Winning with Words: The Origins and Impact of Political Framing. Brian Schaffner and Patrick Sellers, eds. New York, NY: Routledge, 2009. 200 pp.

With this book, political scientists Brian Schaffner and Patrick Sellers set out to bring some clarity to a set of issues that had troubled their own investigations into the nature of public opinion, public policy, and the role that message-framing might play in the process. They convened a conference of scholars at American University in 2007, and this unique little book is the result. In it, they and their contributors have managed to clarify some important distinctions between approaches to the study of elite framing strategy and practice, and those that are focused on understanding the factors that govern the impact of those frames on audiences, and on the policy process more generally. 

As editors, Shaffner and Sellers have been especially careful to ensure that each chapter calls the readers’ attention to a broad range of issues, insights, and concerns that are addressed in other chapters in the book, as well as within the scholarly literature.

Eight of the chapters in this volume pursue these goals through their assessments of policy debates and alternative strategies used in electoral campaigns, aided in part by a number of original experimental and time-series analyses designed to assess the impact of alternative and evolving issue frames. However, the final chapter, written by Shanto Iyengar, serves to remind us that the problem of generating a definition of framing that could unify the approaches of scholars in political science, sociology, communication, and social psychology is not yet close to being solved.

The policy topics featured in these core chapters cover some interesting ideological terrain. Thomas Nelson, Dana Wittmer, and Allyson Shortle explore the strategic use of framing techniques in the service of what they refer to as “value recruitment.” They demonstrate how competing camps in the debate over the place of “intelligent design” within the nation’s public school science curriculum attempted to claim the moral high ground through the use of specific strategies and tactics. Experimental evidence helped to validate activists’ assumptions about the importance of specific value frames.

Another highly contentious ideological debate is featured in Jessica Gerrity’s assessment of the role that interest groups played in framing the issue of  “partial-birth abortion.” Gerrity’s analysis emphasized the differences in strategies used by organized interest groups in delivering targeted framing appeals to the public, to the media, and to the policy elites in Congress.

Douglas Harris characterized the strategies that have been used by congressional policy entrepreneurs in their efforts to influence legislative debates over issues that frequently divide the political parties. He noted their use of public opinion data to determine which frames have the greatest potential for mobilizing traditional constituents, as well as for repairing the party’s image in a particular policy domain.

Electoral campaigns were the point of focus for Taylor Ansley and co-editor Sellers’ chapter on strategic framing efforts. They provide key markers of changes in campaign strategies over time. Many of these were in response to the opportunities and challenges represented by web-based communications. They make good use of the 2006 senatorial campaigns to help outline the role that greater decentralization may play in future electoral contests.

The chapters that focused primarily on the nature of framing effects made use of a number of different and, in some cases, quite innovative approaches to extending the power of survey-based experiments. James Druckman utilized election day exit polls to test the impact of randomly assigned message frames on a casino gambling referendum in Chicago. Druckman’s use of competing frames in some of the treatments made it possible to engage in a kind of sensitivity analysis that helped to clarify the relative power of moral versus economic rationales in garnering support for particular policy options.

Co-editor Schaffner and Mary Atkinson also used a survey in an explicit test of the power of a rather simple, but powerful shift in the reframing of inheritance tax policy from an “estate tax” into a “death tax” by Republican strategists.

Two studies made use of time series analysis to explore the links between changes in media frames and associated changes in the public’s response. Michael Wagner explored the impact of congressional issue framing on party identification by examining the relationships between the frames regarding taxes and abortion used by congressional and presidential candidates from 1975-2000 in relation to changes in national election survey respondents’ self-identification with a political party. Unlike many other studies that emphasized the variety of frames being used, Wagner’s analysis examined the importance of frame stability over time as an influence on party loyalty.

Frank Baumbartner, Suzanna Linn, and Amber Boydstun used a more traditional approach to assess the impact of media frames on American policy toward the death penalty. Their comprehensive analysis of the New York Times’ framing of capital punishment between 1960 and 2005 was compared against changes in capital sentences and executions during the same period. A social movement to challenge the injustices within the court system is also shown to have played an important role in a rather complex process of change.

The authors here have done an admirable job of collecting these discussions. Naturally, Schaffner, an associate professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts, and Sellars, a professor of political science at Davidson University, approach the issues and processes through their primary identification with political science. But there is much of value to be derived from this collection by students and researchers in communication, journalism, and media studies.

OSCAR H. GANDY JR.
University of Pennsylvania

What Really Happened to the 1960s: How Mass Media Culture Failed American Democracy. Edward P. Morgan. Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2010. 405 pp.

