict, which to date has been characterized by a fixation on sensational violence—or ignored altogether. In her book Faith, Gender, and Activism in the Punjab Conflict: The Wheat Fields Still Whisper (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), Mallika Kaur unearths the stories of three people who found themselves at the center of Punjab’s human rights movement: Baljit Kaur, who armed herself with a video camera to record essential evidence of the conflict; Justice Ajit Singh Bains, who became a beloved “people’s judge”; and Inderjit Singh Jaijee, who returned to Punjab to document abuses even as other elites were fleeing. Together, they are credited with saving countless lives. Braiding oral histories, personal snapshots, and primary documents recovered from at-risk archives, Kaur shows that when entire conflicts are marginalized, we miss essential stories: stories of faith, feminist action, and the power of citizen-activists. Sneha Annavarapu is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Sociology at the University of Chicago. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
Slavery and the University: Histories and Legacies (University of Georgia Press, 2019), edited by Leslie M. Harris, James T. Campbell, and Alfred L. Brophy, is the first edited collection of scholarly essays devoted solely to the histories and legacies of this subject on North American campuses and in their Atlantic contexts. Gathering together contributions from scholars, activists, and administrators, the volume combines two broad bodies of work: (1) historically based interdisciplinary research on the presence of slavery at higher education institutions in terms of the development of proslavery and antislavery thought and the use of slave labor; and (2) analysis on the ways in which the legacies of slavery in institutions of higher education continued in the post–Civil War era to the present day. The collection features broadly themed essays on issues of religion, economy, and the regional slave trade of the Caribbean. It also includes case studies of slavery’s influence on specific institutions, such as Princeton University, Harvard University, Oberlin College, Emory University, and the University of Alabama. Though the roots of Slavery and the University stem from a 2011 conference at Emory University, the collection extends outward to incorporate recent findings. As such, it offers a roadmap to one of the most exciting developments in the field of U.S. slavery studies and to ways of thinking about racial diversity in the history and current practices of higher education. Today I spoke with Leslie Harris about the book. Dr. Harris is a professor of history at Northwestern University. She is the coeditor, with Ira Berlin, of Slavery in New York and the coeditor, with Daina Ramey Berry, of Slavery and Freedom in Savannah (Georgia). Adam McNeil is a History PhD student at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
From moral panics about immigration and gun control to anxiety about terrorism and natural disasters, Americans live in a culture of fear. While fear is typically discussed in emotional or poetic terms—as the opposite of courage, or as an obstacle to be overcome—it nevertheless has very real consequences in everyday life. Persistent fear negatively effects individuals’ decision-making abilities and causes anxiety, depression, and poor physical health. Further, fear harms communities and society by corroding social trust and civic engagement. Yet politicians often effectively leverage fears to garner votes and companies routinely market unnecessary products that promise protection from imagined or exaggerated harms. Drawing on five years of data from the Chapman Survey of American Fears—which canvasses a random, national sample of adults about a broad range of fears—Fear Itself: The Causes and Consequences of Fear in America (NYU Press, 2020), offers new insights into what people are afraid of and how fear affects their lives. The authors--Christopher Bader and his colleagues-- also draw on participant observation with Doomsday preppers and conspiracy theorists to provide fascinating narratives about subcultures of fear. Fear Itself is a novel, wide-ranging study of the social consequences of fear, ultimately suggesting that there is good reason to be afraid of fear itself. In this interview, Bader and I discuss Americans’ greatest fears, conspiracies, preppers, and fear of crime. We then discuss how xenophobia and the media perpetuate fear. Lastly, Dr. Bader reviews the consequences of fear and how to ameliorate some of the negative effects of fear and how people can best manage their fears. I recommend this book for students, professors, and anyone else interested in crime and deviance, religion, collective behavior, and the social components of fear. Krystina Millar is a PhD student in the Department of Sociology at Indiana University. Her research interests include gender, sociology of the body, and sexuality. You can find her on Twitter at @KrystinaMillar. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
North America is in the grips of a drug epidemic; with the introduction of fentanyl, the chances of a fatal overdose are greater than ever, prompting many to rethink the war on drugs. Public opinion has slowly begun to turn against prohibition, and policy-makers are finally beginning to look at addiction as a health issue as opposed to one for the criminal justice system. While deaths across the continent continue to climb, In Fighting for Space: How a Group of Drug Users Transformed One City’s Struggle with Addiction (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2018), Travis Lupick explains the concept of harm reduction as a crucial component of a city’s response to the drug crisis. It tells the story of a grassroots group of addicts in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside who waged a political street fight for two decades to transform how the city treats its most marginalized citizens. Over the past twenty-five years, this group of residents from Canada's poorest neighborhood organized themselves in response to the growing number of overdose deaths and demanded that addicts be given the same rights as any other citizen; against all odds, they eventually won. But just as their battle came to an end, fentanyl arrived and opioid deaths across North America reached an all-time high. The "genocide" in Vancouver finally sparked government action. Twenty years later, as the same pattern plays out in other cities, there is much that advocates for reform can learn from Vancouver's experience. Fighting for Space tells that story—including case studies in Ohio, Florida, New York, California, Massachusetts, and Washington state—with the same passionate fervor as the activists whose tireless work gave dignity to addicts and saved countless lives. Manuel Arredondo is a Clinical Social Worker and Public Health advocate in Oakland, CA. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
Arthur Asseraf’s Electric News in Colonial Algeria (Oxford University Press, 2019) examines the workings of the “news ecosystem” in Algeria from the 1880s to the beginning of the Second World War. The study of a society divided between a dominant (European) settler minority and an Algerian Muslim majority, the book tracks the development and impact of new information technologies—the printing press, telegraph, cinema, radio (and later television)—in Algeria from the late-nineteenth through the mid-twentieth centuries. Throughout its chapters, readers are reminded to resist Eurocentric and teleological frameworks of “modernization” that do not apply to societies like Algeria’s where such technologies coexisted with other forms of news circulation including manuscripts, song, and rumor/word of mouth. The book is grounded in an impressive range of sources in multiple languages. It challenges ideas about the relationship between print capitalism and nationalism over the course of this pivotal period in both Algerian and French history. Interrogating the history of colonial hegemony in and through the analysis of how Algerians accessed and interpreted the news in myriad ways often not anticipated by settler and state authorities, the book also has far-reaching implications for how we think about knowledge and power in imperial contexts more broadly. Its pages are rich with exciting and fascinating moments and stories—of surveillance, violence, and injustice, but also of the counterforces of the Algerian subversion of and resistance to colonial oppression. *Special note in March 2020: I hope you are all keeping safe and healthy and that this conversation with Arthur might be helpful in some small way right now—with work, teaching and/or as a distraction in this period of global pandemic. Thanks so much to Arthur, who was SO much fun to speak with & to all the NBFS listeners out there! Roxanne Panchasi is an Associate Professor of History at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada who specializes in twentieth and twenty-first century France and its empire. She is the author of Future Tense: The Culture of Anticipation in France Between the Wars(2009). Her current research focuses on the history of French nuclear weapons and testing since 1945. Her most recent article, '"No Hiroshima in Africa": The Algerian War and the Question of French Nuclear Tests in the Sahara' appeared in the Spring 2019 issue of History of the Present. She lives and reads in Vancouver, Canada and hopes all listeners are keeping healthy and safe at this difficult time in our world. If you have a recent title to suggest for the podcast, please send her an email (panchasi@sfu.ca). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
Paradox is a sophisticated kind of magic trick. A magician's purpose is to create the appearance of impossibility, to pull a rabbit from an empty hat. Yet paradox doesn't require tangibles, like rabbits or hats. Paradox works in the abstract, with words and concepts and symbols, to create the illusion of contradiction. There are no contradictions in reality, but there can appear to be. In Sleight of Mind: 75 Ingenious Paradoxes in Mathematics, Physics, and Philosophy (MIT Press, 2020), Matt Cook and a few collaborators dive deeply into more than 75 paradoxes in mathematics, physics, philosophy, and the social sciences. As each paradox is discussed and resolved, Cook helps readers discover the meaning of knowledge and the proper formation of concepts―and how reason can dispel the illusion of contradiction. The journey begins with “a most ingenious paradox” from Gilbert and Sullivan's Pirates of Penzance. Readers will then travel from Ancient Greece to cutting-edge laboratories, encounter infinity and its different sizes, and discover mathematical impossibilities inherent in elections. They will tackle conundrums in probability, induction, geometry, and game theory; perform “supertasks”; build apparent perpetual motion machines; meet twins living in different millennia; explore the strange quantum world―and much more. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
We often think of censorship as governments removing material or harshly punishing people who spread or access information. But Margaret E. Roberts’ new book Censored: Distraction and Diversion Inside China’s Great Firewall (Princeton University Press, 2020) reveals the nuances of censorship in the age of the internet. She identifies 3 types of censorship: fear (threatening punishment to deter the spread or access of information); friction (increasing the time or money necessary to access information); and flooding (publishing information to distract, confuse, or dilute). Roberts shows how China customizes repression by using friction and flooding (censorship that is porous) to deter the majority of citizens whose busy schedules and general lack of interest in politics make it difficult to spend extra time and money accessing information. Highly motivated elites (e.g. journalists, activists) who are willing to spend the extra time and money to overcome the boundaries of both friction and flooding meanwhile may face fear and punishment. The two groups end up with very different information – complicating political coordination between the majority and elites. Roberts’s highly accessible book negotiates two extreme positions (the internet will bring government accountability v. extreme censorship) to provide a more nuanced understanding of digital politics, the politics of repression, and political communication. Even if there is better information available, governments can create friction on distribution or flood the internet with propaganda. Looking at how China manages censorship provides insights not only for other authoritarian governments but also democratic governments. Liberal democracies might not use fear but they can affect access and availability – and they may find themselves (as the United States did in the 2016 presidential election) subject to flooding from external sources. The podcast includes Roberts’ insights on how the Chinese censored information on COVID-19 and the effect that had on the public. Foreign Affairs named Censored one of its Best Books of 2018 and it was also honored with the Goldsmith Award and the Best Book in Human Rights Section and Information Technology and Politics section of the American Political Science Association. Susan Liebell is associate professor of political science at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. She is the author of Democracy, Intelligent Design, and Evolution: Science for Citizenship (Routledge, 2013). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
In her book, Becoming the News: How Ordinary People Respond to the Media Spotlight (Columbia University Press, 2017), Ruth Palmer argues that understanding the motivations and experiences of those who have been featured in news stories – voluntarily or not – sheds new light on the practice of journalism and the importance many continue to place on the role of the mainstream media. Palmer charts the arc of the experience of “making” the news, from the events that brought an ordinary person to journalists’ attention through the decision to cooperate with reporters, interactions with journalists, and reactions to the news coverage and its aftermath. She explores what motivates someone to talk to the press; whether they consider the potential risks; the power dynamics between a journalist and their subject; their expectations about the motivations of journalists; and the influence of social media on their decisions and reception. Pointing to the ways traditional news organizations both continue to hold on to and are losing their authority, Becoming the News has important implications for how we think about the production and consumption of news at a time when Americans distrust the news media more than ever. Marci Mazzarotto is an Assistant Professor of Digital Communication at Georgian Court University in New Jersey. Her research interests center on the interdisciplinary intersection of academic theory and artistic practice with a focus on film and television studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
From the New York Times to NPR, many major news organizations have strict policies about how reporters can conduct themselves in relation to the stories they cover. Journalists are discouraged from going to political events, advocating for causes related to the topics they cover, and publicly supporting candidates — all in the name of impartiality and presenting the news as an unbiased observer. Journalist Lewis Raven Wallace argues that this thinking is flawed, and even dangerous to democracy, in his book The View from Somewhere: Undoing the Myth of Journalistic Objectivity (University of Chicago Press, 2019). Wallace traces the history of how objectivity became the gold standard in journalism, and looks at examples of people who have bucked the trend along the way. Wallace advocates for a style of journalism that frees reporters to tell stories without the veil of impartiality while still uncovering the truth and holding those in power accountable. As you’ll hear, this approach is starting to take root in journalism schools and online news outlets created by voices largely excluded from mainstream media. Wallace is an independent journalist, a co-founder of Press On, a southern movement journalism collective, and the host of The View from Somewhere podcast. He previously worked in public radio and is a longtime activist engaged in prison abolition, racial justice, and queer and trans liberation. He is a white transgender person from the Midwest and is now based in North Carolina. Jenna Spinelle is a journalism instructor at Penn State, host of the Democracy Works podcast, produced by Penn State’s McCourtney Institute for Democracy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
Today we are joined by Travis Bell, Janelle Applequist, and Christian Dotson-Pierson to discuss their new book CTE, Media, and the NFL: Framing a Public Health Crisis as a Football Epidemic (Lexington Books, 2019). In our conversation, we discussed public misconceptions about Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy, the media’s problematic connection of CTE with the NFL and concussions, and the league’s efforts to produce alternative histories of CTE. In CTE, Media, and the NFL, Bell, Applequist and Dotson-Pierson use media theory to unpack reporting on CTE. They explain the long history of Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy, beginning with punch-drunk diagnosis among interwar boxers to the first female brain with confirmed CTE from a victim of domestic violence. Through a close reading of over seven hundred articles from six American newspapers, painstakingly coded for dozens of variables, they show how the media wrote about it. In these stories football plays a specific role in shaping American notions of masculinity, an athlete’s gender shapes reporting on their head injuries, and the celebrity framing the shape of the narrative. The authors use earlier studies of the HIV/AIDs crisis and Big Tobacco’s battle to obfuscate the link between smoking and cancer to better understand the dangers of CTE coverage. They argue that the media’s framing of CTE as a health crisis, and the onslaught of incomplete information about the disease, has led to an availability cascade of problematic or wrong information. Most notably – CTE is linked with concussions in the reporting but is caused by all kinds of head trauma. The NFL’s efforts to muddle the science of CTE proved less effective than Big Tobacco’s and now the league may be over-connected to CTE to the detriment of athletes in other sports, military veterans, and even victims of domestic abuse whose stories are largely ignored. Keith Rathbone is a lecturer at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. He researches twentieth-century French social and cultural history. His manuscript, entitled A Nation in Play: Physical Culture, the State, and Society during France’s Dark Years, 1932-1948, examines physical education and sports in order to better understand civic life under the dual authoritarian systems of the German Occupation and the Vichy Regime. If you have a title to suggest for this podcast, please contact him at keith.rathbone@mq.edu.au. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
Since the 1940s, America’s relations with the rest of the world have been guided by the idea of promoting the free flow of information. It’s an idea that seems benign, perhaps even difficult to argue against—who could possibly oppose the freedom of information? But, as Diana Lemberg shows in her exciting new book, Barriers Down: How American Power and Free-Flow Policies Shaped Global Media (Columbia University Press, 2019), the idea wasn’t always benign and many fought against its implementation. In the book, Lemberg, an associate professor at Lingnan University, examines how American businessmen, statesmen, and social scientists sought to tear down barriers to transnational flows of information in the post-WWII era, and, in the process, maximize the spread of American content abroad. Barriers Down is an innovative study that shows just how central information politics were to the US’ vision of the global order. The book deserves a wide audience. Dexter Fergie is a PhD student of US and global history at Northwestern University. He is currently researching the 20th century geopolitical history of information and communications networks. He can be reached by email at dexter.fergie@u.northwestern.edu or on Twitter @DexterFergie. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
How does the world of book reviews work? In Inside the Critics’ Circle: Book Reviewing in Uncertain Times (Princeton University Press, 2020), Phillipa Chong, assistant professor in sociology at McMaster University, provides a unique sociological analysis of how critics confront the different types of uncertainty associated with their practice. The book explores how reviewers get matched to books, the ethics and etiquette of negative reviews and ‘punching up’, along with professional identities and the future of criticism. The book is packed with interview material, coupled with accessible and easy to follow theoretical interventions, creating a text that will be of interest to social sciences, humanities, and general readers alike. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
From talking heads on cable news to hot takes online, there seems to be more opinion than ever in journalism these days. There’s an entire body of research about how this shift toward opinionated news impacts the people who consume news, but far less on how these changes impact the people who create it. Kimberly Meltzer tackles some of these questions in her book From News to Talk: The Expansion of Opinion and Commentary in U.S. Journalism (SUNY Press, 2019). The book features interviews with journalists like Maria Bartiromo and Brian Stelter about why the media landscape is changing, what role (if any) journalists play in the decline of civility in public discourse, and how they work together as communities of practice in an ever-changing profession. As Meltzer says, today’s news landscape is complex. It recalls a past era of partisan newspapers, with the added wrinkle of 21st-century technology and a desire by some outlets to hold true to the standard of objectivity that became ubiquitous after World War II. In this interview, she offers some advice for journalists, news consumers, and journalism educators about how to think about the relationship between news, opinion, and civility today. Meltzer is Associate Professor of Communication and Chair of the Department of Communication at Marymount University in Arlington, Virginia. She is also the author of “TV News Anchors and Journalistic Tradition: How Journalists Adapt to Technology” and worked as a broadcast journalist herself before transitioning to academia. Jenna Spinelle is a journalism instructor at Penn State, host of the Democracy Works podcast, produced by Penn State’s McCourtney Institute for Democracy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
If you’re a grad student facing the ugly reality of finding a tenure-track job, you could easily be forgiven for thinking about a career change. However, if you’ve spent the last several years working on a PhD, or if you’re a faculty member whose career has basically consisted of higher ed, switching isn’t so easy. PhD holders are mostly trained to work as professors, and making easy connections to other careers is no mean feat. Because the people you know were generally trained to do the same sorts of things, an easy source of advice might not be there for you. Thankfully, for anybody who wishes there was a guidebook that would just break all of this down, that book has now been written. Going Alt-Ac: A Guide to Alternative Academic Careers (Stylus Publishing, 2020) by Kathryn E. Linder, Kevin Kelly, and Thomas J. Tobin offers practical advice and step-by-step instructions on how to decide if you want to leave behind academia and how to start searching for a new career. If a lot of career advice is too vague or too ambiguous, this book corrects that by outlining not just how to figure out what you might want to do, but critically, how you might go about accomplishing that. Zeb Larson is a recent graduate of The Ohio State University with a PhD in History. His research deals with the anti-apartheid movement in the United States. To suggest a recent title or to contact him, please send an e-mail to zeb.larson@gmail.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
The old mantra “if it bleeds it leads” is alive and well in today’s media landscape. In fact, social media and up-to-the-second news have made it easier than ever to ingest a constant stream of information about the world. In her book, You Are What You Read: Why Changing Your Media Diet Can Change The World (Unbound, 2019), Jodie Jackson argues that this type of news consumption leads to feelings of anger and helplessness. The book, and this conversation, outline how solutions journalism provides an alternative that focuses on what working and aims to inspire readers instead of angering them. Jackson is not a journalist by training and became interested in the media after feeling overwhelmed by the news herself. She earned a master’s degree in psychology and now works with news organizations around the world to advocate for a solutions-oriented approach. Jodie talk about how a news consumer might go about changing their habits, and how solutions journalism does not equal fluffy or overly positive news coverage. Her book makes a compelling argument about re-evaluating media consumption that’s worth considering for journalism educators and news consumers alike. Jenna Spinelle is a journalism instructor at Penn State and host of the Democracy Works podcast, produced by Penn State’s McCourtney Institute for Democracy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
Judi Rever’s In Praise of Blood: The Crimes of the Rwandan Patriotic Front (Random House, 2018) is investigative journalism at its finest. Through great personal risk to so many of those involved, Rever and her sources tell a story far different from the one most people who are familiar with the Rwandan Genocide would recognize. Synthesizing field research; testimonies from refugees, defectors and dissenters, and governmental and intergovernmental officials; and analysis of primary documents, Rever offers readers the most in-depth account yet of suspected crimes committed by Paul Kagame and the Rwandan Patriotic Front, before, during, and after the genocide in Rwandan against the Tutsi population. Jeff Bachman is a Lecturer in Human Rights at American University’s School of International Service in Washington, DC. He is the author of The United States and Genocide: (Re)Defining the Relationship and editor of the volume Cultural Genocide: Law, Politics, and Global Manifestations. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
The red Zagat guide to restaurants was a fixture to a generation of New York diners before Google bought the brand and stopped publishing copies of the book. In time for the 40th Anniversary, new owners The Infatuation, and Editor in Chief Hillary Reinsberg released a new version and it is selling well and attracting renewed interest in the brand. Host Allen Salkin talks to Reinsberg about Zagat 2020 New York City Restaurants: Special 40th Anniversary Edition (Zagat, 2019) and asks Reinsberg if more cities will be receiving print guides and covers a lot of other topics in food and media. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
Katya Cengel’s From Chernobyl with Love: Reporting from the Ruins of the Soviet Union (University of Nebraska Press, 2019) is an engaging memoir of a Western newspaper reporter’s youthful experiences in Latvia and Ukraine, in the turbulent years from the late 1990’s through the early 2000’s. Interspersed with lively anecdotes, the author brings a unique perspective on the struggles of the post-Soviet era, from the day-to-day vicissitudes of “getting by,” to the broader struggles and dynamics that led to the Orange Revolution in Ukraine. Aaron Weinacht is Professor of History at the University of Montana Western in Dillon, MT. He teaches courses on Russian and Soviet History, World History, and Philosophy of History. His research interests include the sociological theorist Philip Rieff and the influence of Russian nihilism on American libertarianism. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
From Pizzagate to Jeffrey Epstein, conspiracies seem to be more prominent than ever in American political discourse. What was once confined to the pages of supermarket tabloids is now all over our media landscape. Unlike the 9/11 truthers or those who questioned the moon landing, these conspiracies are designed solely to delegitimize a political opponent — rather than in service of finding the truth. As you might imagine, this is problematic for democracy. Democracy scholars Russell Muirhead and Nancy Rosenblum call it “conspiracy without the theory” and unpack the concept in their book A Lot of People Are Saying: The New Conspiracism and the Assault on Democracy(Princeton UP, 2019). Russell is the Robert Clements Professor of Democracy and Politics at Dartmouth. Nancy is the Senator Joseph Clark Research Professor of Ethics in Politics at Harvard. As you’ll hear, the new conspiricism is a symptom of a larger epistemic polarization that’s happening throughout the U.S. When people no longer agree on a shared set of facts, conspiracies run wild and knowledge-producing institutions like the government, universities, and the media are trusted less than ever. Democracy Works is created by the McCourtney Institute for Democracy at Penn State and recorded at WPSU Penn State, central Pennsylvania’s NPR station.
