Showing titles in Media Studies

The media of the 1950s and 1960s promoted an idealized version of American life sustained by the nuclear family and bolstered by a booming consumer economy. The seemingly wholesome and simple lifestyles portrayed on television screens, however, belied a torrent of social, economic, and political struggles occurring at the time. By the late 1950s, television writers were increasingly constrained to distract audiences from confronting counternarratives to the Dream.

The Sun and the Moon tells the delightful and surprisingly true story of how a series of articles in the Sun newspaper in 1835 convinced the citizens of New York that the moon was inhabited. Purporting to reveal discoveries of a famous British astronomer, the series described such moon life as unicorns, beavers that walked upright, and four-foot-tall flying man-bats. It quickly became the most widely circulated newspaper story of the era.

Like the authors' classic book The Elements of Journalism, Blur is a unique and understandable discourse on how information culture is changing. Yes, old authorities are being dismantled and new ones created, and the way we obtain knowledge has changed. But seeking true and reliable information remains the most important purpose of journalism - and the object for those who consume it.

The importance of mythology has often been overlooked by the vast majority of people in the modern era. In the high echelons of our society, there are people in positions of power that understand that mythological archetypes have a profound impact upon the minds of men. They have learned how to manipulate these archetypal energies to effectuate changes in our world. Over the course of the past two years, we have witnessed the results of the creation of a new mythology, crafted especially for our modern sensibilities...

In this new world, one thing everyone needs to know is how to report well. Whether you’re starting out in community journalism or working at a major news organization; whether you’re working on traditional or new platforms; whether you want to learn the basics of good reporting or remind yourself of what the best reporting can and should be, The Ten Rules of Reporting is your essential guide to quality journalism.

There is a vast cultural movement emerging from beyond the Western world. Truly global in its range and allure, it is the biggest challenge yet to Hollywood, McDonald's, and blue jeans. This is an audiobook about these new arbiters of mass culture arising from the East - India's Bollywood films, Turkish soap opera, or dizi, and South Korean pop music. Carefully packaging not always secular modernity with traditional values in urbanized settings, they have created a new global pop culture that can be easily consumed.

In an era of increasing social isolation, platforms like Facebook and Twitter are among the most important tools we have to understand each other. We use social media as a mirror to decipher our place in society, but, as Chris Bail explains, it functions more like a prism that distorts our identities, empowers status-seeking extremists, and renders moderates all but invisible.

Just as Susan Sontag did for photography and Marshall McLuhan did for television, Virginia Heffernan (called one of the "best living writers of English prose") reveals the logic and aesthetics behind the Internet. Since its inception, the Internet has morphed from merely an extension of traditional media into its own full-fledged civilization. It is among mankind's great masterpieces - a massive work of art. As an idea, it rivals monotheism.

An examination of the terrifying ideas of the Dark State’s internationalist-elite oligarchs and the disquieting technological trends that, combined, threaten the fabric of our reality and the very future of mankind.

Beneath the outward appearance of legitimate government and accountable officials there lurk hidden agendas, shadowy personalities and special interest groups seeking to seize control of the nation for their own ends. These 'states within a state', unfettered by legal norms and unworried by public opinion, are known as 'deep states'.

For decades, women battered the walls of the male fortress of television journalism. After fierce struggles, three women - Diane Sawyer, Katie Couric, and Christiane Amanpour - broke into the newsroom’s once impenetrable “boys’ club”. These women were not simply pathbreakers, but wildly gifted journalists whose unique talents enabled them to climb to the top of the corporate ladder and transform the way Americans received their news.

It’s hard today to remember how recently cancer was a silent killer, a dreaded disease about which people rarely spoke in public. In hospitals and doctors’ offices, conversations about malignancy were hushed and hope was limited. In this deeply researched book, Elaine Schattner reveals a sea change—from before 1900 to the present day—in how ordinary people talk about cancer. From Whispers to Shouts examines public perception of cancer through stories in newspapers and magazines, social media, and popular culture.

In our "wireless" world it is easy to take the importance of the undersea cable systems for granted, but the stakes of their successful operation are huge, as they are responsible for carrying almost all transoceanic Internet traffic. In The Undersea Network, Nicole Starosielski follows these cables from the ocean depths to their landing zones on the sandy beaches of the South Pacific, bringing them to the surface of media scholarship and making visible the materiality of the wired network.

From the writer and editor who coined the term “baby boomer” comes Celebrity Nation, an exploration into how and why fame no longer stems only from heroic achievements but from the number of “likes” and shares—and what this change means for American culture. Landon Jones—who spent decades in “celebrityland” only to emerge, like Alice, blinking in the sunlight—brings a personal and first-person perspective on fame and its dark underbelly, complicated even further by the arrival of the internet and social media.

Satan Goes to the Mind Control Convention looks at the role that conspiracy theories play in American life and the current political climate. The book begins at a convention for therapists who uncover “memories” of past lives, extraterrestrials, and government mind control operations.

Determined to offer an unfiltered version of events, the Washington Post's Anthony Shadid was neither embedded with soldiers nor briefed by politicians. Because he is fluent in Arabic, Shadid, an Arab-American born and raised in Oklahoma, was able to actually disappear into the divided, dangerous worlds of Iraq. Day by day, as American dreams clashed with Arab notions of justice, he pieced together the human story of ordinary Iraqis weathering the terrible dislocations and tragedies of war.

Local news is essential to democracy. Meaningful participation in civic life is impossible without it. However, local news is in crisis. According to one widely cited study, some 2,500 newspapers have closed over the last generation. And it is often marginalized communities of color who have been left without the day-to-day journalism they need to govern themselves in a democracy.

Nev Schulman is the host of the wildly popular TV series Catfish which investigates online relationships to determine whether they are based on truth or fiction (spoiler: it's almost always fiction).

In this biography, written long before the significance of Mozart's work was fully realized, Holmes reveals the musician's character and genius, his struggles, his influence on art, and the brilliant reputations that surrounded him.

Everyone deplores narcissism, especially in others. The vain are by turns annoying or absurd, offending us whether they are blissfully oblivious or proudly aware of their behavior. But are narcissism and vanity really as bad as they seem? Can we avoid them even if we try? In Mirror, Mirror, Simon Blackburn, the author of such best-selling philosophy books as Think, Being Good, and Lust, says that narcissism, vanity, pride, and self-esteem are more complex than they first appear and have innumerable good and bad forms.