The late A. J. Liebling, press critic for The New Yorker, proclaimed from time to time that, “By not reporting there are a lot of things you can avoid finding out.” In this book, Edward P. Morgan, university distinguished professor of political science at Lehigh University, recounts what we avoided finding out about the 1960s and how that has shaped our stereotypes of the decade. This book is a must-read for journalists and journalism students not only because it tells us of important media history, but also because of the implications of that history for today. 

Morgan begins by discussing what he refers to as the “contradictions between capitalism and democracy” that create tension because of the inequality of wealth. He said these contradictions came to a head in the post-World War II period and spawned the forces that generated change in the 1960s. The changes came in participatory democracy, the civil rights movement, the Vietnam War, war protests, education, and women’s liberation in the 1960s. He examined the coverage of these areas in great detail, looking at coverage by the New York Times, the three news magazines, and the television networks. To this he adds in the center of the book thirty-five pictures that said a lot about media coverage in the sixties.

He found a consistent pattern in coverage that cut across issues: Coverage was from the establishment perspective, and demonstrations were seen as driven by small groups of deviant individuals. The press underestimated the size and significance of these movements, and was quick to cover violence and blame it on the protestors. Thus was the stereotype formed of the Baby Boomers agitating, pushing a misguided agenda, and thereby bringing on turmoil.

Having lived through the 1960s myself, I am not surprised by Morgan’s findings. I remember the daily briefings by U.S. generals in Vietnam that became known as the “5 o’clock follies.” I recall that the claim by Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara that he could see the light at the end of the tunnel became a national joke with some of us, who wondered if, “Isn’t that the headlight of a locomotive coming toward us?” Those were indications that we were not being told the whole story of the war. And we knew it.

And while the news media minimized the antiwar movement through the mid-1960s, I also noticed that the Gallup Poll reported growing opposition to the war, until by 1968 more than half of Americans opposed it. The social agenda was not set by the press or by the politicians, but by the public itself, and it took at least four years for the press and the politicians to catch up.

We were told that the demonstrators at the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago rioted, but I watched the coverage on television and doubted that interpretation. Morgan points out that civil rights coverage focused on a few big events, like the Rev. Martin Luther King’s speech at the Lincoln Memorial in 1963 and the situation at Selma in 1965, but the press generally missed the story of the life blacks lived.

It took the Watts riot to get that point across, and those of us in professional journalism and journalism education were at least chagrined at the discovery that the Los Angeles Times, one of our great newspapers, did not have a single African American in the newsroom, and had to send someone from the advertising department to cover the story.

Likewise, those of us who were paying attention knew that women’s liberation was not about bra-burning—which was an iconic myth—but about real issues of equality that were important for our country. Morgan also points out that movies and TV entertainment also contributed to the disinformation about the 1960s by building scenarios around the establishment stereotypes of the time, and thus helped perpetuate them.

To some extent, the American people recognized that the media were not serving them well. At stake was the credibility of the media, and as journalists and journalism students read this book they should ponder what price the media—especially the press—paid in credibility for their reportorial failings. They also should wonder if we are walking down the same path again as the media offer increasingly inadequate coverage of major concerns of today. Is it good reporting to discuss the federal deficit and never mention the role that tax cuts have played? Is it good reporting to cite Social Security as one of the causes of the deficit, when in fact it has paid its own way and has a surplus of $2.7 trillion? Does it reflect good reporting that you can get a much more complete and more accurate picture of Afghanistan from Greg Mortenson’s 2009 book Stones Into Schools than from our news media?

Morgan has done us a service by refreshing the memory of the 1960s for those of us who were there, and informing those who were not there. But simply looking back is not enough. This book challenges us who are involved in journalism to look ahead and do a better job than was done in the 1960s, or we’re all doomed to repeat our mistakes.

GUIDO H. STEMPEL III
Ohio University

War with Mexico! America’s Reporters Cover the Battlefront. Tom Reilly, edited by Manley Witten. Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2010. 335 pp.

From the perspective of the early twenty-first century, the U.S. war against Mexico (1846-1848) is easy to overlook. It was a relatively short war, after all, pitting the nascent power of the United States against a divided Mexico and its irrepressible leader, Gen. Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna.

Yet the Mexican War looms large in the history of American war reporting as the first U.S. foreign conflict covered by an enterprising band of professional journalists and amateur correspondents. As documented by the late Tom Reilly, a journalism historian at California State University-Northridge, Mexican War reporting was an important test of American journalism’s newfound energy and its fraught relations with the military, issues that would surface in later U.S. wars. 

Reilly’s goals here are straightforward and descriptive: “to reconstruct the efforts, methods, lifestyles, achievements, and failures of the individual American correspondents and, to a lesser degree, the journalistic system in which they functioned.” In this, he is largely successful, providing a detailed chronicle of an enthusiastically imperialistic era in American war reporting.