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We’ve all heard that a picture is worth a thousand words, but what if we don’t understand what we’re looking at? Social media has made charts, infographics, and diagrams ubiquitous―and easier to share than ever. We associate charts with science and reason; the flashy visuals are both appealing and persuasive. Pie charts, maps, bar and line graphs, and scatter plots (to name a few) can better inform us, revealing patterns and trends hidden behind the numbers we encounter in our lives. In short, good charts make us smarter―if we know how to read them. However, they can also lead us astray. Charts lie in a variety of ways―displaying incomplete or inaccurate data, suggesting misleading patterns, and concealing uncertainty―or are frequently misunderstood, such as the confusing cone of uncertainty maps shown on TV every hurricane season. To make matters worse, many of us are ill-equipped to interpret the visuals that politicians, journalists, advertisers, and even our employers present each day, enabling bad actors to easily manipulate them to promote their own agendas. In How Charts Lie: Getting Smarter about Visual Information (W. W. Norton, 2019), data visualization expert Alberto Cairo teaches us to not only spot the lies in deceptive visuals, but also to take advantage of good ones to understand complex stories. Public conversations are increasingly propelled by numbers, and to make sense of them we must be able to decode and use visual information. By examining contemporary examples ranging from election-result infographics to global GDP maps and box-office record charts, How Charts Lie demystifies an essential new literacy, one that will make us better equipped to navigate our data-driven world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
The First Amendment and a strong Fourth Estate are essential to a healthy democracy. David McCraw spends his days making sure that journalists can do their work in the United States and around the world. This includes responding to libel suits and legal threats, reviewing stories that are likely to be the subject of a lawsuit, helping reporters who run into trouble abroad, filing Freedom of Information Act requests, and much more. Today we talk to McCraw, the Deputy General Counsel of the New York Times and author of Truth in Our Times: Inside the Fight for Press Freedom in the Age of Alternative Facts (All Points Books, 2019). Democracy Works is created by the McCourtney Institute for Democracy at Penn State and recorded at WPSU Penn State, central Pennsylvania’s NPR station.
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As you may know, university presses publish a lot of good books. In fact, they publish thousands of them every year. They are different from most trade books in that most of them are what you might called "fundamental research." Their authors--dedicated researchers one and all--provide the scholarly stuff upon which many non-fiction trade books are based. So when you are reading, say, a popular history, you are often reading UP books at one remove. Of course, some UP books are also bestsellers, and they are all well written (and, I should say, thoroughly vetted thanks to the peer review system), but the greatest contribution of UPs is to provide a base of fundamental research to the public. And they do a great job of it. How do they do it? Today I talked to Kathryn Conrad, the president of the Association of University Presses, about the work of UPs, the challenges they face, and some terrific new directions they are going. We also talked about why, if you have a scholarly book in progress, you should talk to UP editors early and often. And she explains how! Listen in. Marshall Poe is the editor of the New Books Network. He can be reached at marshallpoe@gmail.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
The dominance of the London press in the British national media has long overshadowed the presence of local newspapers in Great Britain and the roles they played in their communities. As Andrew Hobbs demonstrates in his book A Fleet Street In Every Town: The Provincial Press in England, 1855-1900 (Open Book Publishers, 2018), this presence was extremely vibrant during the second half of the 19th century, when expanding literacy and the end of the “takes on knowledge in the 1850s and 1860s. Focusing on the local newspapers in the Lancashire town of Preston during this period, he explains how the reading of newspapers often was a different experience at that time, with public reading rooms giving people from the working classes access to the news. The local newspapers they read also were different, and embodied their communities in ways that were of great importance to their audience. Hobbs explains that most of these readers preferred these local newspapers, as they provided information that more accurately reflected their lives than did the ones published by the “national” press. Hobbs’s book is available for free from Open Book Publishers and can be downloaded here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
The things that make people academics -- as deep fascination with some arcane subject, often bordering on obsession, and a comfort with the solitude that developing expertise requires -- do not necessarily make us good teachers. Jessamyn Neuhaus’s Geeky Pedagogy: A Guide for Intellectuals, Introverts, and Nerds Who Want to Be Effective Teachers (West Virginia University Press, 2019) helps us to identify and embrace that geekiness in us and then offers practical, step-by-step guidelines for how to turn it to effective pedagogy. It’s a sharp, slim, and entertaining volume that can make better teachers of us all. Stephen Pimpare is Senior Lecturer in the Politics & Society Program and Faculty Fellow at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire. He is the author of The New Victorians (New Press, 2004), A Peoples History of Poverty in America (New Press, 2008), winner of the Michael Harrington Award, and Ghettos, Tramps and Welfare Queens: Down and Out on the Silver Screen (Oxford, 2017). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
The things that make people academics -- as deep fascination with some arcane subject, often bordering on obsession, and a comfort with the solitude that developing expertise requires -- do not necessarily make us good teachers. Jessamyn Neuhaus’s Geeky Pedagogy: A Guide for Intellectuals, Introverts, and Nerds Who Want to Be Effective Teachers (West Virginia University Press, 2019) helps us to identify and embrace that geekiness in us and then offers practical, step-by-step guidelines for how to turn it to effective pedagogy. It’s a sharp, slim, and entertaining volume that can make better teachers of us all. Stephen Pimpare is Senior Lecturer in the Politics & Society Program and Faculty Fellow at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire. He is the author of The New Victorians (New Press, 2004), A Peoples History of Poverty in America (New Press, 2008), winner of the Michael Harrington Award, and Ghettos, Tramps and Welfare Queens: Down and Out on the Silver Screen (Oxford, 2017). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
How have memes changed politics? In Internet Memes and Society: Social, Cultural, and Political Contexts(Routledge, 2019), Anastasia Denisova, a lecturer in journalism at the University of Westminster, gives both a history of internet memes as well as an analysis of key case studies of their impact on politics and society. Offering a rich and detailed engagement with Russian and American politics, as well as a nuanced and even-handed assessment of specific and well-known memes. In the current complex political moment the book is essential reading across the humanities and social sciences, as well as for anyone seeking to understand how the internet may shape forthcoming elections. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
In the summer of 1928, William Alexander Scott began a small four-page weekly with the help of his brother Cornelius. By 1932 the Atlanta World had become a daily paper and the basis of Scott's vision for a massive Southern newspaper chain - the Southern Newspaper Syndicate, later renamed as the Scott Newspaper Syndicate. At its peak, more than 240 papers were associated with the Syndicate, making it one of the largest black press institutions in the country. However, the extent of the Syndicate's reach and its centrality to Black southern life has remained largely overlooked. In The Grapevine of the Black South: The Scott Newspaper Syndicate in the Generation before the Civil Rights Movement (University of Georgia Press, 2018), Thomas Aiello offers the first critical history of this influential newspaper syndicate, tracing its roots in the early 1930s through to its eventual dissolution in the 1950s. During this critically important period preceding the the "civil rights era" ushered in by the 1954 Supreme Court ruling on school segregation, the Syndicate helped to shape the collective identity and community networks of the Black South. While providing local editors with a large degree of control and the flexibility to emphasize regional concerns and interests, the Syndicate gave its readers a similar set of tools from which to craft their understanding of Black life and culture, a means to document racial injustice and oppression, and an unparalleled grapevine of information and news coverage. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
Crying the News: A History of America’s Newsboys (Oxford University Press, 2019) looks at the legion of children and teenagers who sold newspapers on city streets, moving trains, and even Civil War battlefields in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Author Vincent DiGirolamo, a history professor at Baruch College, is featured in this New Books Network/Gotham Center for New York City History podcast interview with Beth Harpaz, editor of the City University of New York website SUM. A major theme of the book is the way in which the newspaper industry successfully fought efforts to ban newsboys as child labor. Instead, newspapers promoted newsboys as grand examples of the American dream, overcoming poverty through hard work on the road to success. Indeed, many famous Americans got their start as newsboys, from Thomas Edison to Walt Disney. But that may have been more an indication of the job’s ubiquity rather than its efficacy: "It was one of the most common, if not the most common, childhood occupation," DiGirolamo says on the podcast, adding: “There’s a thin line between opportunity and exploitation.” Beth Harpaz is the editor for the CUNY website SUM, which showcases books and research from the CUNY community.
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During the American Revolution, printed material, including newspapers, pamphlets, almanacs, and broadsides, played a crucial role as a forum for public debate. In Revolutionary Networks: The Business and Politics of Printing the News, 1763-1789 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019), Joseph M. Adelman, Associate Professor of History at Framingham State University, argues that printers—artisans who mingled with the elite but labored in a manual trade—used their commercial and political connections to directly shape Revolutionary political ideology and mass mobilization. Going into the printing offices of colonial America to explore how these documents were produced, Adelman shows how printers balanced their own political beliefs and interests alongside the commercial interests of their businesses, the customs of the printing trade, and the prevailing mood of their communities. Adelman describes how these laborers repackaged oral and manuscript compositions into printed works through which political news and opinion circulated. Drawing on a database of 756 printers active during the Revolutionary era, along with a rich collection of archival and printed sources, Adelman surveys printers' editorial strategies. Moving chronologically through the era of the American Revolution and to the war's aftermath, he details the development of the networks of printers and explains how they contributed to the process of creating first a revolution and then the new nation. By underscoring the important and intertwined roles of commercial and political interests in the development of revolutionary rhetoric, this book essentially reframes our understanding of the American Revolution. Printers, Adelman argues, played a major role as mediators who determined what rhetoric to amplify and where to circulate it. Offering a unique perspective on the American Revolution and early American print culture, Revolutionary Networks reveals how these men and women managed political upheaval through a commercial lens. Ryan Tripp is part-time and full-time adjunct history faculty for Los Medanos Community College as well as the College of Online and Continuing Education at Southern New Hampshire University.
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How do women experience gender inequality in film and television production industries? In Women, Inequality and Media Work (Routledge, 2019), Dr Anne O’Brien, lecturer in the Department of Media Studies at Maynooth University, answers this question with a case study of the Irish media industry. Blending a critical engagement with feminist and media theory with a wealth of empirical material, the book looks at the barriers to women in media occupations. The book highlights the subjectivities within media industries that resist and are responsible for these inequalities, ultimately demanding change in both Irish and Global modes of media production. The book is an important and essential read across a range of academic readers, and for anyone interested in why we have the media we have, and how we can change it. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
The American press is older than the United States itself. Ever since its catalytic role in the American Revolution, journalism has evolved to meet changing political, economic, and technological demands. Gregory Borchard traces this history in A Narrative History of the American Press (Routledge, 2018). He calls for a better understanding of journalism's past, at a time of acute concern about its future. Borchard is a professor at the Hank Greenspun School of Journalism and Media Studies at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. He is the editor of Journalism History, a quarterly scholarly journal. Nathan Bierma is a writer, instructional designer, and voiceover talent in Grand Rapids, Michigan. His website is www.nathanbierma.com.
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American society is deeply divided at this moment—not just on values and opinions but on basic perceptions of reality. In their latest book, One Nation, Two Realities: Dueling Facts in American Democracy (Oxford University Press, 2019), Morgan Marietta and David Barker attribute such division to the natural human tendency towards having different versions of reality. They introduce the concept of ‘dueling fact perceptions’ based on years of research, and for our interview, Morgan Marietta explains how they arrived at such conclusions and their implications for our country’s future. We have a sobering conversation about how fact-checking and greater education will not fix the problem of dueling fact perceptions, and we address the importance of trust—in our politicians, media, and other information sources—can ultimately shape how we use information to advance our beliefs. This interview is essential for those seeking to making sense of our current political climate and will provide realistic but thoughtful answers to many of your persistent questions about it. Morgan Marietta is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell, where he studies the political consequences of belief. His prior books include The Politics of Sacred Rhetoric: Absolutist Appeals and Political Influence, and A Citizen’s Guide to American Ideology: Conservatism and Liberalism in Contemporary Politics. He and co-author David Barker write the "Inconvenient Facts" blog at Psychology Today. Eugenio Duarte, Ph.D. is a psychologist and psychoanalyst practicing in Miami. He treats individuals and couples, with specialties in gender and sexuality, eating and body image problems, and relationship issues. He is also a university psychologist at Florida International University’s Counseling and Psychological Services Center, where he coordinates the eating disorders service. He is a graduate and faculty of William Alanson White Institute and former chair of their LGBTQ Study Group. He is also a contributing author to the book Introduction to Contemporary Psychoanalysis: Defining Terms and Building Bridges (Routledge, 2018).
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When Amos Mac and Rocco Kayiatos first launch Original Plumbing in 2009, they created a magazine the world desperately needed: a creative and celebratory biannual publication about trans men, by trans men. For ten years, OP was an inspired response to the lack of meaningful representation of trans lives and culture. Each issue was filled with gorgeous, moving, hilarious, and sexy narratives that pushed back against marginalizing stereotypes. Taken together, these stories met mainstream media’s violence with self-love, dismissal with determination, and repression with resistance. Collecting the best of the magazine’s entire twenty-issue run, Original Plumbing: The Best Ten Years of Trans Male Culture (Amethyst Editions, 2019) is a remarkable full-color archive that includes interviews with trailblazers like Janet Mock and Silas Howard; cutting-edge artwork and photography; mediations on love, relationships, and family; political essays and personal reflections; and much, much more. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
In this succinct and brilliantly written one-volume account of the rise and fall of the English press, premier historian Jeremy Black, the most prolific historian writing in the Anglophone world, if not on the entire planet, traces the English press’s history from the 17th century to the Internet age. The English Press: A History (Bloomsbury, 2019) focuses on the major developments in the world of print journalism and sets the history of the press in wider currents of English history, political, social, economic and technological. Black takes the reader through a chronological sequence of chapters, with a final chapter exploring possible scenarios for the future of English press. He investigates whether we are witnessing the demise of, or simply a crisis of the English press in the aftermath of the News of the World scandal and Levinson Inquiry. A new title by one of the most eminent historians of Britain and a leading expert on the history of the press, The English Press will appeal to undergraduate students of British and media history and journalism, as well as to the lay reader with an interest in the history of England, and the media. Charles Coutinho has a doctorate in history from New York University. Where he studied with Tony Judt, Stewart Stehlin and McGeorge Bundy. His Ph. D. dissertation was on Anglo-American relations in the run-up to the Suez Crisis of 1956. His area of specialization is 19th and 20th-century European, American diplomatic and political history. He has written recently for the Journal of Intelligence History and Chatham House’s International Affairs. It you have a recent title to suggest for a podcast, please send an e-mail to Charlescoutinho@aol.com.
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Neoliberal policies have been a primary feature of American political economy for decades. In Framing Inequality: News Media, Public Opinion, and the Neoliberal Turn in US Public Policy (Oxford University Press, 2019), Matt Guardino focuses on the power of corporate news media in shaping how the public understands the key policy debates during this period. Based on a range of evidence from the Reagan Revolution into the Trump administration, he explains how profit pressures in the media have narrowed and trivialized news coverage and influenced public attitudes in the process. Guardino is associate professor of political science at Providence College. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
In Graphic Satire in the Soviet Union: Krokodil’s Political Cartoons (University Press of Mississippi, 2019), Dr. John Etty explains how Krokodil magazine provided a venue in which the state, the the magazine’s editors, and readers all participated in defining what it was permissible to laugh at in the USSR. A standard view of Krokodil as propaganda would suggest that the magazine largely functioned as an arm of state ideology. In some cases, Krokodil did serve this function, but more often than not, its contents were the product of a process of co-creation, with all three groups playing a creative role in producing the magazine’s contents. With an engaging mix of visual analysis and theoretical sophistication, the author provides a window into everyday reading materials consumed by Soviet citizens. Aaron Weinacht is Professor of History at the University of Montana Western in Dillon, MT. He teaches courses on Russian and Soviet History, World History, and Philosophy of History. His research interests include the sociological theorist Philip Rieff and the influence of Russian nihilism on American libertarianism.
