Author: Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :
Book Description
Labor's New Deal for Journalism---the Newspaper Guild in the 1930s
Author: America's Battle for Media Democracy
Author: Victor PickardPublisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107038332
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 263
Book Description
Drawing from extensive archival research, the book uncovers the American media system's historical roots and normative foundations. It charts the rise and fall of a forgotten media-reform movement to recover alternatives and paths not taken.
The Death and Life of American Journalism
Author: Robert W. McChesneyPublisher: Bold Type Books
ISBN: 1568587007
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 417
Book Description
Daily newspapers are closing across America. Washington bureaus are shuttering; whole areas of the federal government are now operating with no press coverage. International bureaus are going, going, gone. Journalism, the counterbalance to corporate and political power, the lifeblood of American democracy, is not just threatened. It is in meltdown. In The Death and Life of American Journalism, Robert W. McChesney, an academic, and John Nichols, a journalist, who together founded the nation's leading media reform network, Free Press, investigate the crisis. They propose a bold strategy for saving journalism and saving democracy, one that looks back to how the Founding Fathers ensured free press protection with the First Amendment and provided subsidies to the burgeoning print press of the young nation.
Democracy Without Journalism?
Author: Victor PickardPublisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 019094675X
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 265
Book Description
As local media institutions collapse and news deserts sprout up across the country, the US is facing a profound journalism crisis. Meanwhile, continuous revelations about the role that major media outlets--from Facebook to Fox News--play in the spread of misinformation have exposed deep pathologies in American communication systems. Despite these threats to democracy, policy responses have been woefully inadequate. In Democracy Without Journalism? Victor Pickard argues that we're overlooking the core roots of the crisis. By uncovering degradations caused by run-amok commercialism, he brings into focus the historical antecedents, market failures, and policy inaction that led to the implosion of commercial journalism and the proliferation of misinformation through both social media and mainstream news. The problem isn't just the loss of journalism or irresponsibility of Facebook, but the very structure upon which our profit-driven media system is built. The rise of a "misinformation society" is symptomatic of historical and endemic weaknesses in the American media system tracing back to the early commercialization of the press in the 1800s. While professionalization was meant to resolve tensions between journalism's public service and profit imperatives, Pickard argues that it merely camouflaged deeper structural maladies. Journalism has always been in crisis. The market never supported the levels of journalism--especially local, international, policy, and investigative reporting--that a healthy democracy requires. Today these long-term defects have metastasized. In this book, Pickard presents a counter-narrative that shows how the modern journalism crisis stems from media's historical over-reliance on advertising revenue, the ascendance of media monopolies, and a lack of public oversight. He draws attention to the perils of monopoly control over digital infrastructures and the rise of platform monopolies, especially the "Facebook problem." He looks to experiments from the Progressive and New Deal Eras--as well as public media models around the world--to imagine a more reliable and democratic information system. The book envisions what a new kind of journalism might look like, emphasizing the need for a publicly owned and democratically governed media system. Amid growing scrutiny of unaccountable monopoly control over media institutions and concerns about the consequences to democracy, now is an opportune moment to address fundamental flaws in US news and information systems and push for alternatives. Ultimately, the goal is to reinvent journalism.
The Rise and Fall of Morris Ernst, Free Speech Renegade
Author: Samantha BarbasPublisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022665818X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 427
Book Description
A long-overdue biography of the legendary civil liberties lawyer—a vital and contrary figure who both defended Ulysses and fawned over J. Edgar Hoover. In the 1930s and ’40s, Morris Ernst was one of America’s best-known liberal lawyers. The ACLU’s general counsel for decades, Ernst was renowned for his audacious fights against artistic censorship. He successfully defended Ulysses against obscenity charges, litigated groundbreaking reproductive rights cases, and supported the widespread expansion of protections for sexual expression, union organizing, and public speech. Yet Ernst was also a man of stark contradictions, waging a personal battle against Communism, defending an autocrat, and aligning himself with J. Edgar Hoover’s inflammatory crusades. Arriving at a moment when issues of privacy, artistic freedom, and personal expression are freshly relevant, The Rise and Fall of Morris Ernst, Free Speech Renegade brings this singularly complex figure into a timely new light. As Samantha Barbas’s eloquent and compelling biography makes ironically clear, Ernst both transformed free speech in America and inflicted damage to the cause of civil liberties. Drawing on Ernst’s voluminous cache of publications and papers, Barbas follows the life of this singular idealist from his pugnacious early career to his legal triumphs of the 1930s and ’40s and his later idiosyncratic zealotry. As she shows, today’s challenges to free speech and the exercise of political power make Morris Ernst’s battles as pertinent as ever.