Reilly’s subjects include such reporting stars as George W. Kendall of the New Orleans Picayune and James L. Freaner—known as “Mustang”—of the New Orleans Delta. Both men were fearless, dedicated, and well organized, employing multiple couriers to elude Mexican guerillas and carry their dispatches from the front lines to Veracruz, where U.S. ships carried them to New Orleans.

New Orleans was front and center in Mexican War news. As the nation’s fourth largest city at the time, and the principal port for ships arriving from Mexico, New Orleans had a highly competitive newspaper scene. The New Orleans papers, Reilly concludes, “provided the tone, direction, and content for the reporting of the conflict—and in the journalism style of the day, most of the nation’s press followed their lead.”

Reilly also unearths the war reporting of several lesser-known correspondents, including William C. Tobey of the Philadelphia North American. In the aftermath of the U.S. victory at Cerro Gordo, Tobey described the terrible cost of combat: “While the fight is raging men can look upon death and shrink not from his bloody features; but to walk coldly over hundreds of human bodies, blackened and bloated in the sun…sickens the senses and the soul; strips even victory of its gaudy plumage and stamps the whole with an unspeakable horror.”

Another notable journalist was the outspoken Jane McManus Storms, the only woman war correspondent. Writing for the New York Sun, Storms reported from Veracruz, where she criticized one of her favorite targets, the U.S. Navy, for its “deplorable inefficiency.” She also slam-med Santa Anna and other Mexican generals for inflicting on their citizens “more burdens and outrages than the Americans dare impose.”

Many correspondents, Reilly found, advocated Manifest Destiny and were openly contemptuous of Mexico and Mexicans. Storms and other journalists argued for the annexation of Mexico as a way to bring democracy and order to the land. For his part, Tobey described Mexicans as “ignorant, barbarous, treacherous and superstitious; given to thieving, cheating [and] lying….” The Picayune’s Kendall, who had been a Mexican prisoner before the war, hated Mexicans, a fact evident in many of his reports.

Unofficial correspondents and letter writers served as another significant source of Mexican War news. Publishing under pseudonyms such as “Hombre”  and “Cactus,” these writers—junior officers, former journalists, and printers—were quick to criticize their officers, the lack of equipment, and poor rations. Like the military bloggers of the recent Iraq war, these reports frustrated Army leaders and caused headaches for the Polk administration. Even some in the press criticized the outpouring of unofficial reports: “The public has no means of judging the truth or falsehood of these statements and erroneous opinions are necessarily formed,” the New Orleans Tropic complained.

Back in the States, Mexican War reports had important political consequences because of the presidential ambitions of its leaders, including Gen. Winfield Scott. In the three elections following the war, Reilly writes, “four of the six leading candidates were Mexican War officers, and two, Zachary Taylor and Franklin Pierce, were elected president.”

The torrent of stories and letters raised other controversial topics, too, including U.S. mistreatment of Mexican civilians. After the battle of Buena Vista, for instance, Picayune correspondent John E. Durivage reported that U.S. volunteers deliberately murdered twenty-four Mexicans in retaliation for the murder of an Arkansas volunteer. In fact, many reports documented the unruly behavior of the volunteers, soldiers who were poorly trained and often resentful of—and resented by—the regular Army and its officers.

With his focus on the war and its journalism, Reilly says too little about the causes of the conflict and its complex moral dimensions. Reilly’s short chapter on anti-Mexican stereotypes is also inadequate. Although he catalogues a number of anti-Mexican attitudes and ethnic insults, he offers little explanation of the origins and consequences of these ideas.

Nevertheless, Reilly’s years of research on Mexican War journalists and their reporting make this book a valuable addition to the history of U.S. war reporting. As Reilly makes clear, Mexican War correspondents demonstrated extraordinary ingenuity to get first-hand reports to their readers, pioneering the best tradition of U.S. war reporting. Reilly’s War with Mexico! is worthy achievement and a credit to Manley Witten, a former Reilly student who edited this volume.

JOHN M. COWARD
University of Tulsa

Terror Post 9/11 and the Media. David L. Altheide. New York, NY: Peter Lang, 2009. 214 pp.

It has been a decade since that awful landmark day of smoke and fire that we now know as 9/11. Among other things that changed with those attacks in New York and Washington was a growing need to know more about “terrorism,” its perpetrators, what they hope to accomplish, and how they can be stopped.

The media, of course—oriented to either news or popular culture more generally—have played a substantial role in communicating what has been learned and what is still unknown. This is the focus of David L. Altheide’s latest study. 