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We are fed a steady stream of doom and gloom—terrorist attacks, erosion of democracy, robots taking our jobs. But Michael A. Cohen and his co-author Mich Zenko argue in Clear and Present Safety: The World Has Never Been Better and Why That Matters to Americans (Yale University Press, 2019) that our world has never been “more peaceful, freer, healthier, better educated, and wealthier,” and we only feel otherwise because of “threat inflation” that sensationalizes relatively minor threats. In our discussion, Cohen readily acknowledges serious problems remain, such as climate change and gun violence, but urges us to recognize how much progress has been made and apply the lessons that have been learned. Moreover, he asks us to beware the “threat-industrial complex” of military agencies, special interest groups and the media that distort our understanding of the world we live in. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
In the information age, knowledge is power. Hence, facilitating the access to knowledge to wider publics empowers citizens and makes societies more democratic. How can publishers and authors contribute to this process? This podcast addresses this issue. We interview Professor Austin Choi-Fitzpatrick, whose book, The Good Drone: How Social Movements Democratize Surveillance (forthcoming with MIT Press) is undergoing a Massive Online Peer-Review (MOPR) process, where everyone can make comments on his manuscript. Additionally, his book will be Open Access (OA) since the date of publication. We discuss with him how do MOPR and OA work, how he managed to combine both of them and how these initiatives can contribute to the democratization of knowledge. You can participate in the MOPR process of The Good Drone through this link: https://thegooddrone.pubpub.org/ Felipe G. Santos is a PhD candidate at the Central European University. His research is focused on how activists care for each other and how care practices within social movements mobilize and radicalize heavily aggrieved collectives.
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The story of Emmett Till’s death at the hands of white Mississippians is well known. For many Americans, it highlights the racism of the Jim Crow South and was a defining moment that helped galvanize a generation of civil rights leaders. In his new book, Elliott J. Gorn (Professor of History at Loyola University Chicago) tells the story of Till’s life and death. The death and trial was a national and international news story, but the exact meaning of events in Mississippi were contested. Moreover, the horrific images of Till’s badly beaten body were published in black publications at a time of a segregated media landscape. Most white Americans did not see them until decades later. In Let the People See: The Story of Emmett Till (Oxford University Press, 2018), Gorn also tells this story of the story of Till’s death—examining how responses to the death varied across the population and showing how public memory of Till’s murder has changed over the intervening years. In this episode of the podcast, Gorn discusses Till’s life, death, and legacy. He explains what happened and how it was received at the time. He also discusses why Till’s death drew so much attention, and how that attention fit into the larger historical context. He touches on why his death feels especially timely today. Finally, he discusses the experience of researching the book. Christine Lamberson is an Associate Professor of History at Angelo State University. Her research and teaching focuses on 20th century U.S. political and cultural history. She’s currently working on a book manuscript about the role of violence in shaping U.S. political culture in the 1960s and 1970s. She can be reached at clamberson@angelo.edu.
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What can the lives of journalists under Hitler and Adenauer reveal? How did they navigate the Third Reich as "internal emigrants"? How did the emerging Cold War shape new tensions with their government and publishers? Volker Berghahn examines the lives and careers of three media giants with his latest book Journalists between Hitler and Adenauer: From Inner Emigration to the Moral Reconstruction of West Germany(Princeton University Press, 2019). In it, Berghan's exploration of German journalists' compromises and moral vision for their country illuminates perennial issues around press freedom and the place of media in modern societies. Volker Berghahn is the Seth Low Professor Emeritus of History at Columbia University. His numerous contributions to the field have covered the social and cultural history of modern Germany and Euro-American relations. He taught in England and Germany before coming to Brown University in 1988 and going on to Columbia ten years later. A selected list of Berghahn's books includes America and the Intellectual Cold Wars in Europe (2001), Imperial Germany (1995), The Americanization of West German Industry, 1945-1973 (1986), Modern Germany (1982), The Tirpitz Plan (1971), Europe in the Era of Two World Wars (2006), and Industrial Society and Cultural Transfer (2010). Ryan Stackhouse is a historian of Europe specializing in modern Germany and political policing under dictatorship. His research exploring Gestapo enforcement practices toward different social groups is nearing completion under the working title A Discriminating Terror. He also cohosts the Third Reich History Podcast and can be reached at john.ryan.stackhouse@gmail.com or @Staxomatix.
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How has European culture changed since the 1960s? In Enter Culture, Exit Arts? The Transformation of Cultural Hierarchies in European Newspaper Culture Sections, 1960–2010 (Routledge, 2018), Dr. Irmak Karademir Hazir and her co-authors, explore this important question by looking at newspaper coverage of culture across Europe over the last 50 years. The book has an incredibly rich and detailed dataset of newspaper articles from Spain, UK, France, Turkey, Sweden and Finland, and covers a range of cultural forms. The book grapples with the classic tensions in the study of culture, between aesthetics and commercialisation, hierarchies, and globalisation, along with changes in the format, style, and production conditions for cultural journalism. The book is essential reading for anyone interested in culture in Europe, and you can find out more about the project and read some of the papers here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
49.91% of India’s population was below the age of 24 in the 2011 Census. By 2020 India will become the world’s youngest country with 64% of its population in the working age group of 15-64 years. This is India’s much touted “demographic dividend”. Economists anticipate the dividend to yield as much as an additional 2% to the GDP growth rate but this potential is hampered by poor education, plummeting job opportunities and inadequate access to health care. But who are Indian youth? What do they really want? Journalist Snigdha Poonam takes a deep dive into north India's smaller cities in her first book Dreamers: How Young Indians Are Changing the World (Harvard University Press 2018), and returns with stories of hustle, aspiration and disenchantment. Poonam is a journalist with the national Indian daily Hindustan Times. Her work has appeared in Scroll.in, The Caravan, The Times of India, The New York Times, The Guardian, Granta and The Financial Times. Her article 'Lady Singham’s Mission Against Love' was runner-up in the Bodley Head / Financial Times Essay Prize, 2015. She won the 2017 Journalist of Change award of Bournemouth University for an investigation of student suicides that appeared on Huffington Post. Dreamers is her first book. Madhuri Karak holds a Ph.D. in cultural anthropology from The Graduate Center, City University of New York. Her dissertation titled "Insurgent Difference: An Ethnography of an Indian Resource Frontier” analyzed resource extraction and development as mutually constitutive logics of rule in the bauxite-rich mountains of southern Odisha, India. She tweets @madhurikarak and more of her work can be found here.
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McKenzie Wark’s new book offers 21 focused studies of thinkers working in a wide range of fields who are worth your attention. The chapters of General Intellects: Twenty-One Thinkers for the Twenty-First Century (Verso, 2017) introduce readers to important work in Anglophone cultural studies, psychoanalysis, political theory, media theory, speculative realism, science studies, Italian and French workerist and autonomist thought, two “imaginative readings of Marx,” and two “unique takes on the body politic.” There are significant implications of these ideas for how we live and work at the contemporary university, and we discussed some of those in our conversation. This is a great book to read and to teach with! Carla Nappi is the Andrew W. Mellon Chair in the Department of History at the University of Pittsburgh. You can learn more about her and her work here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
In Networked Press Freedom: Creating Infrastructures For a Public Right to Hear (MIT Press, 2018), journalism professor Mike Ananny provides a new framework for thinking about the media at a time of significant change within the industry. Drawing on a variety of disciplines from journalism studies, political theory and technological studies, Ananny argues press freedom is a result of an interplay of duty, autonomy, social, and institutional forces.
Focusing on the public right to hear, Ananny explores the competing values and publics journalists must negotiate to provide objective news and to build trust. Exploring the complexities of ‘doing journalism’ in the 21st century with competing technological platforms he attempts to answer the question: what is the role of journalism and freedom of the press in the modern era? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
In about 1978, I found myself in my high school library. I don’t know why I was there except to say I was probably on detention; I didn’t do a lot of reading in those days. In any event, I was wandering around the stacks and I found a book called My Lai 4. I knew a little about the My Lai massacre because I knew a little about the Vietnam War; my father had been in the army in the 1960s and my uncle had fought in Vietnam. I started reading.
It’s not often that a book stays with you your whole life, but Seymour M. Hersh‘s My Lai 4: A Report on the Massacre and Its Aftermath (Random House, 1970) did. Hersh reported–that’s just the word–what happened: he did not embellish, he did not moralize, he did not speculate. He tirelessly interviewed the men who were there, the men who commanded them, and read everything he could get his hands on. Then he told a shocked American public: this happened. His reporting arguably changed the course of the Vietnam War. It changed the course of my life, as I went on to write a book about My Lai myself.
He has told the story of how he broke My Lai countless times. The story made him famous, and his later reporting only added to that fame. So in this interview about his recently published, telling, and honest memoir Reporter: A Memoir (Knopf, 2018), I focus on Hersh’s life before My Lai. I was particularly interested to learn how he became “Sy Hersh, reporter.” Listen in.
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“Appalachia was among the first places where the malaise of opioid pills hit the nation in the mid-1990s, ensnaring coal miners, loggers, furniture makers, and their kids.” This is how journalist Beth Macy premises her new book, Dopesick: Dealers, Doctors, and the Drug Company That Addicted America (Little, Brown, & Company, 2018). She then sets out to share a history of how and why this happened.
Macy offers readers a familiar story of industrial exploitation and economic distress in central Appalachia, only, instead of focusing on the coal industry’s role in this history, Macy describes exploitation that resulted from big pharmaceutical companies selling large quantities of prescription opioids in central Appalachia. Building on the work of authors such as Sam Quinones (Dreamland), Anna Lembke (Drug Dealer, MD), and Keith Wailoo (Pain), Macy argues that the sale and use of prescription opioids increased in part after medical professionals began to push the idea that new standards for the assessment and treatment of pain were needed in the 1990s.
The book looks critically not just at the over-prescription of opioids, but, paraphrasing Lembke, Macy also suggests that readers think critically about the “broader American narrative that promotes all pills as a quick fix” (136). As you’ll hear Macy say at the end of the podcast, she wants readers to think about “being better consumers and better listeners who are open to what’s happening on the ground.”
Chelsea Jack is a PhD student in the Anthropology Department at Yale University. She focuses on sociocultural and medical anthropology. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
How can we end the scourge of poverty? How we can sustain ourselves once robots eliminate the need for many jobs? Annie Lowrey offers an answer in the title of her book, Give People Money: How a Universal Basic Income Would End Poverty, Revolutionize Work, and Remake the World (Crown, 2018). She makes the case for the policy called “Universal Basic Income,” in which the government pays everyone a fixed amount of money whether or not they have a job. The book traces the history of the idea, which goes back centuries and has been embraced at various points by people on the left and the right. Lowrey also shares her travels to Kenya, to witness a pilot UBI program, and to India, to explore its high-tech program to bring banking to the poor and could lead to a UBI system. She talks with politician and philosophers, economists and subsistence farmers. And she addresses critics who fear UBI would be too expensive and discourage work. As UBI becomes a hot topic in policy work circles, Give People Money will help you fully understand the idea and consider its profound implications.
Bill Scher is a Contributing Editor for POLITICO Magazine. He has provided political commentary on CNN, NPR and MSNBC. He has been published in The New York Times, The New Republic, and The New York Daily News among other publications. He is author of Wait! Don’t Move to Canada, published by Rodale in 2006. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
Despite its extraordinary diversity, life in the People’s Republic of China is all too often viewed mainly through the lens of politics, with dynamics of top-down coercion and bottom-up resistance seen to predominate. Such a binary framing is particularly often applied to analyses of the country’s media which is understood in terms of mouthpieces of the party-state or vanishingly rare dissident voices. Yet as Maria Repnikova lucidly shows in her book Media Politics in China: Improvising Power under Authoritarianism (Cambridge University Press, 2017) there may be much more at play here than a straightforward cleavage between collaboration and resistance. Through discussion of the work of ‘critical journalists’ and their interactions with officialdom, Repnikova paints a rich and provocative picture of the flexible, creative, if nevertheless precarious, nature of state-media interactions whose implications go far beyond the media sphere.
Repnikova suggests that journalistic ‘change-makers within the system’ (to whom the book is dedicated) delicately tread the “fringes of the permissible” (p. 11), pursuing a collaborative mode of investigative work in an environment which remains saturated with Party-state power. Conversely, the authorities benefit from an ability to learn from the media’s investigations, or use media as a propaganda channel, even as they frequently step in to restrict reporting work. Repnikova’s multi-perspectival consideration of various key actors in this system, carried out through multilingual textual research and in-depth interviews, adds vital insight to our understanding of media, and state-society dynamics more generally, in non-Western and authoritarian contexts. Further enhancing this late in the book is a particularly compelling comparison with Soviet and Russian cases. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
Personal health information often seems locked-down: protected by patient privacy laws, encased in electronic record systems (EHRs) and difficult to share or transport by and between physicians and hospitals. But as Adam Tanner argues in his latest book, Our Bodies, Our Data: How Companies Make Billions Selling Our Medical Records (Beacon Press, 2017), our medical information is anything but static. He describes a vast and growing industry of trade in patient data, emanating from EHRs to pharmacy and drug company sales records. These data – ostensibly stripped of identifying information – are sold and bought largely to help medical and pharmaceutical companies better market their products (as well as for some research). Tanner asks, are these data completely safe? Could they be re-identified and threaten patient privacy? How might this trade in data impact patient care and physician practice? While consumer data breaches plague other industries, Tanner urges us as consumers, medical practitioners and society to have a much-needed and informed conversation about this largely hidden circulation of health information. His book is a great start.
Adam Tanner is a journalist, former foreign correspondent and leading expert on privacy and commercialization of personal data. His first book is entitled What Stays in Vegas: the World of Personal Data – Lifeblood of Big Businesses – and the End of Privacy as We Know It (Public Affairs, 2014). Currently, he is an associate at the Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard University. Learn more about his work on his website Adamtanner.news and follow him on Twitter @DataCurtain
Dana Greenfield, MD PhD is a resident physician in Pediatrics at the University of California, San Francisco. She completed her PhD in Medical Anthropology from UCSF/UC Berkeley in 2015 and MD at UCSF in 2018. Reach her at dana.greenfield@ucsf.edu or on Twitter @DanaGfield.
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Today Irvin S. Cobb is remembered primarily as an author of humorous tales about life in Kentucky. Yet as William E. Ellis describes in his book Irvin S. Cobb: The Rise and Fall of an American Humorist (University Press of Kentucky, 2017), these stories reflected only a portion of his considerable literary output. Born in Paducah, Cobb got his start as a journalist working for the local papers. After moving to New York in 1904 he was hired at the New York World, for which he wrote a steady output of articles and humorous columns. The need for money contributed to Cobb’s move into short story writing, resulting in a number of works that are regarded as classics of their type. By the 1920s Cobb was one of the leading literary figures in America, though as Ellis explains his involvement with movie-making and radio dissipated his energies and contributed to the decline in the quality of his work in his later years. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
Investigative journalist and Northwest correspondent for the Southern Poverty Law Center, David Neiwert has been covering the radical right-wing for decades. In Alt-America: The Rise of the Radical Right in the Age of Trump (Verso, 2017), Neiwert takes his years of experience to chronicle the rise of what is now known as the “Alt Right,” and how it contributed to the election of Donald Trump to the White House. Neiwert shows how the militia movement of the 1990s, the anti-immigrant Minutemen of the 2000s and the Tea Party that surged in 2010 all led to the “Alt Right.” Neiwert also discusses the Alt Right’s relationship with domestic terrorism, from the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing to the 2015 Charleston church massacre. The book also explores the far right’s attraction to conspiracy theories, going back to Henry Ford’s promotion of the “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.” Neiwert considers radical right is fundamentally authoritarian and anti-democratic, and considers the question often asked about fascism in America: Can it happen here?
Bill Scher is a Contributing Editor for POLITICO Magazine. He has provided political commentary on CNN, NPR and MSNBC. He has been published in The New York Times, The New Republic, and The New York Daily News among other publications. He is author of Wait! Don’t Move to Canada, published by Rodale in 2006. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
For all the American media coverage of President Donald Trump’s possible ties to Russia, what’s rarely heard are the voices of Russians themselves. Russians on Trump: Coverage and Commentary (East View Press, 2018), edited by Laurence Bogoslaw, surveys the range of opinions about Trump that have appeared in the Russian press from the late 1990s to today. Before 2015, Trump’s sporadic appearances in Russian news outlets mostly centered on his efforts to hawk real estate. During the presidential campaign, some Russian commentators were intrigued by the idea that Trump might reduce American commitments abroad; focusing on policy rather than personality, they arguably took him seriously as a political player before domestic pundits did. Nevertheless, Trump’s election came as a shock to Russian analysts, many of whom had predicted a Clinton victory. While flamboyant ultranationalist politician Vladimir Zhirinovsky popped champagne, others (such as Moscow Times editor Mikhail Fishman) despaired. “The hope for change in Russia has just been buried in the voting booths of Florida, Michigan and North Carolina,” he wrote on November 10. In the following months, most Russian commentators did not deny the plausibility of Russian cyber-espionage and media influence, though they placed such efforts within the realm of normal statecraft and shrugged off the notion that they influenced the election’s outcome. Even as Trump reneged on his campaign rhetoric about NATO and other key issues, Russian media forecasts for bilateral relations remained largely sunny—until he signed off on a new round of sanctions in August 2017, leading to widespread disillusionment and more negative coverage.
Joy Neumeyer is a journalist and PhD candidate in History at the University of California, Berkeley. Her dissertation project explores the role of death in Soviet culture.
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During the 2016, journalist Salena Zito, who is based in Western Pennsylvania, sensed a brewing conservative populist in the white working-class when many thought the election would be determined by other demographic groups. Her dispatches from the back roads proved prescient when Donald Trump won the presidency. She teamed up with Republican political consultant and data guru Brad Todd to produce The Great Revolt: Inside the Populist Coalition Reshaping American Politics (Crown Forum, 2018). The authors created an in-depth survey of Trump voters, which allowed them to define seven archetypes of people who composed the new political coalition that hadn’t been previously detected. In the book, Zito also introduces readers to some of people she met on the campaign trail who exemplify the different profiles. The authors argue that no matter what happens with the Trump presidency, the Great Revolt has disrupted the two-party system to such an extent that the Democratic and Republican parties will no longer “have the same sway.”
Bill Scher is a Contributing Editor for POLITICO Magazine. He has provided political commentary on CNN, NPR and MSNBC. He has been published in The New York Times, The New Republic, and The New York Daily News among other publications. He is author of Wait! Don’t Move to Canada, published by Rodale in 2006. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
Appeals to “press freedom” can be heard from across the political spectrum. But what those appeals mean varies dramatically. Sam Lebovic, in his excellent new book, Free Speech and Unfree News: The Paradox of Press Freedom in America (Harvard University Press, 2016), traces the fraught history of that contested concept throughout the twentieth century. Beginning his analysis in the 1920s, Lebovic shows how conservative politicians, lawyers, and publishers began to define press freedom as freedom from state censorship, wrapped it in the first amendment, and fought New Deal attempts at regulation. Meanwhile, liberal politicians and journalists feared corporate control of the press as a threat to the democratic need for information, and advocated a freer and more trustworthy press. Not interested solely in the debates over press freedom, Lebovic also focuses on, what he calls, “the everyday politics of information.” He reveals how state classification practices and the political economy of the news fundamentally shaped how information flowed. It is an ambitious book that succeeds in telling a crucial story and it should inform contemporary approaches to press monopolization and the ever-growing “classified universe.” The book will interest intellectual historians, communications scholars, legal historians, political historians, and historians of U.S. foreign relations.