The American Newsroom
Author: Will MariPublisher: University of Missouri Press
ISBN: 0826274595
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 369
Book Description
The story of the American newsroom is that of modern American journalism. In this holistic history, Will Mari tells that story from the 1920s through the 1960s, 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. During this time, the newsroom was more than a physical place—it symbolically represented all that was good and bad in journalism, from the shift from blue- to white-collar work to the flexing of journalism’s power as a watchdog on government and an advocate for social reform. Told from an empathetic, omnivorous, ground-up point of view, The American Newsroom: A History, 1920–1960 uses memoirs, trade journals, textbooks, and archival material to show how the newsroom expanded our ideas of what journalism could and should be.
Explorations in Communication and History
Author: Barbie ZelizerPublisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135969582
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 241
Book Description
When and how do communication and history impact each other? How do disciplinary perspectives affect what we know? Explorations in Communication and History addresses the link between what we know and how we know it by tracking the intersection of communication and history. Asking how each discipline has enhanced and hindered our understanding of the other, the book considers what happens to what we know when disciplines engage. Through a critical collection of essays written by top scholars in the field, the book addresses the engagement of communication and history as it applies to the study of technology, audiences and journalism. A comprehensive introduction by Barbie Zelizer contextualises these debates and makes a case for the importance of disciplinary engagement for teaching as well as research in media and cultural studies and each section has a brief introduction to contextualise the essays and highlight the issues they raise, making this an invaluable collection for students and scholars alike.
Mr. Associated Press
Author: Gene AllenPublisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 0252054474
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 273
Book Description
Between 1925 and 1951, Kent Cooper transformed the Associated Press, making it the world’s dominant news agency while changing the kind of journalism that millions of readers in the United States and other countries relied on. Gene Allen’s biography is a globe-spanning account of how Cooper led and reshaped the most important institution in American--and eventually international--journalism in the mid-twentieth century. Allen critically assesses the many new approaches and causes that Cooper championed: introducing celebrity news and colorful features to a service previously known for stodgy reliability, pushing through disruptive technological innovations like the instantaneous transmission of news photos, and leading a crusade to bring American-style press freedom--inseparable from private ownership, in Cooper’s view--to every country. His insistence on truthfulness and impartiality presents a sharp contrast to much of today’s fractured journalistic landscape. Deeply researched and engagingly written, Mr. Associated Press traces Cooper’s career as he built a new foundation for the modern AP and shaped the twentieth-century world of news.
Crossed Wires
Author: Dan SchillerPublisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0197639259
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 833
Book Description
A sweeping, revisionist historical analysis of telecommunications networks, from the dawn of the republic to the 21st century. Telecommunications networks are vast, intricate, hugely costly systems for exchanging messages and information-within cities and across continents. From the Post Office and the telegraph to today's internet, these networks have sown domestic division while also acting as sources of international power. In Crossed Wires, Dan Schiller, who has conducted archival research on US telecommunications for more than forty years, recovers the extraordinary social history of the major network systems of the United States. Drawing on arrays of archival documents and secondary sources, Schiller reveals that this history has been shaped by sharp social and political conflict and is embedded in the larger history of an expansionary US political economy. Schiller argues that networks have enabled US imperialism through a a recurrent "American system" of cross-border communications. Three other key findings wind through the book. First, business users of networks--more than carriers, and certainly more than residential users--have repeatedly determined how telecommunications systems have developed. Second, despite their current importance for virtually every sphere of social life, networks have been consecrated above all to aiding the circulation of commodities. Finally, although the preferences of executives and officials have broadly determined outcomes, these elites have repeatedly had to contend against the ideas and organizations of workers, social movement activists, and other reformers. This authoritative and comprehensive revisionist history of US telecommunications argues that not technology but a dominative--and contested--political economy drove the evolution of this critical industry.
The Political Economy of Media
Author: Robert W. McChesneyPublisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 1583671617
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 587
Book Description
One of the foremost media critics provides a comprehensive analysis of the economic and political powers that are being mobilized to consolidate private control of media with increasing profit--all at the expense of democracy.