Altheide is a long-time member of the Arizona State University’s School of Justice and Social Inquiry and author of numerous books.  His focus here is less on the events of a decade ago than on how those events, and others since that have been related or attributed in some way to terrorists, have been used by the political system and by news media. Part of his larger project on fear, the media, and social control, the media portion of the equation does not come off well in Altheide’s analysis.

Chapters assess the varied and changing role of media in global crises, including terrorism—the all too evident “herd” mentality of flash and personality over declining substance and analysis. There are countless examples cited in Altheide’s discussion of terrorism and propaganda, terrorism and the politics of fear, terrorism and the problem of evidence, terrorism    as moral panic, a case study of the Columbine school shootings in Colorado, terrorism programming, and the terrorism narrative and mediated evil.

Just that listing tells you how much of Altheide’s analysis focuses on fear and how the mass media build that fear as one way of building their audiences. “Team” and “sports” terms also abound with talk about our side and theirs, use of flags and other bits of nationalism, and a general “rah-rah” tone in reporting “our” wins and “their” losses. The biggest recent “win” over terrorism, of course, was the raid that killed Osama Bin Laden in Pakistan. So are we feeling safer or less fearful now?

Sadly, little of this adds to real understanding of what is going on, though it does play to the desire of many for simpler answers to complex situations. Some of the media examples you will read in Altheide’s collection will make you shake your head in wonder. All of the discussion will contribute to your understanding of how we got here.

CHRISTOPHER H. STERLING
George Washington University

Shadow of the Racketeer: Scandal in Organized Labor. David Witwer. University of Illinois Press, 2009. 336 pp.

The connection between organized crime and organized labor has long been a subject of contention among scholars of the history of the United States. The most recurrent narrative involves good men who rise through the ranks of labor only to be seduced by power and money, leading them to pair with ruffians. While the membership suffers and business owners tremble with fear, criminal enterprises are allowed to fester while an inert and ineffective government fails to curtail this menace. Only through the grace of crusading outsiders, such as journalists, will the corruption meet its end. 

While this is a simple and understandable narrative, the truth is often more nuanced. In his work, Shadow of the Racketeer, David Witwer painstakingly reveals each and every subtle twist and turn of scandal within the organized labor movement of the 1930s and 1940s. His book reveals hidden truths as to the depth and breadth of the scandals, the complicit agreements between businesses and shadowy figures and the ways in which some labor unions became corrupted. He also outlines the rise and decline of Westbrook Pegler, a Pulitzer Prize winner who exposed several key scandals in organized labor, only to find himself trapped in a repetitive narrative of which he could not let go.

Witwer, an associate professor of history at Penn State Harrisburg and author of Corruption and Reform in the Teamsters Union, begins his book with the introduction of Pegler and his movement through the ranks of journalism. Pegler’s pairing with publisher Roy W. Howard and his ability to crusade against perceived injustices helped grow his fame and draw attention to his favorite target: corruption in organized labor. Pegler’s position that all unions had abused members and were corrupted by dishonest leaders became part of the national discourse. Further-more, as Pegler revealed how union leaders William Bioff and George Scalise were tied to organized crime, his charges against labor became broader, culminating with his attacks on the Roosevelt administration and the New Deal.

As the book progresses, however, Witwer reveals a different reality compared to the one Pegler penned. Unions were not all corrupt and the corruption that did affect unions often came as a result of outside influences. Members of “The Outfit,” the criminal enterprise Al Capone left behind, tended to muscle in on honest unions, and took on leadership positions to bilk the treasury of untold fortunes. Other criminal enterprises often followed suit, thus diminishing the unions’ stated purpose and lining the pockets of gangsters.

In addition, business owners were often complicit in these activities, allowing the criminals to run unchecked through unions as a way of limiting worker dissent. In other words, while the businesses were paying financial tribute to the gangsters who pulled the strings in the labor movement, they did so as an anti-labor measure and not out of fear.

The book concludes with a look at   the decline of Pegler’s influence, as his reporting grew weak and his allegations threadbare. His self-stated efforts to improve the condition of working-class citizens who were trapped inside corruptly led groups never came to full fruition. His efforts did, however, lead to a post-war political showdown that eventually led to the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947, which substantially curtailed the strength of labor unions.

Witwer’s work is a masterpiece of research that draws on public documents, personal papers, and media reports of the time. It pulls at each minor scrap of information and organizes it well until the full image of this era is adequately clarified. The depth of the reporting and researching is both impressive and a bit daunting—while the book contains 336 pages, more than 80 pages are dedicated to research notation and indices.

In spite of this heavy research load, the book has a solidly readable quality. Witwer’s attempt to split the difference between a scholarly book and a mainstream read is admirable, making the book more readily accessible without diminishing its scholarly value. Indeed, Shadow of the Racketeer was named the 2010 book of the year by Labor History journal.