Dexter Fergie is a first-year PhD student of US and global history at Northwestern University. He is currently researching the 20th century geopolitical history of information and communications networks. He can be reached by email at dexter.fergie@u.northwestern.edu or on Twitter @DexterFergie. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
It seems safe to assume that media coverage changes the behavior of politicians and voters. And it seems safe to assume this happens in cases of humanitarian crisis.
But it’s really hard to go beyond these platitudes to determine exactly how this feedback loop works. John Nathaniel Clarke’s new book, British Media and the Rwandan Genocide (Routledge, 2018), uses Rwanda as a test case to tease out the relationship between media coverage and policy. To do so, he uses carefully structured, labor intensive and analytically rich process to determine exactly what the media was reporting and writing about the genocide. By examining the media coverage so systematically, he is also able to detect changes over time in the nature of the reporting. He then examines the way in which members of parliament respond to the reports, analysis and op-eds in a variety of British newspapers.
Clarke knows his way around an excel spreadsheet, and his analysis is statistically sophisticated and his conclusions carefully considered. His book raise questions about the received wisdom about coverage of Rwanda. But it also offers a model going forward of how we might understand the relationship between media coverage of mass atrocities and the decisions made by political leaders about how to respond to these crises.
Kelly McFall is Professor of History and Director of the Honors Program at Newman University. He’s the author of four modules in the Reacting to the Past series, including The Needs of Others: Human Rights, International Organizations and Intervention in Rwanda, 1994. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
This episode is a collection of segments from papers given at Humility and Conviction in Public Life’s workshop on Political Polarization and Epistemic Arrogance. On this episode you will hear short selections from talks given by Jennifer Saul, Lani Watson, Michael Lynch, Alessandra Tanesini, Elizabeth Krumrei Mancuso, Steven Sloman, and Heather Battaly. The "Why We Argue" podcast is produced by the Humanities Institute at the University of Connecticut as part of the Humility and Conviction in Public Life project. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
Natalia Roudakova’s book Losing Pravda: Ethics and the Press in Post-Truth Russia (Cambridge University Press, 2017) explores changes in the world of journalism in Russia in the last fifty years. Drawing from more than a decade of research of various ethnographic and historical sources, Roudakova approaches truth as a social category. She demonstrates that the status of truth was relatively secure and stable under the Soviet state socialism. It was the transformation from communism to capitalism that led to a drastic dissolution of a sense of responsibility towards the public and, consequently, into the very possibility to produce truth in the post-socialist era. Looking into everyday practices of Soviet journalists and the post-socialist transformation of the media, Losing Pravda provides a glimpse into one possible future of the US and other post-truth settings in the West. Exploring how truth-seeking and truth-telling work under different socio-political conditions, it offers a new, ethics-based vocabulary for thinking about production of facts and meaning in contemporary world.
Carna Brkovic is a Lecturer at the University of Regensburg, Germany. She is an author of Managing Ambiguity, winner of the 2015 SIEF Young Scholar prize, and an anthropologist exploring humanitarianism, clientelism, and activism in former Yugoslav countries. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
As a historian I find myself constantly asking the question “Is that really new, or is it rather something that looks new but isn’t?” If you read the headlines, particularly those concerning the on going “Digital Revolution,” you would certainly get the impression that a Brave New World is emerging, one nothing like anything that we’ve seen before. And, in a way, this is true: we—meaning humans—have never lived in an environment with smartphones, social media, and the firehose of “information” that is the Internet. We’re always on and always connected in a way we have never been before.
But, as Andrew Keen points out in his smart new book How To Fix The Future (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2018), there is also a sense in which we have been here before, namely, in the Industrial Revolution of the late 18th and 19th century. Then, too, technology and new forms of organization upended the way almost everyone in the industrializing world lived. (For more, see Auguste Comte, Karl Marx, and Emile Durkheim, unless you like poets, in which case you should just read the British Romantics.) Some made dire predictions, others said heaven was around the corner. There was lots of suffering and, well, lots of progress. What we did, Keen points out, is essentially tame the Industrial Revolution such that it served humanity rather than humanity serving it. He says we can do the same with the Digital Revolution, and he tells us how. Listen in. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
In Bad Rabbi And Other Strange But True Stories from the Yiddish Press (Stanford University Press, 2017), Eddy Portnoy, Academic Advisor and Exhibitions Curator at the YIVO Institute for Yiddish Research, delves into the archives of the Yiddish press to reveal the passionate and tumultuous world of Yiddish cultures in New York and Warsaw in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Portnoy describes this world as Yiddishland, a nation in which all the high and low expressions of culture not only occurred but were carefully and colorfully relayed by Yiddish journalists, including the young Isaac Bashevis Singer and his older brother, Israel Joshua Singer.
A treasure for both researchers and general readership, Bad Rabbi brings to life the passionate, chaotic, and sometimes violent communal life of the Yiddish-speaking urban world that flourished prior to World War II on both sides of the Atlantic, and that was documented by some of Yiddish culture’s keenest eyes and finest writers.
David Gottlieb is a PhD Candidate in the History of Judaism at the University of Chicago Divinity School. His research focuses on interpretations of the Binding of Isaac and the formation of Jewish cultural memory. He can be reached at davidg1@uchicago.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Native American students from across the United States attended federally-managed boarding schools where they were taught English, math, and a variety of vocational skills, all for the purpose of forcing their assimilation into white, American society. While enrolled at these schools, students also showcased their writing, editing, and printing skills by publishing school newspapers. In Recovering Native American Writings in the Boarding School Press (University of Nebraska Press, 2017), Assistant Professor of English Jacqueline Emery provides the first comprehensive collection of Native American writings published in boarding school newspapers, and demonstrates the ways in which students used these periodicals to both challenge and reflect assimilationist practices at the schools. The collection includes student-authored letters, editorials, fiction, and folklore, and examines the writings of Gertrude Bonin, Charles Eastman, and Luther Standing Bear, among additional, lesser-known writers.
Samantha M. Williams is a PhD candidate in History at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is currently writing her dissertation, which examines the history of the Stewart Indian School in Carson City, Nevada through the lenses of settler colonialism and public history. She can be reached at swillia7@ucsc.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
In her book, Death Makes the News: How the Media Censor and Display the Dead (NYU Press, 2017), Jessica M. Fishman examines how death is presented in the media. Researching how media outlets present images of death over the past 30 years, Fishman explores the controversial practice of picturing the dead. Fishman presents the varying ways the press selects the images they choose to use, the way they make decisions of what images they use, and why. Her research reveals that much of what we think we know about how dead bodies are, or are not, shown in the media is wrong. The tabloid press is less likely to show a dead body, media show dead foreign bodies more often than they show dead American bodies, and the exceptions to the rules the media uses to portray the dead are not often altered. Well researched, with knowledge from editors and photojournalists about the decisions made around images of death, Jessica Fishman’s work gives readers new ways to think about the ways death does, and does not, make the news.
Rebekah Buchanan is an Associate Professor of English at Western Illinois University. Her work examines the role of narrative in people’s lives. She researches zines, zine writers and the influence of music subcultures and fandom on writers and narratives. You can find more about her on her website, follow her on Twitter @rj_buchanan or email her at rj-buchanan@wiu.edu.
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In her new book, Politics, Media and Campaign Language: Australia’s Identity Anxiety (Anthem Press, 2017), Stephanie Brookes, a Lecturer in Journalism at Monash University, explores the power of election campaign language to offer a window into the Australian national mood and national identity. Using a variety of political and media sources, including speeches, interviews, press conferences, and debates, Brookes investigates how campaign communication can help us understand Australia’s identity security: what kind of country Australia is and ought to be. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
Marvin Scott’s new book, As I Saw It: A Reporter’s Intrepid Journey (Beaufort Books, 2017) tells 26 stories of memorable people and events that the veteran TV journalist gathered during a career spanning more than 50 years.
Scott estimates that he’s told more than 15,000 stories and interviewed 30,000 people for print, radio and television. He describes himself as a journalist who has “tried to stick to old-fashioned reporting, just the facts, without adding my personal views.” He also writes that “at the heart of every story, big and small, is a person. It is people who make the news.” The winner of 11 Emmy Awards, Scott is currently the senior correspondent at New York’s WPIX-TV. He has written for the New York Herald Tribune as well as Parade Magazine and has worked as a radio reporter for the Mutual Broadcasting System and at such television outfits as CNN, WNEW, and WABC.
In this New Books Network interview, Marvin Scott recounts some of the stories he covered including one he did on Charlie Walsh, the bank thief who became a New York celebrity. He also describes how he managed to interview Abraham Zapruder and how many years later, he synced Zapruder’s recorded words to the 26-second amateur film he had shot of the Kennedy assassination in Dallas.
Scott champions traditional, shoe-leather reporting and laments the influence of social media outlets that publish first and check the facts later.
Bruce Wark is a freelance journalist and retired journalism professor based in the Sackville, New Brunswick.
Laura Landon is a librarian at Mount Allison University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
In his new book, Jewish Anzacs: Jews in the Australian Military (New South Press, 2017), author, journalist and historian Mark Dapin explores the little-known story of the thousands of Jews that have fought in Australia’s military conflicts. Through archival research, military records, private letters, and interviews, Dapin tells the story of the Jewish servicemen and women that have fought—and died—for Australia in all of the nation’s wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
In The Unchosen: The Lives of Israel’s New Others (University of Chicago/Pluto Press, 2017), Mya Guarnieri-Jaradat offers her readers an intimate, often devastatingly gloomy portrait of the lives of Southeast Asian migrant workers and African asylum seekers in Israel. She depicts an image of a reality of poverty, harassment, and abuse that often goes largely unseen. Based on a decade’s worth of experience in the field, The Unchosen sheds light on Israel’s often brutal treatment of these marginalized and frequently silenced peoples, providing them with a space where their voices can be heard.
Mya Guarnieri Jaradat is a journalist and writer who spent nearly a decade covering Israel and the occupied Palestinian Territories. Her work has been published in a number of literary and media outlets, including the Nation, Al Jazeera English, Foreign Policy, The Guardian, Narrative, Kenyon Review, and Boston Review.
Yaacov Yadgar is the Stanley Lewis Professor of Israel Studies at the University of Oxford. His most recent book is Sovereign Jews: Israel, Zionism and Judaism (SUNY Press, 2017). You can read more of Yadgar’s work here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
In the wake of the Arab Spring and the ensuing Syrian Civil War, the stories of the millions displaced by the conflict as well as the millions Syria has lost since 2011 remain largely untold. Wendy Pearlman‘s We Crossed a Bridge and It Trembled (Custom House, 2017) attempts to fill that void. Almost entirely comprised of interviews with Syrian refugees, conducted in Arabic then painstakingly translated and organized to tell the story of the Syrian Civil War. Pearlman covers the period before the Civil War, the revolution itself and the tragic aftermath. Heartbreaking, inspiring, and informative all at once, We Crossed a Bridge and It Trembled is hopefully the first of many such compilations to tell the multifaceted Syrian story.
NA Mansour is a graduate student at Princeton University’s Department of Near Eastern Studies working on the global intellectual history of the Arabic-language press. She tweets @NAMansour26 and produces another Middle-East and North Africa-related podcast: Reintroducing.
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Two professors from Mount Allison University in New Brunswick, Canada have published a book about how American popular culture reinforces militarism in the United States. In Pop Culture Goes to War: Enlisting and Resisting Militarism in the War on Terror (Lexington Books, 2010) Geoff Martin and Erin Steuter argue that popular songs, Hollywood movies, professional sports, TV news and even children’s toys help generate public support for the use of military force to solve political problems such as international terrorism. At the same time, they also argue that other elements of popular culture such as The Daily Show, the Colbert Report and The Simpsons, for example, actively resist militarism with pointed political comedy and satire.
In this New Books Network interview, Steuter and Martin say their book was inspired in part by the ideas of the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. who preached against the War in Vietnam. “We can no longer afford to worship the god of hate or bow before the altar of retaliation,” King declared in a speech delivered a year before he was assassinated in 1968. Professors Steuter and Martin argue that King’s opposition to militarism is as relevant today during the seemingly endless post 9/11 War on Terror, as it was then.
Erin Steuter teaches sociology at Mount Allison, in Sackville, New Brunswick while her partner, Geoff Martin is a professor of political science there.
Bruce Wark is a freelance journalist and retired journalism professor based in the Sackville, New Brunswick.
Laura Landon is a librarian at Mount Allison University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
Since its invention, the Internet has become a fundamental part of our lives. Since the invention of social media, communicative technologies have changed our lives and influenced journalism and politics in ways that were unimaginable just ten years ago. In her book, Micro-blogging Memories: Weibo and Collective Remembering in Contemporary China (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), Eileen Le Han explores how the social media site Weibo has influenced Chinese culture and politics. By analysing the relationship between three key tensions: control-resistance, past-present, and global-local, Le Han provides a unique and in-depth account on how social media is used in an increasingly globalising China. By focusing on specific events and how they were reported on, and more significantly, how they are remembered, Le Han explores the contentious topics of state-sponsored censorship, increasing nationalism and the collectivisation of memory. The first five years of Weibo were a turning point in Chinese society, a time in which the anxieties and uncertainties over remembering, were confronted by journalists, media professionals, pundits and ordinary citizens. Five years on how is Weibo fairing? And what does the future hold for Chinese journalism? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
Mitchell Stephens‘s new book, The Voice of America: Lowell Thomas and the Invention of 20th Century Journalism (St. Martins Press, 2017), could be described, in part, as an entertaining book of stories about a legendary American storyteller.
Stephens, professor of journalism at New York University, traces Lowell Thomas’s long career from his early days in the rough and tumble world of Chicago newspapers to his later fame as one of America’s earliest and longest-running radio newscasters and its first TV news host.
Stephens tells how Thomas documented the First World War, weaving together photos, films and his own remarkable gift for oratory in multimedia presentations that he delivered live to two million people in theaters all over the world. It was Lowell Thomas who first reported the war exploits of Lawrence of Arabia, making both T.E. Lawrence and Thomas himself household names.
As a journalism historian and author of the previous book, A History of News, Mitchell Stephens argues that Lowell Thomas helped invent the fact-based, authoritative and non-partisan style that characterized American journalism in the 20th century. In this interview with the New Books Network, Stephens talks about how Lowell Thomas forged a path as a broadcast celebrity that was later followed by his CBS colleague Edward R. Murrow and such TV anchors as Walter Cronkite, Huntley and Brinkley and Tom Brokaw.
Bruce Wark is a freelance journalist and retired journalism professor based in the Canadian town of Sackville, New Brunswick.
Laura Landon is a librarian at Mount Allison University in Sackville, New Brunswick. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
Over the course of a long and adventurous life, Henry Alsberg was guided by the constancy of his passion for radical causes. This focus, as Susan Rubenstein DeMasi makes clear in Henry Alsberg: The Driving Force Behind the New Deal Federal Writers’ Project (McFarland, 2016) defined both his varied career choices and his greatest achievements. Alsbeg’s radicalism was a constant of his life from an early age, and led him to abandon his initial employment as a lawyer for more fulfilling work as a journalist and author. After several years in revolution-plagued eastern Europe as a correspondent during and after the First World War, Alsberg returned to the United States to become a theater producer. Despite the success of his English-language translation of the play The Dybbuk, by the time the Great Depression hit in the early 1930s Alsberg was facing the same challenges as millions of other Americans in finding work. Not only did the New Deals Federal Writers’ Project provide him with employment but, as DeMasi demonstrates, with projects such as the multivolume American Guide and the compiling of the oral histories of former slaves he shepherded some of the most enduring cultural legacies of the era, ones which serve as monuments to his own blend of political values and artistic creativity. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
Does voter ignorance undermine democracy? Ilya Somin is Professor of Law at the Antonin Scalia Law School of George Mason University and regular contributor to the Volokh Conspiracy blog at the Washington Post. Somin’s research focuses on issues concerning constitutional law, property law, and public political participation. He is the author of The Grasping Hand: Kelo v. City of New London and the Limits of Eminent Domain (University of Chicago Press, 2015) and Democracy and Political Ignorance: Why Smaller Government is Smarter (revised edition, Stanford University Press, 2016). The "Why We Argue" podcast is produced by the Humanities Institute at the University of Connecticut as part of the Humility and Conviction in Public Life project. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
Journalists intentionally leave themselves out of the stories they cover. In Clyde H. Farnsworth‘s book Tangled Bylines: A Father and Son Cover the Twentieth Century (University of Missouri Press, 2017) he gets the chance to tell not only his own stories, but also those of his journalist father. Farnsworth spent most of his career as a foreign correspondent and both he and his father worked at the same time at the New York Times.
In the book he shares what it was like to cover historical events and grow up in the shadow of his father’s career. The book features stories about unique encounters with notable people, such as Amelia Earhart and Winston Churchill as well as personal vignettes of a real-life family in the twentieth century. Tangled Bylines provides unique perspectives on the transformations and consistencies in journalism from the 1920s through to the digital age. It provides a foundation for understanding a specific, sometimes singular facet of the history of American journalism. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
In A Land Without Borders: My Journey Around East Jerusalem and the West Bank (Text Publishing Company, 2017), Nir Baram, award winning author and journalist, gives a fascinating account of his travels around the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Baram talks to a wide range of Palestinians living under occupation and Jewish settlers. It’s a unique book which gives attention to voices that upset dominant understandings of the conflict. It’s highly readable yet informative and involving and deserves a wide readership.
Max Kaiser is a PhD candidate at the University of Melbourne. He can be reached at kaiser@student.unimelb.edu.au. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
How can we as consumers distinguish between the many different political medias? Eric Alterman is CUNY Distinguished Professor of English and Journalism at Brooklyn College. Eric is also a columnist for The Nation, and a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress in Washington and the World Policy Institute in New York. He is the author of several books, including When Presidents Lie (Penguin 2004), Kabuki Democracy (Nation Books 2011), and most recently, Inequality and One City (Nation Books 2015). The "Why We Argue" podcast is produced by the Humanities Institute at the University of Connecticut as part of the Humility and Conviction in Public Life project. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
While the title of Matt Pearl‘s book, The Solo Video Journalist: Doing it All and Doing It Well in TV Multimedia Journalism (Focal Press, 2016), hints at a solitary existence, he shares experiences of many journalists who have inspired his work and emphasizes the community built around multimedia journalism. He has worked in television news for more than a decade and shares what he’s learned in a clear and logical way while still telling a story. The book gives a hands-on approach that walks the reader through planning a segment, dressing the part, conducting interviews and editing the content. For quite a long period of time, those in news media were part of a stable industry that hadn’t seen much change. The past few decades have been the opposite of stable. The expectations of those in journalistic roles are more fluid today. The definition of a multimedia journalist is a moving target of sorts, and Pearl has experienced adapting to those shifts and changes in the field. The book not only provides useful insights for college students, but also for veteran journalists who wants to expand their career horizons. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
Charles K. (CK) McClatchy was a towering figure in the making of Sacramento and the inland empire he liked to call Superior California. As editor of the Sacramento Bee from 1883 to 1936, McClatchy was both ardent booster and strident critic, a man whose voice helped shape Sacramento’s industrial landscape and to set its moral and political tone. In a new biography, Charles McClatchy and the Golden Era of American Journalism (University of Missouri Press, 2016), Steven M. Avella explores McClatchy’s public role as an iconoclastic editor who sketched local battles in dramatic terms of good and evil. Avella also examines the contradictions within the private man and the dark impulses that drove him to bouts of vindictiveness and rancor. McClatchy promoted his beloved Sacramento with a distinctive blend of Progressive politics, but in his later years he suffered from an anachronistic world view that relegated him to the sidelines of American life. This biography, based on extensive primary sources, is a fully drawn portrait of a flawed hero who loved his home town and helped establish a media dynasty whose influence is still felt today.
