Media : Media Analysis

Startling statistics shape our thinking about social issues. But all too often, these numbers are wrong. Examining how bad statistics emerge, spread, and come to shape policy debates, this book provides a guide to spotting, and learning to think critically, about these influential numbers. more...

Price: $12.95

The host of NPR's Morning Edition chronicles the rise of radio and television news In this brisk and incisive account, Bob Edwards shows us how Edward R. Murrow helped establish broadcast journalism-and, in the process, reminds us how far most broadcast news has fallen from the reportorial standards set by Murrow and the people he hired at CBS. Sent to Europe in the late 1930s by CBS, Murrow pioneered the concept of radio reports by foreign correspondents, nightly roundups of European news, and, later, "you are there" reports from London during the blitz. After the war, Murrow launched See It Now, the first in-depth television news program-and helped make CBS the gold standard for television news. Edwards brings to life the great stories Murrow covered-the blitz, bombing raids over Berlin, the liberation of Buchenwald, red-baiting by Senator Joe McCarthy-as well as the ups and downs of his career at CBS. Complete with an afterword that analyzes the decline of broadcast news since the 1980s, this book will be required reading for anyone interested in twentieth-century history and the media. "It's amazing to me that Bob Edwards, who didn't know Murrow, knows him so well. . . I found in this book the Murrow I knew."-Daniel Schorr, Senior News Analyst, NPR "Get it, read it, and pass it on. Every aspiring broadcast journalist should have it."—Bill Moyers Bob Edwards (Arlington, VA) has been the host since 1979 of NPR's Morning Edition, the most popular program on public radio, with 13 million listeners each week. He and his program won the prestigious Peabody Award in 1999 for "two hours of daily in-depth news and entertainment expertly helmed by a man who embodies the essence of excellence in radio"; he also won the Edward R. Murrow Award in 1984. He is the author of Fridays with Red. more...

Price: $19.95

Well-known media analyst Eric Burns looks at how journalists have misreported history in this follow-up to his critically acclaimed book Infamous Scribblers. In Infamous Scribblers, Eric Burns revealed how early American journalists represented and misrepresented the events and leaders of the day in coverage that was partisan, fabricated, scandalous, and sensationalistic, and sometimes stirring, brilliant, and indispensable. Now he puts the media under the microscope again, from Ben Franklin and Sam Adams through Mark Twain, William Randolph Hearst, H. L. Mencken, and Walter Duranty (arguably the most unethical journalist to win a Pulitzer) to the modern day. He shows how the media got history wrong and how those mistakes have been magnified and distorted over time, changing our view and understanding of the past. Eric Burns (New York, NY), a media critic and journalist, is the former host of Fox News's acclaimed Fox News Watch and a veteran of NBC Nightly News, Today, and Entertainment Tonight. He has written on media and popular culture for the New York Post, the Los Angeles Times, Reader's Digest, the Weekly Standard, Family Circle, and other publications. His books include Infamous Scribblers (978-1-58648-334-0) and Virtue, Valor, and Vanity (978-1-55970-858-6). more...

Price: $25.95

Originally published in 1985, Neil Postman's groundbreaking polemic about the corrosive effects of television on our politics and public discourse has been hailed as a twenty-first-century book published in the twentieth century. Now, with television joined by more sophisticated electronic media, from the Internet to cell phones to DVDs, it has taken on even greater significance. Amusing Ourselves to Death is a prophetic look at what happens when politics, journalism, education, and even religio more...

Price: $15.00

In turn-of-the-century Vienna, Karl Kraus created a bold new style of media criticism, penning incisive satires that elicited both admiration and outrage. Kraus’s spectacularly hostile critiques often focused on his fellow Jewish journalists, which brought him a reputation as the quintessential self-hating Jew. The Anti-Journalist overturns this view with unprecedented force and sophistication, showing how Kraus’s criticisms form the center of a radical model of German-Jewish self-fashioning, and how that model developed in concert with Kraus’s modernist journalistic style.Paul Reitter’s study of Kraus’s writings situates them in the context of fin-de-siècle German-Jewish intellectual society. He argues that rather than stemming from anti-Semitism, Kraus’s attacks constituted an innovative critique of mainstream German-Jewish strategies for assimilation. Marshalling three of the most daring German-Jewish authors—Kafka, Scholem, and Benjamin—Reitter explains their admiration for Kraus’s project and demonstrates his influence on their own notions of cultural authenticity. The Anti-Journalist is at once a new interpretation of a fascinating modernist oeuvre and a heady exploration of an important stage in the history of German-Jewish thinking about identity. more...

Price: $35.00