Each page contains additional revelations that, while not earth-shattering, cumulatively create an interesting examination of an understudied portion of this country’s history. Furthermore, the attention to detail in the writing allows for the rich development of the characters and the events contained in this tome.

The book is in some ways limited in its readability through the excessive number of players in each scandal and the wide range of unfamiliar acronyms. The book is not an easy read for this and other reasons having to do with the way in which the writing is crafted. However, those individuals hoping to gain a deeper understanding of this period and this topic should find the book accessible, although not easily so.

The work provided here gives readers a frank and honest look at the  reality of the labor movement of the 1930s and the rise of the concept of the racketeer. For those with an interest in labor, unions, crusading journalism, or    the New Deal era, this book is certainly worth a read.

VINCENT F. FILAK
University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh

Rude Democracy: Civility and Incivility in American Politics. Susan Herbst. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2010. 216 pp.

Like an exciting classroom discussion, Rude Democracy opens with the shock of a counterintuitive challenge. Author Susan Herbst suggests that the incivility so rife in our politics can be a valid tactic, and that condemning it outright is “banal and unsophisticated.”

From there, she constructs a nuanced argument that some incivility, but not too much, stimulates healthy debate. Rather than wasting time trying to drum it out of politics, she maintains, we should educate our students and citizenry to deal more thoughtfully with the inevitable discord. 

Herbst is professor of public policy at Georgia Tech and has a deep academic record. But she also draws on the personal. She dedicates the book to her father, Adolph, a “holocaust survivor and once stateless person, who lived the ideals of American civility without ever having to think about it.” Together, her personal experience and scholarly expertise allow Herbst to achieve something unusual in this day and age: a civil book about the uncivil.

She begins with a compact essay on the nature of civility and incivility, then uses material from the 2008 presidential campaign and its aftermath to flesh out her points. She also offers survey results on how young people respond to a politicized climate.

Herbst refuses to spend time debating “the alleged decline of civility,” an exercise she labels a “distraction.” Instead, she suggests that incivility be dealt with as an ongoing presence in the civic arena. Importantly, she believes, civility and incivility play to both the emotional and interactive aspects of contemporary politics. Rather than approaching civility as “a set of social and cultural norms,” she prefers to see it as a “tool in the rhetorical and behavioral arsenals of politics.”

With that in mind, Herbst looks at the 2008 vice presidential candidacy of then-Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, who she says represented “extraordinarily effective uses of both civility and incivility as strategic assets.” Palin could be “rabid, mean-spirited, catty, empathetic, warm, humane, and engaging, all at the same time,” as Herbst says.

Palin’s rhetoric could be extreme, for example in accusing then-Sen. Barack Obama of “palling around with terrorists.” But Herbst also finds that Palin used interaction, humor, passion, warmth, and gratitude to “create a comfortable environment for people to express themselves.” Palin’s campaign “ran to the heart of how civility and incivility are both thoroughly and self-reflexively tactical, thrown on and off, in an age of constant media attention and Internet chatter,” she says.

As for Obama, Herbst focuses on early activities of his presidency, including a speech at Notre Dame where he explicitly asked Americans to debate courteously despite their differences. Then, however, came the notorious town hall meetings over health care reform, where anger and disruption often kicked civility aside. If Obama’s method was, to quote one analyst Herbst cites, to “find common ground and show respect for an opponent,” his opponents often deliberately chose incivility in response.

Herbst seems determined to stay balanced and nonpartisan, but in doing so she leaves us hanging. Are we to admire or condemn Palin for whipping up crowds with extreme insults (in the “comfortable environment” she fostered, people were heard shouting “treason” and “off with his head” about Obama) and misinformation (she charged that Obama’s plan included “death panels”)? Are we to appreciate Obama’s stubborn allegiance to civility or see it as a weakness that let foes trample his ideas?

Perhaps wisely, Herbst leaves these questions for class discussion and further research. But one could hope for some greater authorial guidance. For one thing, she never fully differentiates incivility from rougher notions such as rudeness, nastiness, or demagoguery. She seems curiously unconcerned about what she calls “creative stretching of the truths” in political debate, maintaining that “’facts’” (her quote marks) “may have only a marginal relationship to the struggle over civility.”

She does offer some unexceptionable if general disclaimers. She writes that “awful lies” should be “judged with vigor.” She dislikes “hateful speech” such as “political communication [that] is racist, sexist, or just plain rude.” She promotes a “civilized ‘culture of argument’” based on “teaching basic argumentation skills,” pushing politicians for “clarification, evidence, and logic” and practicing “hard listening.”