Steven M. Avella is a Professor of American History at Marquette University in Milwaukee.
James Kates is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater. He has worked as an editor at The Philadelphia Inquirer, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and other publications.
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From 1927 until his death in 1979, E.F. Joseph documented the daily lives of African Americans in the Bay Area. His images were printed in the Pittsburgh Courier and the Chicago Defender, but not widely published in his home community. A graduate of the American School of Photography in Illinois, Joseph photographed the likes of such celebrities and activists as Josephine Baker, Mahalia Jackson, Mary McLeod Bethune, and Thurgood Marshall. However, what is perhaps more compelling within these pages are the countless images of everyday citizens teaching, entertaining, worshipping, working, and serving their community and their nation. Emmanuel Francis (E. F.) Joseph (1900-1979) was born on November 8, 1900 in St. Lucia, West Indies. After graduating from the American School of Photography of Illinois, he moved to Oakland, California in 1924 where he served as an apprentice in a photography studio. He was the first professional African American photographer in the San Francisco Bay Area operating a commercial and studio photography business in his home initially at 1303 Adeline St. and then at 384 50th St. in Oakland. In 1980, Careth Reid purchased Josephs collection of negatives and personal papers, and nearly four decades later, a labor of love comes to fruition with the publication of The Picture Man: From the Collection of Bay Area Photographer E. F. Joseph (Arcadia, 2017). Ms. Reid, a lifelong educator and champion of community service in the Bay Area, partnered with longtime friend Ruth Beckford, a dancer, teacher, choreographer, actor, and author. Ms. Reid, a native of Berkeley, was the recipient of San Francisco State University’s Alumna of the Year Award in 1990 and is also a member of the university’s Hall of Fame. Ms. Beckford is featured in a downtown mural of the community’s artists and was also celebrated as an Outstanding Alumni of Oakland Technical High School in 2015. Together, they tell the story of the Bay Areas African American community through the eye and lens of one of its own. Ms. Beckford and Ms. Reid live in Oakland, California. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
From the early days of the BBC in 1922, women were everywhere in the broadcasting company’s offices. They were absent, however, argues Dr. Kate Murphy from most of the historiography devoted to this illustrious institution. In this vibrant monograph, Murphy sets out to find these hidden female figures. A former producer of the long-running program Woman’s Hour and currently a Senior Lecturer at Bournemouth University in the UK, Murphy is cognizant both of women’s contribution to the BBC and of the challenges they face working there. In Behind the Wireless: A History of Women at the BBC (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), Murphy delivers on the titles promises. First, she offers a detailed portrait of the BBC in the interwar period as a unique workplace complete with medical services, a subsidized canteen, and a country-club for its workers. She demonstrates why the fact that the company was created around on a new technology made it especially suitable for women in general, and ambitious ones in particular. Second, she illuminates the daily routines, challenges and opportunities for the scores of female typists, secretaries, clerks and telephone-operators who labored for the company. Murphy supplements this institutional history with four case studies of outstanding women, who rose to the top echelons of the organization. These three components make for a fascinating read. The book will complement the scholarship about the BBC but also add to the current exploration of the participation of women in the workforce in the interwar period. I expect that the book will be of great interest for scholars of media, gender, modern Britain and labor relations. It is a wonderful example of how to bring all these concerns into conversation.
Tal Zalmanovich is a historian of modern Britain and media. She’s currently researching the Anti-Apartheid Movement in Britain, and the impact its activists had on domestic politics in Britain. Prior to being an academic, Tal was a journalist. Podcasting is the fruitful convergence of the two. You can contact Tal at tal.zalmanovich@mail.huji.ac.il
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In his acclaimed biography Eye on the Struggle: Ethel Payne, the First Lady of the Black Press (Amistad, Reprint Edition, 2017), James McGrath Morris explores the fascinating life of pioneering black female journalist Ethel Payne. Backed by exhaustive archival research, Morris traces Payne’s role in documenting the civil rights struggle during the decades following World War II, before her later impact as the first female African American radio and television commentator on a national network. The New York Times has described Eyes on the Struggle as an “an important and often absorbing new book,” while the Chicago Tribune has contended that Morris’ beautifully written and carefully researched new book “gives Payne’s ground-breaking work the attention it deserves.”
Morris’ other books include Pulitzer: A Life in Politics, Print, and Power, which Booklist placed on its 2010 list of the ten best biographies, and The Rose Man of Sing Sing: A True Tale of Life, Murder, and Redemption in the Age of Yellow Journalism, which the Washington Post named as one of its Best Books of the Year. His most recent work is The Ambulance Drivers: Hemingway, Dos Passos, and a Friendship Made and Lost in War which will be published in April 2017 by Da Capo Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
Journalism, history, biography, memoirs, and historical fiction overlap to some degree. The first two focus on provable facts, but the facts must be arranged to form a coherent story, and that requires an element of interpretation, especially in history. Biography and memoirs demand even more of a story arc, although still devoted to a specific person who once lived or still lives. And historical fiction, although it departs from that fundamental reliance on what can be documented or evidenced by creating imaginary characters or putting words into the heads and mouths of real people, nonetheless relies on creating a you are there sense of authenticity that cannot exist without considerable research into how people in a given time and place dressed, talked, ate, traveled, and socialized.
Finding Billy Battles and its sequels, The Improbable Journeys of Billy Battles (Xlibris, 2016) and the forthcoming The Lost Years of Billy Battles (title not set), occupy this space between journalism and fiction. William Fitzroy Raglan Battles, a centenarian in an old soldiers home when his reluctant great-grandson makes his acquaintance, turns out to have lived a rich and varied life that has taken him through the American Wild West, the Philippines, late nineteenth-century Saigon, the Spanish-American War, and other places, not to mention many of the tamer regions of the United States. A reporter by inclination and training, Billy typically observes and records, but the areas he visits often draw him into their conflicts, blurring the line between participation and journalism.
Ronald Yates, himself a journalist and professor of journalism who has visited many of the destinations where he sends his main character, brings each of these venues to life in a way that is both vivid and true to the time period. And in Billy Battles, based on a veteran of the Spanish-American War whom Yates interviewed in the same old soldiers home where we first meet his hero, Yates has created a multilayered portrait of a man of integrity who just cant resist a good fight.
C. P. Lesley is the author of six novels, including Legends of the Five Directions (The Golden Lynx, The Winged Horse, and The Swan Princess), a historical fiction series set in 1530s Russia, during the childhood of Ivan the Terrible. Find out more about her at http://www.cplesley.com.
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If all you knew about methamphetamines came from popular culture (“Breaking Bad”) or government anti-drug campaigns (“Faces of Meth”), then you’d probably think that the typical meth user was a unemployed, rail thin degenerate with bad acne, no teeth and a penchant for child abuse. In these depictions, all meth users are “tweekers,” that is, very bad people who are addicted to speed (here, meth) and who can’t take care of themselves or others. But it just ain’t so, as Travis Linnemann points out in his thought-provoking book Meth Wars: Police, Media, Power (NYU Press, 2016).
The image we get from the media and the law enforcement of meth use is as cooked as Walter White’s meth. In actual fact, very few peoples use meth (even in “Methland,” aka the Midwest) and most of those who do are not dysfunctional “tweekers.” This is not to say that meth isn’t a problem; it is, just like cocaine, heroin, abused prescription medications, and, above all, alcohol. But it isn’t as different from these “normal” drugs as the media and authorities would have us believe. It’s a powerful stimulant. It’s used for a variety of purposes, some of them having nothing to do with getting high (as a stimulant, meth is especially attractive to those who work long, hard hours). Some people can use it without acting like or appearing to be “tweekers.” The typical meth user is employed, acne-free, has a mouth full of teeth and takes care of his or her children. Just like the typical user of Adderall or any number of legal and widely prescribed amphetamines. Yet, according to the media and authorities, there is a “meth epidemic” that we should all fear as if it were something absolutely unprecedented. And, because meth is so particularly dangerous (so the line goes), we should throw all the meth users in jail forthwith. No thought is given to harm-reduction. As Linnemann shows, our twisted, distorted understanding of meth is beyond hypocritical; it’s positively harmful, particularly for the users and their families. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
Sarah Jaffe has written Necessary Trouble: Americans in Revolt (Nation Books, 2016). Jaffe is a Nation Institute fellow and an independent journalist. Over the last few years, several authors on the podcast have discussed the growth of the Tea Party, BlackLivesMatter, and Occupy Wall Street. Jaffe’s new book returns to the heart of these movements, explaining what has made ordinary Americans become activists. Jaffe argues that the financial crisis in 2008 sparked activism in many forms. In order to make this case, Jaffe travelled the country, interviewing people about what made them angry. She attended a people’s assembly in a church gymnasium in Ferguson, Missouri; walked a picket line at an Atlanta Burger King; rode a bus from New York to Ohio with student organizers; and went door-to-door in Queens days after Hurricane Sandy.
Find her on twitter @sarahljaffe. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
The BBC is often thought to be a great, impartial, defender of British values and society. In The BBC: Myth of a Public Service (Verso, 2016), Tom Mills, a lecturer in Sociology at Aston University, re-reads the history of the BBC to offer a more problematic status for the corporation, as an adjunct of British state power. The book uses examples from the General Strike in Britain, through war and economics reporting, to the vetting of left wing political attitudes within the Corporation, to tell the story of an institution that has been misunderstood by both left and right wing critics. Moreover, the book provides a critique of the management and organisation reforms to the BBC, coupled with a class analysis, demonstrating the need for transformation to this important part of British society. At a time when the media is under intense scrutiny for its perceived failures in reporting and representing politics and economics, Mills’ analysis and prescriptions for reform make for essential reading. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
With messages limited to 140 characters, Twitter once drew skepticism, even scorn, from journalists who saw little role for the social-media platform in their work. But as Alecia Swasy demonstrates in her new book, How Journalists Use Twitter: The Changing Landscape of U.S. Newsrooms (Lexington Books, 2016), many reporters now embrace Twitter as a means of cultivating sources, promoting stories and building their own “brands”as information providers. Swasy, a veteran business reporter who now teaches at Washington and Lee University, studied Twitter use at four metropolitan newspapers. She discovered that the humble “tweet”has become an integral component of a 24/7 news cycle in which reporters and readers engage in an ongoing conversation.
James Kates is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater. He has worked as an editor at The Philadelphia Inquirer, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and other publications Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
The millennial generation (those born from 1980 through the beginning of the 21st century) now comprises the largest voting bloc in the American electorate. In Media, Millennials, and Politics: The Coming of Age of the Next Political Generation (Lexington Books, 2016), Alison N. Novak argues that these 50 million young citizens are misunderstood, marginalized and sometimes overtly insulted by the news media. Writers, newscasters and pundits label them “apathetic, uninvolved and entitled,” while ignoring clear evidence that many millennials are deeply concerned about the course of the nation. Novak examines coverage of millennials in cable television and online news, finding that journalists often substitute stereotypes and rhetorical shortcuts for rigorous examination of how members of this generation think and act. She concludes by calling the media to task and demanding that it present a fuller, more nuanced picture of a group that will soon inherit the reins of power in the United States.
James Kates is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater. He has worked as an editor at The Philadelphia Inquirer, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and other publications. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
In his new book The Defender: How The Legendary Black Newspaper Changed America (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016), Ethan Michaeli charts the riveting history of the Chicago Defender, one of the nation’s longest running and most significant black periodicals.
Founded in 1905 by publisher Robert S. Abbott, the Defender came to play a central role in regional and national black politics; drawing African Americans north to Chicago as part of the Great Migration out of the South, condemning Jim Crow and bolstering the electoral power of black America, and helping to secure the election of presidents such as Harry Truman, John F. Kennedy and Barack Obama.
Relying on exhaustive research, including dozens of interviews and extensive archival material, Ethan has constructed the most in-depth and illuminating history of the Defender ever published – highlighting not only the impact of publisher Abbott and iconic columnists such as Ida B. Wells and Langston Hughes, but also the hundreds of other journalists and editors who contributed to the legendary newspaper’s development. Alex Kotlowitz has described The Defender as “a majestic, sweeping history, both of a newspaper and of a people,” and Carol Anderson has applauded the text as a landmark study which will “become an essential resource in African American cultural and political studies.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
Savage Portrayals: Race, Media, and the Central Park Jogger Story (Temple University Press, 2014) offers a timely reminder of how racial bias and prejudice continue to shape political perspectives and dominant media narratives. Drawing on her unique experience as a journalist covering the case, Natalie Byfield explores the media response to and framing of the Central Park Jogger case which gained national attention during the late 1980s.
Byfield is a cultural sociologist, who has taught in the fields of sociology and media studies. She is an associate professor at St. John’s University in Queens, New York where her research centers on the sociology of knowledge. She examines language, media systems, and methodologies exploring their roles in the production and construction of race/class/gender inequalities. In 1989 she was a member of a reporting team nominated by the Daily News for a Pulitzer Prize relating to the papers coverage of the Central Park Jogger case. Dr. Byfield is also the recipient of a Charles H. Revson Fellowship at Columbia University and a National Science Foundation Fellowship. Her current book project is titled Minority Report: Place, Race, and Surveillance in New York City. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
In a fragmented media world where anyone can speak, professional journalists are no longer the “gatekeepers” who decide what the public will see and hear. Instead, citizens are barraged with claims, assertions and innuendo that have not been subjected to the journalistic discipline of verification. Fact-checking, pioneered by bloggers and developed by professional news organizations, attempts to get at the elusive truth by subjecting political figures’ words to careful scrutiny. In Deciding What’s True: The Rise of Political Fact-Checking in American Journalism (Columbia University Press, 2016) Lucas Graves examines the fact-checkers’ work and plumbs its potential, its limits and its hazards. He concludes that fact-checking, while imperfect, is a genuine reform movement that is reshaping American journalism and the long-cherished ideal of objectivity.
James Kates is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater. He has worked as an editor at The Philadelphia Inquirer, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and other publications. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
Eric Gardner’s new study Black Print Unbound: the Christian Recorder, African American Literature, and Periodical Culture (Oxford University Press, 2015) explores the development and voice of the Christian Recorder during the years leading up to and immediately after the American Civil War. As the house organ of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, the Recorder held a national reach among free African Americans and became an integral part of broader nineteenth-century black print networks. Through recovering the paper’s history, Black Print Unbound offers an important intervention into the study of African American literary history and American print culture.
Eric’s teaching and research interests center on African American literature and culture and American literary history, and he is currently a professor of English at Saginaw Valley State University. His first monograph, Unexpected Places: Relocating Nineteenth-Century African American Literature was published in 2009 by the University Press of Mississippi and was awarded the Research Society for American Periodicals annual book prize. His work can be found in edited collections and journals such as American Literary History and Legacy: a Journal of American Women Writers. To find out more about Eric’s research visit his personal website: http://www.blackprintculture.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
Carol McCabe Booker is a Washington, D.C. attorney and former journalist. In the 1960s and 70s, she covered civil rights for the Voice of America, freelanced articles for The Washington Post, Readers Digest, Ebony, Jet, and Black Stars, and reported from Africa, including the Nigerian warfront, for Westinghouse Broadcasting stations. After retiring in 2008, she helped her husband, journalist Simeon Booker, write Shocking the Conscience: A Reporter’s Account of the Civil Rights Movement, which received widespread critical acclaim following its publication by the University Press of Mississippi.
After Simeon and trailblazing reporter Alice Dunnigan were inducted into the black journalists Hall of Fame in 2013, Carol tracked down Dunnigan’s out-of-print autobiography to recover her fascinating story for a modern audience. The daughter of a sharecropper born in rural Kentucky, Dunnigan went on to become the first African American female reporter accredited by the White House, the Supreme Court, and the Senate, and fashioned an illustrious career in journalism and politics in the nation’s capital. Alone Atop The Hill: The Autobiography of Alice Dunnigan, Pioneer of the National Black Press (University of Georgia Press, 2015) is an updated, annotated edition of a classic yet forgotten memoir which illustrates how Dunnigan overcame race and gender barriers to break into the highest echelons of the national press.
James West is a historian of the twentieth-century United States. His research focuses on African American business enterprise and print culture, with a particular interest in Chicago. His current book project examines the role of EBONY magazine as an outlet for popular black history. He tweets @chitownanddown. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
The Resolution of the Suspect by Israeli photographer Miki Kratsman, with text by Ariella Azoulay, is co-published by the Peabody Museum Press at Harvard and Radius Books of Santa Fe, NM (2016). Mr. Kratsman was the 2011 recipient of the Robert Gardner Fellowship in Photography, an internationally recognized award given annually by the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology to a photographer who has demonstrated great originality working in the documentary vein.
Through images created in the context of daily news, his tens of thousands of photographs have, in retrospect, taken on fascinating new meanings, as bystanders become protagonists and peripheral details move to the center. Isolated from the original frame, cropped, enlarged, and redisplayed, the reimagined images ask us to explore the limits of the observers gaze under conditions of occupation. These photographs look at both “wanted men”—individuals sought by the Israeli state– and the everyman and everywoman on the street who, by virtue of being Palestinian in a particular time and place, can be seen as a “suspect.” The work is both transgressive and banal, crossing boundaries between Israel and Palestine, wanted and innocent, street photography and surveillance imagery. Kratsman has also provoked vital, long-term interaction around the images on social media, creating a Facebook page on which viewers are invited to identify the individuals portrayed and comment on their “fate.” His complex project is chronicled in this book in more than 300 images that powerfully implicate the viewer as we follow the gaze of both occupier and occupied within a complex web of power relations around issues of life and death. Supported with thought-provoking text by Ariella Azoulay, she looks at various models of historical and civil construction of the gaze and explores the ways in which the shadow of death is an actual threat that hovers over Kratsman’s photographed persons and frames both individuals and the borrowed time within which they exist.
Miki Kratsman was born in Argentina and emigrated to Israel in 1971. He worked as a photojournalist for Hadashot and Ha’aretz until 2012. A photo educator for a number of years, Mr. Kratsman has taught at the Camera Obscura College of Photography and the School for Geographic Photography of Tel Aviv as well as in the Department of Art in Haifa University, he was also the head of the photography department at Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design until 2014, when he retired. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
In the decades leading up to the Civil War, antebellum African Americans elites turned to the newspaper as a means of translating their belief in black “chosenness” into programs for black liberation. Benjamin Fagan’s The Black Newspaper and the Chosen Nation (University of Georgia Press, 2016) demonstrates how the belief that God had marked black Americans as his chosen people on earth became a central article of faith in many northern African American communities throughout the nineteenth century. Directed by varying understandings of black “chosenness,” black periodicals helped to frame public debate, shape the black public sphere and to define forms of respectability and strategies for racial uplift.
