A SCHOLARLY BOOK REPOSITORY
Frank Kearns was the go-to guy at CBS News for danger- ous stories in Africa and the Middle East in the 1950s, ‘60s, and early ‘70s. By his own account, he was nearly killed 114 times. He took stories that nobody else wanted to cover and was challenged to get them on the air when nobody cared about this part of the world. But his stories were warning shots for conflicts that play out in the headlines today.
In 1957, Senator John Kennedy described America’s view of the Algerian war for independence as the Eisenhower Administration’s “head in the sand policy.” So CBS News decided to find out what was really happening there and to determine where Algeria’s war for independence fit into the game plan for the Cold War. They sent Frank Kearns to find out.
Kearns took with him cameraman Yousef (“Joe”) Masraff and 400 pounds of gear, some of which they shed, and they hiked with FLN escorts from Tunisia, across a wide “no-man’s land,” and into the Aures Mountains of eastern Algeria, where the war was bloodiest. They carried no passports or visas. They dressed as Algerians. They refused to bear weapons. And they knew that if captured, they would be executed and left in unmarked graves. But their job as journalists was to seek the truth whatever it might turn out to be.
This is Frank Kearns’s diary.
Bad News for Refugees analyses the political, economic and environmental contexts of migration and looks specifically at how refugees and asylum seekers have been stigmatised in political rhetoric and in media coverage.
Through forensic research it shows how hysterical and inaccurate media accounts act to legitimise political action which can have terrible consequences both on the lives of refugees and also on established migrant communities.
Based on new research by the renowned Glasgow Media Group, Bad News for Refugees is essential reading for those concerned with the negative effects of media on public understanding and for the safety of vulnerable groups and communities in our society.
It was not just The Tunnel's subject matter that sparked controversy, but the medium itself. The surprisingly fast ascendance of television news as the country's top choice for information threatened the self-defined supremacy of print journalism and the de facto cooperation of government officials and reporters on Cold War issues. In Contested Ground, Mike Conway argues that the production and reception of television news and documentaries during this period reveals a major upheaval in American news communications.
The authors persuasively argue, for example, that powder cocaine in the early Reagan years was understood and treated very differently on television and by the state than was crack cocaine, which was discovered by the news media in late 1985. In their critical analysis of 270 news stories broadcast between 1981 and 1988, Reeves and Campbell demonstrate a disturbing disparity between the earlier presentation of the middle- and upper-class "white" drug offender, for whom therapeutic recovery was an available option, and the subsequent news treatment of the inner-city "black" drug delinquent, often described as beyond rehabilitation and subject only to intensified strategies of law and order. Enlivened by provocative discussions of Nancy Reagan’s antidrug activism, the dramatic death of basketball star Len Bias, and the myth of the crack baby, the book argues that Reagan’s war on drugs was at heart a political spectacle that advanced the reactionary agenda of the New and Religious Right—an agenda that dismissed social problems grounded in economic devastation as individual moral problems that could simply be remedied by just saying "no."
Wide ranging and authoritative, Cracked Coverage: Television News, the Anti-Cocaine Crusade, and the Reagan Legacy is a truly interdisciplinary work that will attract readers across the humanities and social sciences in addition to students, scholars, journalists, and policy makers interested in the media and drug-related issues.
In How Partisan Media Polarize America, Matthew Levendusky confirms—but also qualifies—both of these claims. Drawing on experiments and survey data, he shows that Americans who watch partisan programming do become more certain of their beliefs and less willing to weigh the merits of opposing views or to compromise. And while only a small segment of the American population watches partisan media programs, those who do tend to be more politically engaged, and their effects on national politics are therefore far-reaching.
In a time when politics seem doomed to partisan discord, How Partisan Media Polarize America offers a much-needed clarification of the role partisan media might play.
This book, built on years of unique access to the newsrooms of BBC News and ITV News in the United Kingdom and DR TV Avisen and TV2 Nyhedeme in Denmark, answers those questions and more. Exploring the shared professional ideals of journalists, the study analyzes how they conceive of stories as important, and how their ideals relating to their work are expressed and aspired to in everyday practice.
2006 History Division Book Award of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication,
2006 Frank Luther Mott/Kappa Tau Alpha Communications Award, and
2005 Donald McGannon Award for Social and Ethical Relevance in Communications Policy Research
The public often views television investigative reporting as a watchdog on the government. In fact, some of the centerpiece moments of TV muckraking relied heavily on official sources for inspiration, information, and regulatory protection from critics. At the same time, criticism by government officials and overt threats to regulate the television industry influenced the decision-making and content that went into some of broadcast news's iconic moments.