But she leaves behind a serious drawing-the-line question. When does   the rhetorical combat go too far, and what standards should apply in judging it? In treating civility and incivility as tools of political discourse, she seems to imply that what’s most important is whether they work, not whether they advance or corrupt public understanding.

Finally, to many students, the 2008-2009 headlines already seem ancient. The emergence of the so-called tea party movement in 2010 raised even newer incivility issues, the shooting of a member of Congress in January 2011 raised more, and doubtless the 2012 campaign will bring a new load. Herbst’s main questions are eternal, but the specifics may soon seem dated.

Overall, though, Herbst has written a valuable, fair-minded book. It is a contribution to the literature of history, ethics, and public affairs, and it could easily be used to stimulate lively classroom conversations—the kind that spill into the halls when the hour has ended.

CARL SESSIONS STEPP
University of Maryland

Representing Disability in an Ableist World: Essays on Mass Media. Beth A. Haller. Louisville, KY: The Advocado Press, 2010. 213 pp.

Sophisticated and highly readable, Representing Disability in an Ableist World is a work that can be appreciated both by those who are already familiar with disability studies scholarship concerning media and by those who are seeking a comprehensive introduction to it. Written by Beth A. Haller, a professor of journalism at Towson University as well as the author of the popular blog Media dis&dat (http://media-dis-n-dat.blogspot.com/), the work surveys important issues surrounding the representation of disability in culture. 

Beginning with the premise that media narratives “ignore, devalue or misrepresent disability issues,” Haller methodically moves through ten chapters that discuss a wide variety of case studies, genres, misrepresentations, assumptions, and media (both old and new). Haller demonstrates a formidable expertise at deconstructing ableist narratives while showing the readers the stakes involved in their deconstruction.

Reading the book, I felt energized not only by Haller’s strong arguments decrying negative representations of disability that one would expect to find in such a book but also through her nuanced analysis of less stereotypical representations. In particular, what I enjoyed most is the way Haller continuously returns to the reality of an active, engaged disability community that both responds to the media that purports to depict them, and then generates original representation that counters those depictions. For instance, Haller’s first chapter looks at disability-related content on the Internet, emphasizing the multiple ways disability activists have created a range of digital media. Of course, Haller does not argue that the Internet represents a kind of technological utopia for people with disabilities; rather, she argues that new media provide an opportunity for more sophisticated representation, often without the gatekeeping, filters, and interests associated with the traditional media. Plenty of examples help prove her case, and those with an interest in disability representation might find themselves rapidly underlining Haller’s resources of blogs, YouTube videos, and Twitter feeds to return to later.

Besides her strong use of resources and scholarship, Haller’s overall tone is one of the book’s great assets. There is a sense of cautious optimism as she discusses the changing media landscape. As readers, we are treated in chapter 8 to an analysis of texts such as the work of John Callahan and the development of his Pelswick animated series on Nickelodeon. In this chapter, Haller traces a development of multiple phases of disability humor throughout the twentieth century: The first is represented by the spectacle of the freak show and the second phase is best represented by “sick humor” (such as Helen Keller jokes, etc.). The third phase, in which disability is also the focus of the comedy, is characterized by the significant difference that the humor is generated and controlled by people with disabilities themselves. Haller argues that work such as Pelswick and others help usher in a fourth phase, in which disability humor is simply part of a “humor landscape… disability is just part of the diverse humor panorama, not the reason for the comedy.” Haller’s emphasis in discussing the third and fourth phases is on the role of the disabled creator of the humor.

Her emphasis on the power of disability creators and activists is welcome and extends to other chapters as well. In another case, she discusses the responses to such relatively recent films as Clint Eastwood’s Million Dollar Baby and Ben Stiller’s Tropic Thunder. In her analysis, Haller focuses on the activism generated by controversial storyline elements within the films. She clearly demonstrates that disability advocates made a strong impact that directly influenced coverage by the mainstream media, and thus the public at large was made aware of negative disability stereotypes.

One can also see the power of advocacy in Haller’s analysis of the decline in cultural position of the annual Jerry Lewis Labor Day Telethon. The arguments against the Jerry Lewis telethon within the disability rights community are well-rehearsed, but Haller’s analysis articulates so well the pitiable and stigmatized attitudes that have been associated with the event that it almost reads like a farewell letter (and, indeed, Lewis has announced that this year will be his last). “Happily,” she says, “the subject of this chapter is becoming less and less relevant to the disability rights community.”

Even so, the study of ableism within the media on the whole is increasingly relevant, and Haller’s book is a wonderful way to explore the past, present, and future depictions of representations of disability. Those who are beginning to take an interest in disability studies scholarship may find particular value in chapter 2, where Haller discusses in great detail her research methods, with an emphasis of conducting qualitative and quantitative analysis in media research. Haller’s work is perfect for adoption in a course on disability studies or other applicable courses.