Fagan joins podcast host James West to discuss many of the key protagonists and periodicals of his work in more detail, shedding new light on prominent editors such as Frederick Douglass, Samuel Cornish and Mary Ann Shadd, and important early black periodicals such as Freedoms Journal, the North Star and the Provincial Freeman. As Fagan ably demonstrates, the idea of black “chosenness” played a major role in the early development of the black press, and helped to shape broader understandings of freedom, equality and nationhood on both a translocal and transnational scale.
James West is a historian of the twentieth century United States. His research focuses on African American business enterprise and print culture, with a particular interest in Chicago. His current book project examines the role of EBONY magazine as an outlet for popular black history. He tweets @chitownanddown. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
Jason Stahl is the author of Right Moves: The Conservative Think Tank in American Political Culture since 1945 (University of North Carolina Press, 2016). Stahl is an historian and lecturer in the Department of Organizational Leadership and Policy Development at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. What is missing from the explanation of Donald Trump’s rise and the politics of this year’s presidential campaign? Jason Stahl suggests that part of what is missing is a better appreciation of the politics of conservative of ideas over the last seventy years. In his book, he traces the evolution of conservative think tanks, including the American Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation, from small upstarts with little power to major players in national policy making. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
This week we feature two new books on the podcast, both about corporate power. First, Zachary Roth has written The Great Suppression: Voting Rights, Corporate Cash, and the Conservative Assault on Democracy (Crown, 2016). Roth is a national reporter for MSNBC. Next, Ciara Torres-Spelliscy is the author of Corporate Citizen? An Argument for the Separation of Corporation and State (Carolina Academic Press, 2016). She is an associate professor of law at Stetson University College of Law and a Fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law. The two books look at the state of the democracy, Roth from the perspective of a reporter covering voting rights issues in state and local government, and Torres-Spelliscy from the perspective of the constitution. Together, these two books address whether corporate power has grown too strong and whether reforms can shift the balance of power in U.S. politics. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
Two Canadian political science professors contend that the grotesque inequities of the capitalist system feed hatred, nourish misogyny, promote chronic dispossession and wreak havoc on the environment. In their new book, The Servant State: Overseeing Capital Accumulation in Canada, (Fernwood, 2015), Geoffrey McCormack and Thom Workman, add that [o]nly when humanity moves beyond this system of social and natural exploitation will the well-being of all improve. Their book suggests, however, that moving beyond capitalism in advanced, industrial countries will not be easy since such states are ruled by governments that consistently serve the interests of the capitalist business class, helping it accumulate the machinery and equipment that are the means of capitalist production. They argue that the capitalist state also reinforces the coercive nature of capitalism with labour market policies designed to force workers into accepting jobs even if they’re poorly paid and insecure.
In The Servant State, McCormack and Workman focus on how Canada weathered the global financial crisis of 2008. The book examines why Canada fared better economically than the U.S. and outlines the steps the Canadian government took to serve and protect capitalism during its latest crisis. Drawing on Marxian theory, the authors seek to move beyond what they describe as the smooth and oftentimes complacent discourse about Canadian capitalism to focus instead on the essential nature of the capitalist system. They write, this study embraces the spirit of rejection rather than indignation, the spirit of repudiation rather than conciliation. Geoffrey McCormack is assistant professor of political science at Wheelock College in Boston while Thom Workman teaches in the political science department at the University of New Brunswick, Fredericton. They spoke to the New Books Network at the university library in Sackville, New Brunswick. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
Anthony Rausch‘s recent work looks closely at newspapers and journalism in modern Japan, focusing especially on the nature and significance of local newspapers. Though the local newspaper in Japan accounts for nearly half the consumption of newspapers overall, it has not been taken up and studied in any systematic way. Japan’s Local Newspapers: Chihoshi and Revitalization Journalism (Routledge, 2012) begins to remedy this by offering a careful examination of the local newspaper industry that pays special attention to the promise of a journalistic approach that Rausch calls revitalization journalism. Japanese Journalism and the Japanese Newspaper: A Supplemental Reader (Teneo Press, 2014) collects several essays that offer interesting perspectives on the power of newspapers as historical and contemporary documents informing multiple areas of inquiry for scholars of Japan. We talked about both of these books for the podcast, and briefly surveyed some of the essays in the Reader in the course of doing so. Enjoy! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
The inspiration for Robert S. Boynton‘s new book began with a photograph in the New York Times in October 2002. In the photo, two middle-aged Japanese couples and a single woman descending from a plane at Tokyo’s Haneda Airport. The headline read, “Tears and Hugs as 5 Abducted Japanese Go Home to Visit.” From a chance look at this photo, a project that spanned several years and many months in Japan and South Korea was born. The resulting book, The Invitation-Only Zone: The True Story of North Koreas Abduction Project (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2016), is an fascinatingly and compellingly written account of a series of abductions from Japan (as well as other parts of Asia, Eastern Europe, and the Middle East) from the late 1970s through the their contemporary after-effects. Boynton’s book weaves the story of the abductees and abductors together with a modern history of Japanese/Korean relations that contextualizes the abduction story within a broader frame of colonialism and its histories. This is an important story that is also a joy to read, featuring some unforgettable figures the Japanese Indiana Jones! a super-rockin’ sushi chef! and is highly recommended! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
The Canadian author and journalist Naomi Klein says right-wing conservatives who deny the reality of global warming are correct about the revolutionary implications of climate change.
In her new book, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate (Simon and Schuster, 2014) Klein quotes Thomas J. Donohue, President of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce who says that the steps being proposed to radically reduce carbon emissions would change the American way of life and put large segments of the economy out of business.
Klein agrees, but argues that transforming global capitalism into a more humane economic system would be a good thing. In her book, she urges progressives who care about the environment to show that the steps needed to avert catastrophic climate change “are also our best hope of building a much more stable and equitable economic system, one that strengthens and transforms the public sphere, generates plentiful, dignified work, and radically reins in corporate greed.”
Klein also argues that the imperatives of growth and consumption that drive global capitalism are incompatible with what we need to do to avert catastrophic warming. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
Joan Judge‘s wonderful new book takes readers into the pages of the Funu shibao (the Women’s Eastern Times), a “Shanghai-based, nationally distributed, protocommercial, gendered journal that was closely attuned to the concerns of its readers, the rhythm of everyday life, and the shifting global conjuncture” and a wonderfully rich historical source. Republican Lens: Gender, Visuality, and Experience in the Early Chinese Periodical Press (University of California Press, 2015) uses the Funu shibao as a lens into early Republican China (1911-1917) and its commercial print culture, paying careful attention to the interplay of texts, visual elements, and advertisements on its pages. Among the many fascinating figures we learn about are the journal’s activist editor, Bao Tianxiao; the cosmopolitan and public-oriented “Republican Ladies” who constituted a significant part of the journal’s targeted readership and pool of authors; and the flying women who help bring the book to its conclusion. A must-read for historians of print culture and gender in modern China, Republican Lens also explores issues of interest to historians of health and biomedicine, education, sexuality, and aviation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
Humans have coped with tragedy using ritual and memorials since the Neolithic era. Doka called a memorial a space invested with meaning, “set aside to commemorate an event such as a tragedy.” Memorialization is a ritual of bereavement, the creation of a place, permanent or not, that facilitates the persistence of memory. This space allows for the restructuring of the social network between the living, those who create the memorial, and the dead, those for which the memorial is created.
Memorialization happens in both the analog and digital contexts. In fact, some now decline to recognize a distinction between the on- and offline worlds. In his new book, Journalism and Memorialization in the Age of Social Media (Palgrave MacMillan, 2015), Peter J. Gloviczki, an assistant professor at Coker College, conceptualizes online memorials as networked remembrance spaces. These social media posts and groups are “immediate, interactive and public and they function across a great distance.” Online memorials are both user-driven – the users drive the conversations and are responsible for keeping up the sites – and story-driven – the sites are places where users tell stories related to the subject(s) of the memorial.
Thorough, fact-based journalism plays an important role in the maintenance of online memorials. According to Gloviczki, news reports provide the foundation for the discussion of events, as well as being central to making sense of those events. So significant is journalism for online memorials that, in some cases, a memorial will cease once coverage of that event ends. But many online memorials continue long after media interests concludes. The persistence of these sites demonstrates how online memorials “disrupt the notion of a finite end.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
Candis Callison‘s timely and fascinating new book considers climate change as a form of life and articulates how journalists, scientists, religious groups, economic collectives, and others shape and influence public engagement around the issue. How Climate Change Comes to Matter: The Communal Life of Facts (Duke University Press, 2014) looks carefully at the discourses and practices of five collectives within and through which climate change becomes meaningful: Arctic indigenous representatives of the Inuit Circumpolar Council, corporate social responsibility activists in Boston, American evangelical Christians, science journalists, and science policy experts. Callison explores meaning-making in these contexts in a series of beautifully written chapters that collectively narrate the forms of expertise and translation through which climate change comes to matter. The book pays special attention to the ways that these case studies can inform efforts to mobilize greater collaboration across multiple epistemologies, ethical imperatives, vernaculars, and social norms. It’s an insightful, compelling, and enjoyable read! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
The Nation magazine turned 150 this year, a striking achievement for a publication that is firmly on the left of the political spectrum. It was founded in 1865 just months after the Civil War ended and Abraham Lincoln was assassinated.
To celebrate a century and a half in print, the magazine has published a book on its history written by D. D. Guttenplan, a Nation correspondent based in London.
The Nation: A Biography (The Nation Co., 2015) traces the tumultuous history of America’s oldest weekly from the causes and controversies that shaped it to the rebels, mavericks and visionaries who edited and wrote for it. Along the way, The Nation has featured the work of such notable people as Albert Einstein, Emma Goldman, Molly Ivins, I.F. Stone, Ralph Nader, Martin Luther King Jr. and Hunter S. Thompson.
In this New Books Network interview, Guttenplan talks about how The Nation veered sharply right in its early years to become the voice of the eastern establishment and then, how it gradually regained its radical roots. He says though that The Nation has always been consistent on one great theme: its opposition to the growth of American Empire from conquests in Cuba, Hawaii and the Philippines in its early decades to the War in Vietnam and the invasion of Iraq in its later ones. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
Parks M. Coble‘s new book is a wonderful study of memory, war, and history that takes the Sino-Japanese War of 1937-1945 and its aftermath as its focus. China’s War Reporters: The Legacy of Resistance against Japan (Harvard University Press, 2015) is organized in two major parts. The first part (Ch. 1-5) look closely at writing done by journalists and intellectuals during the war, focusing especially on those who were associated with the National Salvation Movement. Here we find a fascinating account of Chinese journals, newspapers, and war reporters that pays special attention to the political and ideological motivations behind wartime writers’ choices of what to report and how to report it. The distinctions here between rural and urban experiences and knowledge of the war are especially striking. The second part (Ch. 6-7) looks at the “re-remembering” of the war, including the consequences of communist rule for Salvation Movement writers in the immediate aftermath of the war, the disappearance of their legacy from public memory, and the refiguring of their work in the context of post-Mao “new remembering” of the war. Coble also considers the consequences of an increasing emphasis on nationalism in China for the re-remembering of the war in academic and popular media. Collectively, the chapters of China’s War Reporters argue that the particular way that the war has been remembered in China has distorted and constrained historical scholarship. It’s an exceptionally clear and well-written history. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
Sex, Drugs and Rock n’ Roll. That’s the stereotypical view of the 1960s. But in her memoir, Ithaca Diaries, Coming of Age in the 1960s (Cambridge Common Press, 2014), journalist and writer Anita M. Harris tells a more nuanced story about her tumultuous undergraduate years at Cornell University.
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Helen Keller, Franz Kafka and Silent Cal Coolidge appear in this week’s Almanac, a blog to celebrate the 150thanniversary of The Nation, America’s oldest magazine. Nation archivist Richard Kreitner is featuring an event from every day of the year and how The Nation covered it.In this New Books Network interview, he discusses events from May 31 to June 6 including Watergate, political assassinations and the D-Day invasion of France.As you listen, you’ll hear the voices of Richard M. Nixon, Robert F. Kennedy and an excerpt from one of Kafka’s most famous stories. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
When Star Wars opened in 1977, Robert Hatch, film reviewer for The Nation magazine, wrote that it “belongs in the sub-basement, or interstellar comic-strip school of science fiction, Terry and the Pirates with astro-drive.” Hatch concluded that all in all, Star Wars “is an outrageously successful…compilation of nonsense.”
The Nation‘s archivist, Richard Kreitner chose Robert Hatch’s review for the May twenty-fifth entry on his daily blog The Almanac which the magazine is publishing to celebrate 150 years of publishing.
In this New Books Network journalism podcast, Richard Kreitner discusses events that happened in the last week of May and how The Nation covered them. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
The Nation magazine, a beacon of the cultural and political left, is celebrating 150 years of publishing. As part of its celebration, it’s publishing a daily blog called The Almanac that looks at events on each day of the year and how The Nation covered them.
In this New Books Network journalism podcast, you’ll hear Richard Kreitner, the magazine’s archivist, discuss how The Nation covered the struggle for civil rights including the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark ruling against segregated public schools in 1954; the life and work of the slain African-American leader Malcolm X and poet Langston Hughes’s essay on black culture that The Nation published in 1926.
You’ll also hear the voices of Martin Luther King, Malcolm X and Langston Hughes. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
The Nation magazine is one of America’s most distinguished journalistic enterprises featuring the writing and work of such notable people as Calvin Trillin, Noam Chomsky, Jessica Mitford, James Baldwin and Naomi Klein. The Nation was founded 150 years ago this July. It’s America’s oldest weekly magazine. To mark its 150th anniversary, it’s publishing a daily blog called The Almanac compiled by the magazine’s archivist, Richard Kreitner. The Almanac looks at significant historical events that took place on each day of the year and how The Nation covered them.
In this New Books Network podcast, you’ll hear Richard Kreitner talk about The Nation’s coverage of events from May 10 to May 16. Everything from The Nation’s strong backing for Israel’s declaration of independence in 1948 to the prowess of boxer Joe Louis and the death of Bob Marley. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
The Nation magazine is one of America’s most distinguished journalistic enterprises featuring the writing and work of such notable people as Albert Einstein, Emma Goldman, Molly Ivins, I.F. Stone and Hunter S. Thompson. The Nation was founded 150 years ago this July. It’s America’s oldest weekly magazine. To mark its 15oth anniversary, it’s publishing a daily blog called The Almanac compiled by the magazine’s archivist, Richard Kreitner. The Almanac looks at significant historical events that took place on each day of the year and how The Nation covered them.
In this New Books Network podcast, you’ll hear Richard Kreitner talk about The Nation’s critical coverage of events from April 26 to May 2. Everything from the nuclear disaster at Chernobyl to the death of J. Edgar Hoover. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
Deana A. Rohlinger has just written Abortion Politics, Mass Media, and Social Movements in America (Cambridge University Press, 2015). Rohlinger is associate professor of sociology at Florida State University.
In the last several weeks, the podcast has featured a variety of political scientists who study interest groups and social movements. This week, Deana Rohlinger brings her perspective as a sociologist to the subject. She examines the way four policy organizations with an interest in abortion policy (National Right to Life Committee, National Organization of Women, Planned Parenthood Federation, and Concerned Women for America) interact with the media. Rohlinger finds quite different strategies for how to court the media, but also in how each organization responds to crises. She uses interviews with organizational leaders to deepen what we know about how social movements and interest groups employ a media strategy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
How those within the Brussels Beltway in the EU institutions must pine for the simple days of the past. Not only was the European project in itself far less contested, but the nature of the journalism surrounding the EU was also far more accommodating.
One of the main lessons of John Lloyd and Cristina Marconi‘s fascinating book Reporting the EU: News, Media and the European Institutions (I. B. Tauris, 2014) is how much it has mirrored the evolution of the European project itself. In the first couple of decades the journalists were as likely to be true believers as the Eurocrats in the corridors of power, even if their reports tended to reflect the concerns and interests of the individual countries that they served. That started to change as the EU (under various names) grew and changed.
In the 1980s the British press developed a real streak of Euroscepticism, and journalists in general began to ask more questions than the Eurocrats were used to. Big developments such as the Maastricht Treaty and the expansion into the poorer corners of the former Soviet Empire begged bigger questions. And then there was the euro crisis, and the current wave of popular Euroscepticism that has found a home in almost every corner of the continent. All the while Eurocrats and EU boosters charged that Euroscepticism was something contrived through the practicing of hostile journalism by spiteful editors in thrall to shadowy media tycoons. If only the people of Europe had a fair picture of what they did, they’d say: then they’d fall in behind the European project once again.
At least the euro crisis has led to the EU finding its way to the front pages of newspapers, along with a widespread realisation that what goes on within that Brussels Beltway (and in places like Berlin) matters to all its citizens far more than they’d realised. The authors of the book hope that recognition will continue to give the EU, for all its complexity, a legitimate place in Europe’s popular media, worthy of this peculiar set of institutions that has grown to have such an impact in so many parts of daily life.
I hope you enjoy the interview! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
The media system in the United States could have developed into something very different than what it is today. In fact, there was an era in which significant media reform was considered. This was a time when media consumers were tired of constant advertising, bias, and control by corporate entities, and instead wanted more “public-oriented” content. Sound at all familiar?
In his new book, America’s Battle for Media Democracy: The Triumph of Corporate Libertarianism and the Future of Media Reform (Cambridge University Press, 2014), Victor Pickard, an assistant professor of communication at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, examines the debates on media reform and policy from the early 20th century, focusing, in particular, on radio. Pickard revisits the significant media policy conflicts to analyze why the American media is the way it is, and how it could have been. In so doing, he considers what the current American media system means for the Web and other new media. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
It’s been 100 years since the start of the First World War, a conflict that cost millions of lives. In his recently revised book, Propaganda and the Ethics of Persuasion (2013), Randal Marlin writes that Britain pioneered propaganda techniques to sell that war that have been imitated ever since. He tells how the British spread a false story about Germans boiling the bodies of their dead soldiers in corpse factories. It was designed to paint Germany as a uncivilized, ghoulish nation that had to be fought. Marlin also tells how American propaganda during the First World War helped foster the modern public relations and advertising industries.
Marlin, who studied with the French propaganda theorist Jacques Ellul, sees propaganda as a manipulative exercise of power and he argues that in order to defend ourselves against it, we need to recognize its methods and techniques. His revised second edition analyzes how the Bush administration used fear to persuade Americans to support the invasion of Iraq.