Chad Raphael's looks at the relationship between journalism and regulation during the celebrated period of muckraking that took place on American television between 1960 and 1975. Raphael offers new insights into the economic, political, and industrial forces that shaped documentaries like Harvest of Shame, Hunger in America, and Banks and the Poor while placing the investigative television documentary into its institutional, regulatory, and cultural context. Throughout, Raphael exposes the complex strands of influence used by government officials to shape--and attack--investigative reporting, and highlights how these tactics created a troubling legacy for the regulation of television news today.
"Not only does it provide convincing evidence for particular effects of media fragmentation, but it also explores some of the specific mechanisms by which television works its damage. . . . Here is powerful additional evidence for those of us who like to flay television for its contributions to the trivialization of public discourse and the erosion of democratic accountability."—William A. Gamson, Contemporary Sociology
"Iyengar's book has substantial merit. . . . [His] experimental methods offer a precision of measurement that media effects research seldom attains. I believe, moreover, that Iyengar's notion of framing effects is one of the truly important theoretical concepts to appear in recent years."—Thomas E. Patterson, American Political Science Review
Jerusalem, Take One! Memoirs of a Jewish Filmmaker is a behind-the-scenes look at the life of documentary filmmaker Alan Rosenthal, the maker of over sixty films including Day of Peace, Out of the Ashes, A Nation Is Born, and On the Brink of Peace. As a witness to so much recent Israeli history through a camera’s viewfinder, Rosenthal himself makes as much of an interesting subject as the events he documents.
Born in London in 1936, Rosenthal studied law at Oxford before beginning his work in television directing in Israel and the United States. By the 1960s he was an established young filmmaker who had participated in the filming of the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem in 1961. He returned in 1968, initially for just one year, as part of a team invited by the Israeli government to set up the first television network; that year turned into the thirty-plus years that inspired this book.
The Eichmann trial, the development of Israel Television, the Oslo agreement, the search for the menorah from the Second Temple, the history of Zionism on the television screen, and the Yom Kippur War and Project Renewal are but a few of the recent moments in Israeli history that Rosenthal and his camera have witnessed. As he recalls these events with humor and wit, Rosenthal’s words recapture the emotions and feel of those times as vividly as his lens recorded their passing.
This is a memoir, not a history textbook, and Rosenthal himself is the true subject of the book’s most intensely personal and introspective moments, stories of growth and learning, of England and family, of love and loss, of ideological disappointment and renewed hope. Rosenthal’s tale is one of progress toward the man he wishes to be, the films he feels he must make, and the cultural identity he seeks to develop for himself and all Jewish people.
From Edward R. Murrow to "Sixty Minutes" and CNN, the television news correspondent has become a fixture of American journalism in the latter half of the twentieth century. The correspondent's role has changed, however, as centralized control, changing technology, "infotainment," and profit margin have influenced the way that television networks operate and television news is reported.
In spite of the flood of literature dealing with the American television networks, the evening anchors, and prime-time personalities, little has been written about the "the foot soldier of network news." Live from the Trenches fills that gap, providing the first examination of television news correspondents and their work, with much of the analysis coming from the correspondents themselves.
The correspondents:
Jim Bittermann, a former ABC Paris correspondent, has been the CNN Paris correspondent since 1996. He received a National News Emmy for his coverage of the 1988 Sudan famine.
Chris Bury, correspondent for "Nightline" since 1993, has covered foreign and domestic stories from Waco to Whitewater.
Michael Murrie, after a dozen years in television news at KSDK in St. Louis, is an associate professor and director of the Telecommunications Master's Program for the Department of Radio-Television at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale.
Roger O'Neil, NBC News Denver bureau chief and correspondent since 1983, was the lead reporter for NBC during the Oklahoma City bombing trial of Timothy McVeigh.
Walter C. Rodgers, bureau chief and correspondent in Jerusalem, joined CNN in 1993 as the Berlin correspondent. Prior to joining CNN, he worked for ABC for twelve years.
Marlene Sanders broke barriers for women throughout her career and has won three Emmies. As a correspondent at ABC News in 1964, she was the first woman to anchor a prime-time network newscast.
George Strait is the primary ABC News correspondent for medical and health news. Among his many awards are the Alfred I. duPont Award and Gold Medal Award from the National Association of Black Journalists.
Ed Turner is CNN's first editor-at-large. Based in Washington, he represents the CNN News Group globally.
Garrick Utley joined CNN in 1997 after thirty years covering more than seventy countries for ABC.