NEIL PATRICK SHEPARD
Davenport University

Reorienting Global Communication: Indian and Chinese Media Beyond Borders. Michael Curtin and Hemant Shah, eds. Champaign, IL: University of Illinois, 2010. 328 pp.

The world is watching India and China, with their liberalized market economies, more than one billion people each, their ancient history with past glories and cultural riches; together, they are seen as formidable competition to the developed world. Yet books focusing on the mass media of these two Asian superpowers are scarce. One is Marcus Franda’s China and India Online: The Politics of Information Technology in the World’s Largest Nations (2002). There are books on media and information and communication technology in the Asian region generally, but most of these are already dated. After more than two decades of liberalization and market growth, the importance of measuring the media’s social and cultural impact in this important region cannot be overemphasized. 

In Reorienting Global Communication, editors Michael Curtin of the University of California-Santa Barbara and Hemant Shah of the University of Wisconsin-Madison aim “to reorient perceptions of cultural flow, offering an alternative mapping of the globe.” The book encompasses a broad spectrum of media, and examines such topics as the enormous popularity of Indian and Chinese blockbusters; transnational, national, and regional dimensions of their film and pop culture industries; as well as their TV, newspaper, Internet, and even wedding businesses.

These fourteen informed essays collectively argue that Indian, Chinese, and pan-Asian media generally pose a threat to Western and particularly U.S. domination. For decades, global media scholars have examined media in the   light of theories such as modernization theory and cultural imperialism theory, which clearly focus on communication flow from developed to developing countries. Such media also assert the dominance and cultural values of the West. Now, in the twenty-first century, many Asian countries, particularly India and China, boast a much stronger media infrastructure and generally more prominent positions in global affairs. Curtin and Shah urge scholars to examine emerging patterns of communication flow in the context of the multidirectional exchange of information.

Entertainment industries in India and China—particularly film—are thriving.  With India and China representing one-third of the world’s population, they have little difficulty in finding large markets for their products either domestically or around the globe. Diasporas “represent not only new markets for media institutions based in the home country that are reimagining themselves as global operators, [but] they also represent resources for politicians who covet the expatriates’ money, expertise, prestige, and mobility,” the authors state.

The film industry plays a major role in the economies of both India and China. As Curtin and Shah point out in their introduction, although Hollywood still reigns supreme, with movies like Spiderman bringing in $900 million (including more than $500 million outside the United States), the sheer size of Chinese and Indian audiences for home-grown products is changing the film industry’s economic balance. They point out that although 125 million people saw Spiderman worldwide, 110 million people in India alone saw the Bollywood superhero movie Krrish. Although the market for Chinese and Indian films outside the countries may be relatively small, they are able to generate an impressive income in video and soundtrack sales. Films like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon are able to appeal to Western audiences as well. In her analysis of the film industry in China, Emilie Yueh-Yu Yeh writes that pan-China productions are more dominant due in part to protectionism by the Chinese government, and that pan-Asian productions need the blessing of China’s official agencies in order to succeed.

Tackling diverse topics, the contributors make the reader think about media developments and their impacts in India and China and beyond. For example, Sujatha Moorti explores a different type of transnational business—the multimillion-dollar Indian wedding industry—by referencing films, magazines, web portals, bridal expos, and wedding malls. The average cost of an Indian wedding is between $20,000 and $150,000, with wealthier Indians spending as much as $128 million. Non-resident Indians have contributed to the growth of this industry, Moorti reports, and have added transnational entertainment such as Flamenco dancers and Bollywood dancers. Madhavi Mallapargada, in her essay on the role of websites, discusses how online communities such as Namaste.com promote the idea that “the promise of India is virtually everywhere.” (This essay would have had greater impact if references beyond 2003 had been used.)

Chin-Chuan Lee, analyzing the state-approved discourses in Global Times, a Chinese newspaper with a circulation of 1.5 million, found that the discourses were primarily framed within the con- text of U.S.-China relations. The discussion revolved around China’s peaceful rise to become a global power, and its desire to become a powerful global force. The essay by Zhongdang Pan on the Chinese Community Party-owned CCTV’s spring festival gala hosted by a Chinese-American host further illustrates the fact that Chinese media can easily command audiences of millions. A nationalist integration effort by the Chinese government, this show is now telecast to a global audience created by the Chinese diaspora.

Reorienting Global Communication provides a clear understanding of the growing importance of the media and entertainment industries in India and China. Although the market for Chinese and Indian media products reaches mainly their own citizens or ex-pats, these two countries pose healthy competition to the market for U.S. entertainment. This book takes a refreshing new approach in examining changing global media power, and provides a starting point for continued discussion of cultural pluralism and alternative models of information flow.