The book traces the history of propaganda from ancient times to its present, post 9/11 forms
Randal Marlin is a professor of philosophy at Carleton University in Ottawa. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
The Canadian author and scholar, Heather Menzies, has written a book about the journey she took to the highlands of Scotland in search of her ancestral roots. In Reclaiming the Commons for the Common Good: A Memoir and Manifesto (New Society Publishers, 2014), Menzies outlines her discovery of a vanished way of life and argues that restoring it would help North Americans recover a deeper sense of self as well as more satisfying social relations with the people around them. It could also help them gain more control over political decisions that affect them in their communities, states and provinces and at the national level. “Commoning–cultivating community and livelihood together on the common land of the Earth,” Menzies writes, “was a way of life for my ancestors and for many other newcomers to North America too. It was a way of understanding and pursuing economics as embedded in life and the labor, human and non-human, that is necessary to sustain it.” She maintains that reclaiming the commons could also help us to heal an overheating planet and reconcile with the native peoples displaced by European settlers. Heather Menzies is an adjunct professor at Carleton University in Ottawa. She is the author of 10 books and has been awarded the Order of Canada for her contributions to public discourse. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
The new book, Constructing Neoliberalism: Economic Transformation in Anglo-American Democracies (University of Toronto Press, 2013) shows how political elites in Britain, New Zealand, Australia and Canada successfully introduced radically new economic policies in the 1980s. While opinion polls have consistently showed that neoliberal policies are not popular, governments in all four countries have continued implementing an agenda that includes government spending cuts, the privatization of state-owned enterprises and free trade. The book’s author, Jonathan Swarts, Associate Professor of Political Science at Purdue University North Central in northwestern Indiana, says he finds it fascinating how governments of all political stripes in the four Anglo-American democracies have adopted neoliberalism, which he calls a new “political-economic imaginary.” In this interview with the New Books Network, Professor Swarts discusses how political leaders in the four Anglo-American democracies brought about the neoliberal economic transformation using a combination of persuasion and coercion. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
Brooke Erin Duffy’s Remake, Remodel: Women’s Magazines in the Digital Age (University of Illinois Press, 2013) traces the upheaval in the women’s magazine industry in an era of media convergence and audience media-making. Duffy, assistant professor at Temple University’s School of Media and Communication, is especially interested in the experience of writers, editors, and others who produce women’s magazines: How are they coping with new competition, more intense work routines, and the imperative to produce (and engage) across a range of non-print media platforms? Questions of identity thread through the book: What does it mean to be a magazine writer in the iPad era? What are the stakes for gender identity as this female-focused genre adapts to digital workflows? To get at these questions, Duffy conducted in-depth interviews with dozens of editors, publishers, interns, and business-side workers, most of them at the big three magazine publishers, Hearst, Conde Nast, and Time, Inc. Remake, Remodel traces the history of women’s magazines, as well the history of scholarship on these magazines, but the bulk of the book explores different facets of workers’ coming-to-terms with the digital tsunami, including changes to the gendered makeup of the workforce, shifts in the industry’s attitude toward its audience, the complicated rivalry, dismissal, and embrace of fashion bloggers, and the tension between medium-specific traditions and the push to spread the magazine–now reimagined as a brand–across a range of platforms. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
Brooke Erin Duffy's Remake, Remodel: Women's Magazines in the Digital Age (University of Illinois Press, 2013) traces the upheaval in the women's magazine industry in an era of media convergence and audience media-making. Duffy, assistant professor at Temple University's School of Media and Communication, is especially interested in the experience of writers, editors, and others who produce women's magazines: How are they coping with new competition, more intense work routines, and the imperative to produce (and engage) across a range of non-print media platforms? Questions of identity thread through the book: What does it mean to be a magazine writer in the iPad era? What are the stakes for gender identity as this female-focused genre adapts to digital workflows? To get at these questions, Duffy conducted in-depth interviews with dozens of editors, publishers, interns, and business-side workers, most of them at the big three magazine publishers, Hearst, Conde Nast, and Time, Inc. Remake, Remodel traces the history of women's magazines, as well the history of scholarship on these magazines, but the bulk of the book explores different facets of workers' coming-to-terms with the digital tsunami, including changes to the gendered makeup of the workforce, shifts in the industry's attitude toward its audience, the complicated rivalry, dismissal, and embrace of fashion bloggers, and the tension between medium-specific traditions and the push to spread the magazine--now reimagined as a brand--across a range of platforms. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
“We are not half a dozen provinces. We are one great Dominion,” Canada’s first Prime Minister, John A. Macdonald proudly declared. More than a century later, Canada has 10 provinces and three northern territories making it one of the biggest and richest countries on Earth. In the spirit of optimism that prevailed in the year after the country celebrated its 100th anniversary, then Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau called for the founding of a just society in which every Canadian would enjoy fundamental rights.. But according to a recently published book, the country is retreating from Macdonald’s vision of one great country and from Trudeau’s call for a just society. In Equal As Citizens: The Tumultuous and Troubled History of a Great Canadian Idea (Formac, 2014), authorRichard Starr argues that Canada is losing its commitment to equal opportunity and sharing the country’s wealth. He traces the long history of Canada’s slow evolution toward a more equal society and its gradual retreat from that ideal. He shows that Canadians in richer provinces including Alberta, Ontario and British Columbia, now enjoy higher levels of government services, such as better health care and education, than those who live in poorer provinces such as Manitoba, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia. More than 30 years ago, Canada’s politicians enshrined their commitment to equal opportunity and public services in the Canadian constitution, but Starr writes that those commitments have been forgotten. As a result, citizens in poorer provinces are paying higher taxes for lower levels of public services. In this interview with the New Books Network, Richard Starr says he hopes his book will spark more discussion and debate about inequality in Canada. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
The acclaimed Canadian author Silver Donald Cameron writes that the idea for his newly reissued book, The Living Beach: Life, Death and Politics where the Land Meets the Sea (Red Deer Press, 2014), occurred to him when he was interviewing a “lean, laconic, geologist,” named Bob Taylor who works at the Bedford Institute of Oceanography in Halifax, Nova Scotia.
“A beach stores sand in dunes behind it,” Taylor said. “When it’s attacked, it draws material from the dunes for itself and for building a protective shoal or bar offshore. When it’s less stressed, it takes sand and gravel from offshore and stores it back on the beach and in the dunes.”
“You talk as though the damn thing were alive,” Cameron said.
“I think of it that way,” said Taylor.
At the time, Silver Donald Cameron thought of it as a vivid metaphor. But, in his newly revised version of The Living Beach, he argues that it’s true: the beach is alive with the right to be protected. His book explores all aspects of beaches including the plants and animals that live there, the sciences of biology, oceanography and geology that help us understand them, the politics of flood control, and beaches in stories, poetry and song.
In 2009, The Living Beach was voted one of Atlantic Canada’s 100 best books. In 2014, Red Deer Press published a new revised edition.
In this interview for the New Books Network, Silver Donald Cameron visits a beach at Parrsboro, Nova Scotia on the shores of the Minas Basin, home of the world’s highest tides. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
The city of Iowa City’s website promotes its “small-town hospitality” and its focus on “culture.” But a closer look at Iowa City, home to 70,000 and the University of Iowa, reveals a community trying to redefine itself as urban African-Americans relocate to the area.
This is the focus of Robert E. “Ted” Gutsche‘s book, A Transplanted Chicago: Race, Place and the Press in Iowa City (McFarland, 2014). In it, he takes on the “Southeast Side” and all its meanings.
“Southeast Side” has become a coded term by local press to describe an area of Iowa City it associates with crime and unruliness, sometimes even using the term when the actual crime does not occur on the Southeast Side.
“Home to a mixture of white townies and new, black arrivals from Chicago, St. Louis, and other metro regions in the Upper Midwest,” Gutsche writes, “the Southeast Side is known–mythically–as a bastion of affordable housing, black families, and stories of devious behavior.”
Through original interviews and research, Gutsche, a former reporter, shows just how wrong the press has it about Iowa City’s Southeast Side. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
Last weekend was the NFL Draft, the annual event when teams select college players who have shown the talent to advance to the professional ranks. Staged at New York’s Radio City Music Hall, broadcast live on two cable networks, and surrounded by ceaseless media attention and analysis, the Draft is the spring anchor-point of the NFL as a year-round attraction.
Decades ago, the Draft was nothing more than a business meeting. Yet even then the NFL was taking steps to establish itself as a year-round sports league. This came not on cable television, but in church basements and community meeting halls. The menfolk would gather after banquets or father-son dinners and watch films of football–real films, supplied in metal cans and spooled into projectors. They might watch highlights of the last Super Bowl or their local team’s season, a documentary about the great players of the recent past, or a compilation of on-field blunders by players, coaches, and referees. Even though it was the dead of winter, the audience would come away from the screening eager for football.
These were the productions of NFL Films. Captured by motion picture cameras, set to orchestral scores, and narrated by the dulcet baritone of John Facenda, these films presented football as high art: a contest of mythic heroes and the embodiment of American virtue.Travis Vogan gained full access to the NFL Archives for his study of the filmmaking arm of the National Football League: Keepers of the Flame: NFL Films and the Rise of Sports Media (University of Illinois Press, 2014). Starting as a father-and-son operation, NFL Films became an integral part of the rise of professional football in the US. Even more than that, Travis argues, its productions have shaped the way that all sports are broadcast and promoted.
As a side note: Travis will be one of the writers for the new online journalThe Allrounder, along with several scholars and journalists you’ve heard on past episodes of the podcast.The Allrounderhas the same aim as New Books in Sports, to get people thinking in new ways about the sports they follow by making available in-depth research and thoughtful writing.
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Erika G. King learned a lot during research for her book, Obama, the Media, and Framing the U.S. Exit from Iraq and Afghanistan (Ashgate, 2014), but one item surprised her a bit more than most.
“One might have thought, but one would be wrong. . . that media organizations might just come together and say, ‘Yes, Iraq was a difficult war, but we accomplished something, and now it’s over and things can be seen in a slightly positive light,’ ” King said. “But I found it very interesting that journalists for these national media organizations used Obama’s moment in the sun to present some very negative outlooks about what Iraq had represented to talk about–how many of them felt culpable in their early interpretations and support of the Iraq war.”
Obama, the Media, and Framing the U.S. Exit from Iraq and Afghanistan is a qualitative look at narratives and shifting rhetoric. King’s research reveals the interplay between the Obama administration and the media during this crucial and recent period of American history.
Scholars and consumers of journalism and political science research will find this book to be an invaluable addition to their collection. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
Matthew Cecil brought many questions into his latest historical work, Hoover’s FBI and the Fourth Estate: The Campaign to Control the Press and the Bureau’s Image (University Press of Kansas, 2014). Questions included, “Why were some members of the press so willing to serve as J. Edgar Hoover’s pawns, even when it was clear they were being used?” And, “How did Hoover’s interactions with the press resemble his leadership at the FBI?” Cecil, director of Wichita State’s Elliott School of Communication, said he has long had research interests into Hoover’s FBI. This is a book that will draw interest far beyond the Academy. Those interested in politics, media, criminal justice and one of America’s most storied and divisive figures, Hoover, would do well to pick up this book. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
“When we criticize the news, who are we really criticizing?”
This is the final question asked by Professor Joseph Uscinski in his book, The People’s News: Media, Politics, and the Demands of Capitalism(NYU Press, 2014). The answer, Uscinski says in his interview, is us–the consumer. News producers, he writes, are merely responding to the demands of consumers, adjusting news content based on ratings, polls and audience demographics. The People’s News views news through the lens of news as a commodity beholden to market forces, not as a type of media.
Combining the academic disciplines of media effects and political economy, The People’s News is a well-researched and well-reported look at what happens when the concepts of free press and democracy collide. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
Everybody knows the author of The Jungle was Upton Sinclair (or, if they’re a little confused, they might say Sinclair Lewis). As Lauren Coodley shows in her new biography Upton Sinclair: California Socialist, Celebrity Intellectual (University of Nebraska Press, 2013), there was a lot more to Upton Sinclair. For one thing, he was the author of nearly eighty books that were not entitled The Jungle. One of those, Dragon’s Teeth (part of the World’s End series), won him the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Sinclair was also a socialist, feminist, anti-communist, dietary reformer, and prohibitionist. And, as Coodley reminds us, he was a prominent celebrity, a born contrarian who took almost as much pleasure at defying his fellow socialists as he did infuriating the rich, powerful, and complacent. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
What if there was an instruction manual for television? Not just for the casual consumer, but for college students interested in learning about the culture of television, written by some of the field’s top scholars?
In How to Watch Television (New York University Press, 2013), editors Ethan Thompson and Jason Mittell have put together a collection of 40 original essays from some of today’s top scholars on television culture. Each essay focuses on a single television show, and each is an example of how to practice media criticism on an academic level. Thompson, Associate Professor at Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi, and Mittell, professor at Middlebury College, also contributed essays to the collection. As the authors explain: “This book, the essays inside it, and the critical methods the authors employ, all seek to expand the ways you think about television.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
It’s getting harder and harder to trailblaze in the field of American Studies. More and more, writers have to follow paths created by others, imposing new interpretations on old ones in never-ending cycles of revision. But Jonathan Daniel Wells did find something new: Women Writers and Journalists in the Nineteenth-Century South (Cambridge UP, 2011; paperback, 2013) is the first to focus in on women journalists, both black and white, in the nineteenth-century American South. The South had a vital periodical marketplace where curious women could engage with politics, belles lettres, science, diplomacy, and other allegedly unfeminine subjects. Examining evidence from both writers and readers, Wells’s book asks questions about literary culture, celebrity, the limits of dissent, and North-South differences that readers will find refreshing and engaging. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
Is truth in journalism the same as balance? Is fairness really fair to news consumers, or is fairness merely a code word used by journalists looking to get out of the line of fire? In his latest book, Informing the News: The Need for Knowledge-Based Journalism (Vintage, 2013), Thomas E. Patterson gets at the heart of a journalism epidemic threatening the democratic process. Patterson is Bradlee Professor of Government and the Press and a faculty member at the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. Patterson calls for journalists to become experts in a subject, whether it’s foreign policy, economics, or other matters. Knowledge-based journalism will give journalists tools they need to go beyond the he-said/she-said reporting model and will allow for a level of analysis that better serves the American people. Invoking the observations and wisdom of Walter Lippmann, Informing the News is an important work intended for journalism scholars, journalists, journalism educators, and anyone with a vested interest in a democratic society. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
George Brock approached his book about newspapers and journalism in the digital age unwilling to write another gloom-and-doom narrative about the death or decline of the industry. When he studied the historical development of journalism and current trends, he found the industry is what is always has been: volatile, evolving, and vital to society’s well being.
Out of Print: Newspapers, Journalism and the Business of News in the Digital Age (Kogan Page, 2013) is an important look at the industrial, economic, and pragmatic realities of a shifting industry. Using modern case studies, including the phone-hacking scandal that brought down Great Britain’s News of the World, as well as historical research and recent data, Brock examines where journalism was, is and will be.
Brock, head of City University London’s prestigious graduate school of journalism, has produced a work that transcends academia without sacrificing methodology or theory.
“Because journalism lives on the frontier between democratic purposes and the commercial market,” Brock writes, “it is constantly being reorganized and renegotiated.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
In our digital world, it does seem like paper is dying by inches. Bookstores are going out of business, and more and more people get their news from the internet than from newspapers. But how irrelevant has paper really become? As Ian Samson argues in his new book, Paper: An Elegy (Harper Collins, 2012), not only is paper still vital in our society, it pretty much dominates all our lives. From advertising to currency, to board games and origami, paper still revolves around most business and leisure. Even “post-paper” products, such as e-readers, imitate the aesthetics and feel of paper, mirroring it in spirit if not in product. And how many of us have heard, “yes, I have an e-book reader, but I just really like the feel of a book in my hand”? In this interview, Ian Samson tells us about the history of paper, its uses throughout time, and our love affair with the “ultimate man-made material.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
In October 2007, journalist Eric Simons sat in the stands of Memorial Stadium in Berkeley, Calif., to watch his beloved University of California Bears take on Oregon State University in football. If Cal won, it almost certainly would be ranked No. 1 in the country. Instead, Simons agonized as Cal’s quarterback struggled through the final play. Cal lost. Simons suffered a miserable train ride home to San Francisco. But from crushing defeat sprang an idea for his latest book, The Secret Lives of Sports Fans: The Science of Sports Obsession (The Overlook Press, 2013). A science and nature writer by trade, Simons sought scientific explanations for the physical and emotional reactions experienced by sports fans., “We are not subject to any kind of fan nature; we are more complex than that,” Simons writes. “We sports fan are glorious expressions of all the wondrous quirks and oddities in human nature.” Through the lens of sport and sports fans, Simons has built a unique window into what it means to be human. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
Brian Michael Goss, professor of communication at St. Louis University in Madrid, has taken one of media’s most studied theories and given it a facelift.
In Rebooting the Herman and Chomsky Propaganda Model in the Twenty-First Century (Peter Lang, 2013), Goss revisits the model created by Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky in their 1988 book, Manufacturing Consent. The filters remain, but Goss pushes the model into the modern context of new media models and expanded global exportation. “Far from condemning journalism,” Goss writes, “I hope to see it more closely approximate its mythologies about itself.” “Rebooting” is an important work, relevant not just to scholars, but all consumers of media. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
Sex Trafficking, Scandal, and the Transformation of Journalism: 1885-1917 (University of Chicago Press, 2013), the new book from the University of Oregon’s Gretchen Soderlund, is about far more than the title suggests. Using sex trafficking and scandal as a starting point, Soderlund delves into an era of journalism that features muckrakers and sensationalists, key political players and journalists with social and cultural agendas. It is a book about racial identity, journalists and their audiences, and Great Britain’s influence on journalistic practices and culture. “From an early twenty-first century vantage point,” Soderlund writes, “it is clear that issues of immigration, urbanization, heterosociability, and racial mixing were stitched into white slavery narratives.” Sex Trafficking, Scandal, and the Transformation of Journalism took Soderlund deep into the archives of journalism history. The result is a thorough, important discussion about one of the key periods in American journalism. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
Dan Kennedy envisioned a massive book project, a big-picture investigation into current issues facing journalism and media. Instead he found everything he needed in New Haven, Conn., inside the small but productive office of the New Haven Independent.
In The Wired City: Reimagining Journalism and Civic Life in the Post-Newspaper Age (University of Massachusetts Press, 2013), Kennedy, assistant professor of journalism at Northeastern University, researches models of journalism that engage public conversation while producing indispensable local news coverage. Although Kennedy’s work includes insight into numerous organizations, the book focuses primarily on the Independent, a non-profit institution in the historical town of New Haven that includes the New Haven Register, a publication that dates back more than two centuries
Through interviews and research, Kennedy shows that local journalism in the 21st Century can survive and thrive so long as those within an organization are willing to put in the work and develop an understanding of the new tenets of journalism: social engagement, deep community focus, and evolving revenue models
“What you want is sustainability,” Kennedy says. “On the other hand, the New Haven Register traces its roots to Benjamin Franklin in the 1760s. I don’t think that anybody is going to achieve that kind of sustainability anymore, and I’m not even sure it’s desirable. I think we’re going to see things come and go.”
The Wired City is food for the civic minded and news junkies alike. It’s an important work that begins a sketch of what local journalism can and should be. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
Robert W. McChesney, the celebrated political economist of communication, takes the Internet, industry and government head-on in his latest book, Digital Disconnect: How Capitalism is Turning the Internet Against Democracy (The New Press, 2013). Digital Disconnect builds on McChesney’s previous works, spinning forward his scholarship to construct a remarkably current look at the Internet’s corporate and political landscape. “Almost all of the other books on the Internet, some of which are very good, sort of try to take a larger view of it,” McChesney says during the interview. “Because of where I’m coming from, because of my interests, I think that’s the one thing I could inject that draws from my past research, where I can speak with greater authority, that’s really not talked about by anyone else.” McChesney uses the book to argue that the Internet has become a hub of “numbing commercialism,” largely the result of failed government policies. Writes McChesney: “When the dust clears on this critical juncture, if our societies have not been fundamentally transformed for the better, if democracy has not triumphed over capital, the digital revolution may prove to have been a revolution in name only, an ironic, tragic reminder of the growing gap between the potential and the reality of human society.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
If it doesn’t spread, it’s dead
This is the unifying idea of Henry Jenkins, Sam Ford, and Joshua Green’s new book, Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture (New York University Press, 2013) Those six words – If it doesn’t spread, it’s dead – appear on the back cover, on the inside jacket, and in the very first paragraph of the book’s introduction.