Anthony Nadler charts a paradigm shift, from market research's reach into the editorial suite in the 1970s through contemporary experiments in collaborative filtering and social news sites like Reddit and Digg. As Nadler shows, the transition was and is a rocky one. It also goes back much further than many experts suppose. Idealized visions of demand-driven news face obstacles with each iteration. Furthermore, the post-professional philosophy fails to recognize how organizations mobilize interest in news and public life. Nadler argues that this civic function of news organizations has been neglected in debates on the future of journalism. Only with a critical grasp of news outlets' role in stirring broad interest in democratic life, he says, might journalism's digital crisis push us toward building a more robust and democratic news media.
Wide-ranging and original, Making the News Popular offers a critical examination of an important, and still evolving, media phenomenon.
"Because of its methodological integrity and richness, News That Matters is likely to be regarded as an impressive, possibliy grounbreaking work."—Neil Postman, New York Times Book Review
Almost twenty-five years ago, Shanto Iyengar and Donald R. Kinder first documented a series of sophisticated and innovative experiments that unobtrusively altered the order and emphasis of news stories in selected television broadcasts. Their resulting book News That Matters, now hailed as a classic by scholars of political science and public opinion alike, is here updated for the twenty-first century, with a new preface and epilogue by the authors. Backed by careful analysis of public opinion surveys, the authors show how, despite changing American politics, those issues that receive extended coverage in the national news become more important to viewers, while those that are ignored lose credibility. Moreover, those issues that are prominent in the news stream continue to loom more heavily as criteria for evaluating the president and for choosing between political candidates.
“News That Matters does matter, because it demonstrates conclusively that television newscasts powerfully affect opinion. . . . All that follows, whether it supports, modifies, or challenges their conclusions, will have to begin here.”—The Public Interest
Some say it's simply information, mirroring the world. Others believe it's propaganda, promoting a partisan view. But news, Michael Schudson tells us, is really both and neither; it is a form of culture, complete with its own literary and social conventions and powerful in ways far more subtle and complex than its many critics might suspect. A penetrating look into this culture, The Power of News offers a compelling view of the news media's emergence as a central institution of modern society, a key repository of common knowledge and cultural authority.
One of our foremost writers on journalism and mass communication, Schudson shows us the news evolving in concert with American democracy and industry, subject to the social forces that shape the culture at large. He excavates the origins of contemporary journalistic practices, including the interview, the summary lead, the preoccupation with the presidency, and the ironic and detached stance of the reporter toward the political world. His book explodes certain myths perpetuated by both journalists and critics. The press, for instance, did not bring about the Spanish-American War or bring down Richard Nixon; TV did not decide the Kennedy-Nixon debates or turn the public against the Vietnam War.
Then what does the news do? True to their calling, the media mediate, as Schudson demonstrates. He analyzes how the news, by making knowledge public, actually changes the character of knowledge and allows people to act on that knowledge in new and significant ways. He brings to bear a wealth of historical scholarship and a keen sense for the apt questions about the production, meaning, and reception of news today.
More and more people rely on information from television and the Internet to make important decisions. Processing Politics offers a sound, well-researched defense of these remarkably versatile media, and challenges us to make them work for us in our democracy.
See It Now, Edward R. Murrow and Fred W. Friendly’s early documentary television program, has come to be recognized as the exemplar of nonfiction television. One important element in its reputation is a series of four telecasts directly dealing with abuses of McCarthyism and the Red Scare. This book is about those programs, but it is also about the early 1950s in America, the troubled era in which these programs were broadcast. This book is, then, both cultural history and media analysis.
As media analysis, this book seeks to understand the symbolic form, the aesthetic construction, and the subsequent experience that these four programs offered viewers. This sort of critical analysis is a development of recent vintage in American media studies. Whereas a decade ago television and the media were studied largely through an empiricist social scientific paradigm, now humanistic approaches to media discourses engage the interest of scholars in history, rhetoric and communication, political science, anthropology, and American studies. As case study, then, this book bridges classical humanist and contemporary mass media approaches, and as we go, I shall essay the utility of humanistic methods for the understanding and explication of mass media that is primarily visual in nature.
As cultural history, this book seeks to illuminate a unique era in the recent American past. My aim is to understand the programs as articulations of public “common sense” and as artifacts that help convey this common sense. Thus, a second theme of this book will be to locate-through the analysis of public discourse cast in the television documentary form—an American ideology: a set of “templates” that both ground the programs and reveal the cultural assumptions of the historical period.
In addition, from a slightly different historical perspective, our increased understanding of these See It Now broadcasts gives us an appreciation of the development of the television industry and the genre of television documentary. Coming at a time when few Americans had television sets, these See It Now programs coincided with an exponential increase in television ownership and popularity. As an elaborate defense of free speech for the medium, these documentaries may have helped to establish autonomy and a direction for a nascent broadcasting industry. More specifically, as the paradigm for the television documentary and as the first regularly scheduled documentary series, these See It Now programs shaped expectations and set the benchmark to which all nonfiction television, from Twentieth Century to White Paper to Sixty Minutes, has been compared. Thus, a third theme will be the implications of these seminal programs for media institutions and for the genre of television news documentary.
It is no coincidence that presidential candidates have been making it a point to add the late-night comedy circuit to the campaign trail in recent years. In 2004, when John Kerry decided it was time to do his first national television interview, he did not choose CBS’s 60 Minutes, ABC’s Nightline, or NBC Nightly News. Kerry picked Comedy Central’s The Daily Show. When George W. Bush was lagging in the polls, his appearance on the David Letterman Show gave him a measurable boost. Candidates for the 2008 presidential election began their late-night bookings almost as soon as they launched their campaigns.
How can this be? The reason is that polls have been consistently finding that a significant number of Americans—and an even larger proportion of those under the age of thirty—get at least some of their “news” about politics and national affairs from comedy shows. While this trend toward what some have called “infotainment” seems to herald the descent of our national discourse—the triumph of entertainment over substance—the reality, according to Russell L. Peterson, is more complex. He explains that this programming is more than a mere replacement for traditional news outlets; it plays its own role in shaping public perception of government and the political process.
From Johnny Carson to Jon Stewart, from Chevy Chase’s spoofing of President Ford on Saturday Night Live to Stephen Colbert’s roasting of President Bush at the White House Correspondents Dinner, Strange Bedfellows explores what Americans have found so funny about our political institutions and the people who inhabit them, and asks what this says about the health of our democracy. Comparing the mainstream network hosts—Jay, Dave, Conan, and Johnny before them—who have always strived to be “equal opportunity offenders” to the newer, edgier crop of comedians on cable networks, Peterson shows how each brand of satire plays off a different level of Americans’ frustrations with politics.
The critics may be right. But, as Charles L. Ponce de Leon explains in That’s the Way It Is, TV news has always walked a fine line between hard news and fluff. The familiar story of decline fails to acknowledge real changes in the media and Americans’ news-consuming habits, while also harking back to a golden age that, on closer examination, is revealed to be not so golden after all. Ponce de Leon traces the entire history of televised news, from the household names of the late 1940s and early ’50s, like Eric Sevareid, Edward R. Murrow, and Walter Cronkite, through the rise of cable, the political power of Fox News, and the satirical punch of Colbert and Stewart. He shows us an industry forever in transition, where newsmagazines and celebrity profiles vie with political news and serious investigations. The need for ratings success—and the lighter, human interest stories that can help bring it—Ponce de Leon makes clear, has always sat uneasily alongside a real desire to report hard news.
Highlighting the contradictions and paradoxes at the heart of TV news, and telling a story rich in familiar figures and fascinating anecdotes, That’s the Way It Is will be the definitive account of how television has showed us our history as it happens.
In Watching Women's Liberation, 1970: Feminism's Pivotal Year on the Network News, Bonnie J. Dow uses case studies of key media events to delve into the ways national TV news mediated the emergence of feminism's second wave. First legitimized as a big story by print media, the feminist movement gained broadcast attention as the networks’ eagerness to get in on the action was accompanied by feminists’ efforts to use national media for their own purposes. Dow chronicles the conditions that precipitated feminism's new visibility and analyzes the verbal and visual strategies of broadcast news discourses that tried to make sense of the movement.
Groundbreaking and packed with detail, Watching Women's Liberation, 1970 shows how feminism went mainstream--and what it gained and lost on the way.
Women in television news have made great strides in the past twenty-five years. No longer limited to being the token pretty face on the nightly newscast, women have taken their places as working journalists in newsrooms, on the campaign trail, in war zones, and in the highest echelons of network news management. Barbara Walters and Connie Chung have even occupied the coveted network anchor's chair, if only briefly.
In this book, 70 of the foremost women in television news reflect on their professional successes, the personal and professional sacrifices that often bought those successes, and the barriers that still confront women in the news business. Weaving their interviews into a compelling text, Judith Marlane covers a wide range of issues, including looks versus ability and experience, sexual harassment, the resistance to women news anchors, the difficulties of balancing work and family life, women's and men's salaries, and the willingness of women to help other women in the business.
This book builds from Marlane's 1976 work, Women in Television News. Interviews with many of the same women highlight the gains that women have made in broadcast journalism. Simultaneously, Marlane has expanded her range of informants to include fifteen of America's most famous male anchors and correspondents to gather their assessments of the role of women in broadcasting today.
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