The authors focus on the new currencies of media, including user engagement and the rapid flow of information, while debunking the terms we’ve all learned to know and dread, such as “viral” and “Web 2.0.”
Jenkins, Ford, and Green set an ambitious agenda, targeting not one but three audiences: media scholars, communication professionals, and those who create and share media and are interested in learning how media are changing because of it.
“Perhaps the most impactful aspect of a spreadable media environment,” the authors write, “is the way in which we all now play a vital role in the sharing of media texts.”
A review of Spreadable Media can be found in Public Books here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
Somewhere along the line, C.W. Anderson became fascinated with digital journalism and the culture that surrounds it: engaged publics, social networks, and the challenges to “legacy” media.
Rebuilding the News: Metropolitan Journalism in the Digital Age (Temple University Press, 2013) is the fascinating product of Anderson’s research into the Philadelphia journalism scene during the first decade-plus of the 21st Century. Once a thriving hub of traditional journalism, Philadelphia has become a living case study of the collision of digital media practices.
Anderson’s ethnographic research and spot-on academic interpretation paints a vivid picture of a sometimes innovative, sometimes meandering journalism scene. Although we are at the beginning of the digital journalism era, in Rebuilding the News Anderson nonetheless walks us through the new ecosystem, what seems to be working, what doesn’t, and where we go from here.
“Given all of the pain journalism has experienced in the past decade and a half,” Anderson writes, “it would be a shame to waste this moment.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
Eric Deggans doesn’t just want to see the media transformed. He has his eye on something even more profound. “The goal is to transform the audience,” he said, “because the audience has the power.” Deggans, media critic for the Tampa Bay Times, is the author of Race-Baiter: How the Media Wields Dangerous Words to Divide a Nation (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). The title comes from a 2008 episode of Fox News’ “The O’Reilly Factor,” in which the host, Bill O’Reilly, called Deggan a race-baiter.
At the urging of his friends and colleagues, Deggans began to explore divisive issues in media and how networks use them to drive ratings and increase their bottom line. “Race-Baiter” goes beyond race, also studying issues of gender and regional culture. Deggans had both the curse and the benefit of writing the book under a tight deadline, which allowed for a discussion of such recent events as the Trayvon Martin shooting and Sarah Fluke being thrust into the national spotlight by radio talk-show host Rush Limbaugh.
Deggans draws on his experience as a critic to look not just at news, but also network television, including scripted shows and reality TV. Although the bulk of the book highlights the outrageous exploitation committed by media, he ends Race-Baiter by pushing the conversation forward in the hopefully titled chapter, “Talking Across Difference.” Racial, gender, and cultural differences best serve society through discussion, says Deggans, not exploitation for financial gain.
“Let’s fill Facebook pages, comment sections, and Twitter feeds with praise for outlets doing the right thing,” Deggans writes in his final chapter, “and scorn for those who choose another direction.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
“You live in media. Who you are, what you do, and what all of this means to you does not exist outside of media.”
So begins Mark Deuze‘s critical look at media, society, and culture, Media Life (Polity Press, 2012). Media are everywhere, and like fish in water, most are blissfully unaware of the very surroundings in which they live.
Deuze uses hope to separate his book from many scholarly works on modern media culture. He writes not from fear of the future, but optimism. Media, he writes, isn’t something to be avoided or something we need to escape. Rather, media is most effective when it is understood and used to live a better life, or as Deuze writes, “… we have to let go of seeing media as influence machines that will eventually make us disappear, instead considering media as part of our lives to the extent that they will make us visible (again).”
There isn’t a wasted moment in Media Life, with each chapter building upon the ideas of the previous. Meticulously researched and seamlessly written, Media Life addresses concerns and hopes, historical context and modern media phenomena. It is an important book that will be cited for years to come. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
It’s a great advantage of a dual biography that one can draw attention to a significant life that might otherwise be unexamined by linking it to the life of someone famous. Such is the case with Chip Bishop‘s biography, The Lion and the Journalist: The Unlikely Friendship of Theodore Roosevelt and Joseph Bucklin Bishop (Lyons Press, 2011), which charts the simultaneous rise of the former President and the author’s own great-granduncle.
The author does an excellent job illustrating the dynamics of the relationship between Roosevelt and Bishop. For it was to Bishop’s benefit to know Roosevelt, but it was also advantageous for Roosevelt to cultivate an ally in the press like Bishop. Theirs was a mutually beneficial relationship, and the author does an exceptional job of showing how it strengthened and altered with the passage of time, changes in status, increased physical distance, etc. These are the external forces that shape long-term friendships, but they’re seldom explored so intimately and eloquently in biographies of men.
The Lion and the Journalist covers a lot of ground. There’s publishing, politics, PR, and the Panama Canal. It’s an unusual historical melange, but it’s riveting. The Lion and the Journalist is also an especially rich entry into the genre of biographies about biographers and their subjects. For it was Bishop who penned the first biography of Roosevelt, laying the foundation from which all future biographers would begin.
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One of the hardest jobs in journalism is making sense of conflict. Seeing through the fog of war and through what each side wants you to report is fantastically difficult, before you come across issues such as access, logistics, safety and context.
James Rodgers has a deep understanding of why this is so hard because for many years (Reuters TV and BBC) he was one of the journalists who spent time in conflict zones from Chechnya and Iraq to Georgia and Gaza. As a result his book Reporting Conflict (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012) draws upon his own personal experiences as well his understanding of the issues involved, and the roles that various different types of reporter and journalist can play for different organisations and in very different circumstances.
The result is a slim but disarmingly complete and clear book that deals with most of the big issues facing reporters in times of conflict, from the explosion of different technologies to the constraints imposed by practices such as embedding journalists with armed forces. It’s an important, clear and informed contribution to a debate that will continue as media organisations change and technologies evolve, and I thoroughly recommend getting hold of a copy. But first, of course, have a listen to my interview with James.
PS. Here is the link to James’ BBC radio documentary about the ‘PR battle for the Caucasus’ (and for those who are interested in the region here is also a link to my own BBC radio documentary looking at the symbolic role that wine played in relations between Russia and Georgia).
James’ Twitter feed is @jmacrodgers; mine is @npw99. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
In his new book, The Tyranny of Cliches: How Liberals Cheat in the War of Ideas (Sentinel HC, 2012), Jonah Goldberg, founding editor of National Review Online and columnist for the Los Angeles Times, analyzes various media strategies used by liberals to “cheat in the war of ideas.” He believes radical ideas are frequently presented swathed in cliches and aphorisms, and attempts to disentangle some of the most recent examples.
In our interview, we talked about how he speaks in a pop culture idiom to appeal to young readers, that Voltaire never said “I disagree with what you say but will defend to the death your right to say it,” and why he takes on the role of Jewish defender of the Catholic Church.
Read all about it, and more, in Goldberg’s very funny new book.
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Howard Cosell was fond of saying that American television in the 1970s was dominated by three C’s, representing each of the broadcast networks: revered CBS news anchor Walter Cronkite, NBC’s late-night talk show host Johnny Carson, and Cosell himself, the marquee sports announcer for the ABC network. Cosell was known for an inflated sense of self-importance, but in this claim he was accurate. From his interviews of Muhammad Ali on Wide World of Sports in the Sixties, through his 13-year tenure in the broadcast booth of Monday Night Football, Cosell came to be the most prominent personality in sports television and one of the most recognizable figures–certainly, the most recognized voice–in all of American popular culture.
Throughout his career, Cosell aspired to be more like the trusted journalist Cronkite than the entertainer Carson. And one of the main points of historian John Bloom’s biography, There You Have It: The Life, Legacy, and Legend of Howard Cosell (University of Massachusetts Press, 2010), is that Cosell was an innovative, probing, and fearless reporter. Cosell defended Ali when the boxer was stripped of his heavyweight title. He spoke on behalf of Tommie Smith and John Carlos when they were sent home after their protest at the 1968 Mexico City Olympics. And he denounced boxing and refused to work in the sport again, after announcing the horribly one-sided Holmes-Cobb championship fight in 1982.
At the same time, Cosell recognized that sports was entertainment. He played his role for laughs in the Woody Allen film Bananas and on the made-for-TV “athletic competitions” of lesser actors and actresses. But as his fame peaked, Cosell’s stated opinion of sports turned sharply and dismissively critical. The broadcaster always felt himself an outsider in the world of sports, a characteristic that Bloom attributes to Cosell’s Jewish background. And as a trained attorney, Cosell felt himself intellectually superior to the jocks and shills, as he called them. He gained wealth and fame through sports, but he came to see himself as bigger than sports. In that sense, Cosell can be seen not only as a legendary figure, but also as a tragic one. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
“When your grandmother gets raped, put it on the front page.” That was the Medill family editorial policy and Eleanor Medill “Cissy” Patterson embraced it enthusiastically. The granddaughter of the Chicago Tribune‘s founder, the cousin of the Tribune‘s editor and the sister of the founder of the New York Daily News, Patterson’s family were said to have ink in their veins and she was no exception. By the early 1930s, this titian-haired heiress was the only female editor of a U.S. major metropolitan daily.
Patterson’s life held tremendous contrasts–great beauty, big scandals and bitter animosities and intrigue– all of which Amanda Smith elegantly explores in Newspaper Titan: The Infamous Life and Monumental Times of Cissy Patterson (Knopf, 2011). As the title indicates, there is no shortage of drama here.
The heiress to a newspaper fortune, the young Cissy Patterson slinked through Gilded Age society, famous for her inimitable gait. Following the trend of Americans making socially advantageous marriages to European aristocrats, Patterson wed a Russian count who abused her and kidnapped their only child. It’s an incredible story given new life through Smith’s research, which uncovered sources that reveal how- through the intervention of Patterson’s family, President Taft and the Russian Czar- Patterson’s three-year-old daughter was finally returned home.
As a society girl, a Countess, an essayist, a rancher, a novelist and, most memorably, a newspaperwoman, Cissy Patterson pushed the boundaries of what women of her time were expected to do and her newspaper was almost a mirror of her self. Under her leadership, the Washington Times (later the Washington Times-Herald) became DC’s most profitable paper thanks to Patterson’s gossipy editorials, her fierce isolationism and her distinctive editorial bite. There was venom in her pen and readers were hooked.
It’s a testament to Smith’s skill as a writer that even the ancillary characters in Newspaper Titan seem to burst fully alive from the page, giving the reader insight not only into Patterson’s social circle but also an unusually keen sense of the personalities with whom she tussled.
Ultimately, by Newspaper Titan‘s end, the impression one gains of Cissy Patterson is that of a woman who prized newsprint over people, a woman who was delightful after a drink but whose claws came out after three. Patterson was the first to admit this. She was quoted telling TIME, “The trouble with me is that I am a vindictive old shanty-Irish bitch.” And yet, it’s that same cattiness that made her an influential force in the development of tabloid media then and which makes her such a beguiling biographical subject now. As Cissy Patterson herself said: “I’d rather raise hell than raise vegetables.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
In his new book, Left Turn: How Liberal Media Bias Distorts the American Mind (St. Martin’s Press, 2011), Tim Groseclose, Marvin Hoffenberg Professor of American Politics at UCLA, discusses his quantitative measurements of political bias in the American news media. Based on years of in-depth studies, he concludes that nearly every mainstream media outlet is skewed to the left of the American electorate, and that this bias has helped push the American electorate to the left of where it would be otherwise. In our interview, we talked about different kinds of media bias, as well as bias in academia, and the effect it has had on Professor Groseclose’s career. Read all about it, and more, in Groseclose’s illuminating new book
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Few places can match the Djemaa el Fna in Marrakech for spectacle. As the shadows lengthen and dusk approaches, the square seethes with snake charmers, charlatans, showmen and chancers, all shrouded in charcoal smoke from dozens of makeshift food stalls. It feels like a glimpse into a different world in a different age.
One part of that different age, however, is dying out. A handful of storytellers still make their living by captivating audiences with tales and stories of love and death, trickery and justice. Richard Hamilton came across the storytellers while working in Morocco for the BBC, and realised that the tradition was on the brink of extinction. He travelled back to the Djemaa el Fna again and again, tracking down the last of these remarkable men, before advancing years and the age of the television killed Moroccan storytelling once and for all.
The Last Storytellers: Tales from the Heart of Morocco (I. B. Taurus, 2011) is the result of those visits. Richard talks about the roots of storytelling, the storytellers themselves, and the stories that they built their livelihoods around. He then treats us to a generous selection of the tales. I’m glad we had time in the interview to touch on some of them. It would be even better to hear some of the tales from the storytellers themselves, mesmerizing their audience in the Djemaa el Fna itself. But even if – as we fear – storytelling itself passes into history, thanks to Richard it will not be completely lost. I hope you enjoy the interview.
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As Ahmedabad, the chief city of Gujarat state in Western India, puts itself up as a contender for World Heritage status, Howard Spodek’s lovely book, Ahmedabad: Shock City of Twentieth Century India (Indiana University Press, 2011), can only give a boost to its campaign. This book is a discrete, yet integrated, collection of narratives from Ahmedabad throughout the twentieth century. The stories trace how this city quietly and unobtrusively sent out people and ideas into the rest of India, and on occasion acted out events that were reflective of trends across the wider Indian landscape. But, as Howard emphasizes, this is also a city that despite everything has remained staunchly and proudly Gujurati, its luminaries basing their power on resources and support from the surrounding regions.
Mohandas Gandhi made this industrial city his base, as did many of his followers; the mills came and went, cultural and educational institutions sprang up, and Ahmedabad itself might yet undergo a change in moniker to Karnavati. None of this affects its mediaeval monuments, and patterns of life in its gated bylanes of pols, even as they retain characteristics from long ago, yet subtly, imperceptibly, shift and change in response to changing times.. Howard’s book is a must read for an insight into century of the many that this many layered city has been in existence. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
In February 2002, British journalist James Brabazon set out to travel with guerrilla forces into Liberia to show the world what was happening in that war-torn country. To protect him, he hired Nick du Toit, a former South African Defence Force soldier who had fought in conflicts across Africa for over three decades. What follows is an incredible behind-the-scenes account of the Liberian rebels known as the LURD as they attempt to seize control of the country from government troops led by President Charles Taylor. In this gripping narrative, James Brabazon paints a brilliant portrait of the chaos that tore West Africa apart: nations run by warlords and kleptocrats, rebels fighting to displace them, ordinary people caught in the crossfire and everywhere adventurers and mercenaries operating in war’s dark shadows. It is a brutally honest book about what it takes to be a journalist, survivor, and friend in this morally corrosive crucible. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism
We like to think of countries as permanent fixtures. They aren’t. They come and go. In 1989, a place called the Deutsche Demokratische Republik, or East Germany, was going. It was never really an “ordinary” place. In the West but also the East; sovereign but not sovereign; German but not German; poor but rich. I could go on. It was the unnatural product of the Cold War, so when the Cold War ended it ended as well. But it didn’t just blink out of existence. Not at all. For a brief period–roughly from the fall of the Berlin Wall in November, 1989 to formal reunification in October, 1990–it continued to exist, a country that was alive and dead. Reporter Stevan Allen was lucky enough to be there and he has written an artful book about it–Roaming Ghostland: The Final Days of East Germany. At its center is a wonderful literary device: just as East Germany was passing out of existence, so too was an important phase in Allen’s life. The two narratives–that of the “Ossies” and the young journalist–move together, intermingle, and sometimes do battle as Allen tries to get the story and to figure out what he is doing with his life. One of the terrific things about the book is that you get to see the trials of foreign reporting–and its toll on foreign correspondents–from the street itself. Allen pulls no punchs regarding himself or his subjects. He often fails as do they. Sometimes he gets the story, sometimes he doesn’t; sometimes the East Germans help him, sometimes they don’t. This is not a self-congratulatory tale of unending triumph; it’s the story of a man at work, a man living life, a man struggling with himself and his task.
Part personal memoir, part coming-of-age story, part hard-nosed reporting, and part elegy to a youth past, Roaming Ghostland: The Final Days of East Germany will be a welcome treat for journalists, historians, and anyone interested in a good read about places and pasts that no longer exist, save in memory. If you know a young person who is interested in a career as a journalist, this book would make a terrific gift.
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The modern newspaper is not as old as you think. Until the early nineteenth century, they were thin and expensive. It was only with the advent of the penny press circa 1830 that the truly mass broadsheet was born. Yet selling a paper for a cent was not a straight-forward business proposition. In order to turn a profit, you needed to sell a lot of copy. You won’t be surprised to learn that the best way to move papers was to give the people what they wanted–scandal, outrage, marvels, miracles and outright inventions. In The Sun and the Moon. The Remarkable True Account of Hoaxers, Showmen, Dueling Journalists, and Lunar Man-Bats in Nineteenth-Century New York (Basic Books, 2008) shows how the early masters of the trade invented the modern paper by telling the public that the moon was inhabited by the recognizable ancestors of “Bat Boy.” Goodman marches a gallery of rogues across the book’s pages–an astronomer with an over-active imagination, an editor with an invented past, a horde of street urchins hawking papers and eating oysters. P.T. Barnum and Edger Allan Poe make appearances! This is a terrifically entertaining book, popular history at its best. And, of course, it’s ALL TRUE! Now put down The Weekly World News and go buy The Sun and the Moon!
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Every so often I read a book that reminds me that things weren’t at all what they appear to have been in hindsight. James Zug‘s wonderfully written The Guardian: The History of South Africa’s Extraordinary Anti-Apartheid Newspaper (Michigan State UP, 2007) is one such book. For years I studied and wrote about Russia and the Soviet Union. In that time, I came to think of communists as at best horribly misguided and at worst positively malevolent. Zug reminded me that in fact communists were on the right side of many issues that I hold dear. One of them, and the focus of The Guardian, was racism generally and Apartheid in particular. With a novelist’s skill, Zug chronicles the activities of a remarkably brave group of South African leftists, fellow-travelers, and Party members who, through the pages of their newspaper and with their very lives, fought racism in South Africa when so many ‘right-thinking people’ stood by in silence. He doesn’t sugar-coat the story, and never fails to point out when The Guardian‘s editors and writers were on the wrong side of an issue. But Zug saves them from being written out of history all together by broad-brushed dismissals of mid-century communism. Not only that, he tells a ripping tale. Please read this book.
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Today we talked with Eric Gardner, who is chair and professor of English at Saginaw Valley State University. The interview focuses on Jennie Carter: A Black Journalist of the Early West (University Press of Mississippi, 2008), a new book which Dr. Gardner both authored an introduction to and edited. This is the first collection from an African American journalist writing for the San Francisco based newspaper, the Elevator. Gardner’s introduction does an excellent job of placing Carter into both the context of the history and literature of the American West. Dr. Gardner is also the editor of Major Voices: The Drama of Slavery and has authored works which appear in the African American Review, the African American National Biography, and Legacy.
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