SANDHYA RAO
Texas State University

Refiguring Mass Communication: A History. Peter Simonson. Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press “History of Communications” series, 2010. 261 pp.

This is a rhetorical and historical study into what the term “mass communication” has meant since (and even well before) the term first appeared nearly a century ago.

A member of the University of Colorado communication faculty who began his academic work in religious studies and then turned to intellectual history, Peter Simonson organizes his argument around narrative accounts of five key figures and their own communicative worlds—three of them predating the modern conceptions of mass communication. Indeed, he redefines the very concept by using these significant but overlooked rhetorical episodes in its history. As he puts it in the introduction, his is a study of changes in “mass communication as a social concept, a rhetorical utterance, and a heterogeneous family of social forms.” 

His six chapters describe and compare the very different visions of “mass” communication articulated by a range of “expert” observers: the Biblical figure Paul of Tarsus (to study the communication of religion); the nineteenth-century printer turned poet and journalist Walt Whitman; university educator and sociologist Charles Horton Cooley; industrial leader David Sarnoff (to study what mass communication meant in the 1920s as radio got started), and the late media scholar sociologist Robert K. Merton, with whom the author corresponded and conducted interviews.

How each of these exemplars, one from ancient times, two from the nineteenth century, and two active in the twentieth, were selected for study is interesting in itself. Each man (and Simonson recognizes that masculine bias as a drawback to his work) offers quite different geographical and social contexts from which visions of mass communication have emerged, as well as the religious and moral horizons against which they have taken shape, and, finally, the heterogeneous social forms of communication that they point to. A final chapter looks at the concept of mass communication today by examining a modern county fair.

“Overall, the book is intended to extend pragmatist and Emersonian traditions of thinking about communication and rhetoric,” Simonson says. Subject to the background one brings to this volume, some of the discussion can get fairly complex, but Simonson’s insights are worth the effort.

CHRISTOPHER H. STERLING
George Washington University

Prime Time Prisons on U.S. TV: Representation of Incarceration. Bill Yousman. New York, NY: Peter Lang, 2009. 200 pp.

In the last two decades of the twentieth century, the number of incarcerated Americans quadrupled, resulting in two million-plus citizens in prisons and jails. Bill Yousman, former managing director of the progressive nonprofit Media Education Foundation and now a lecturer in communications at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, takes the mass media to task over the invisibility of this vast population of prisoners. He situates the gap in the larger context of a critical social problem—the incarceration of millions nationwide—and the distortions that are rife in media representations of multiple aspects of crime in general. Analyzing both nonfiction (news) and fictional (drama) representations, he finds little to commend. 

The prison population growth does not necessarily indicate a concurrent increase in crime. In fact, Yousman cites data indicating the opposite, and therein lies the problem. The media present numerous misleading images so that the public, most of whom have no source of information on crime and prisons other than their televisions, believe they know the real story—when they are actually privy only to mediated images that can lead to distorted perceptions. The prevalence and popularity of TV crime shows and an overrepresentation of violent crime in particular on the news and in dramas—a constructed “pseudo-environment”—lead many viewers to believe that there is more violent crime than ever before. The effect is increased public anxiety and the potential, ultimately, of misinformed public policy. Yousman provides a full picture of the economics and philosophy at work in commercial television, so that the distortions and limitations make sense, albeit at best disappointing and at worst detrimental to social progress.

Yousman spends the first third of his book on background and context, presenting plentiful statistics and theory regarding the U.S. penal system and those areas of media representation that have been studied. He briefly addresses images of prisons in magazines and films. Relying on cultural analysis, criticism, and semiotic and narrative theory he invokes integral scholars and theorists ranging from Walter Lippmann to Antonio Gramsci and Michel Foucault. Yousman’s language is sometimes dissertation-steeped, but he is successful in clearly making the point that hegemonic culture/devices create mass perception and moral panics, an argument that is central to his thesis.

He first tackles local and national news of prisons, observing that both lean heavily toward coverage of atypical events such as riots, escapes, and unusual rehabilitation programs, rather than on basic issues such as inmate health care, juvenile justice, and prisoner rights. Conceding that the difficulty in gaining access to prisons is part of the problem in balanced and accurate reporting, he observes that, nevertheless, the economic bottom-line drives the true dynamic: sensational content draws audiences, which pleases local affiliates, networks, and, ultimately, advertisers.

Yousman identifies contradictory, inaccurate, or exaggerated themes prevalent in network news, including: that prisoners are dangerous; that society needs prisons to keep citizens safe; that prisoners deserve the punishment they receive; that they drain society’s resources; that prisons take good care of prisoners; and that criticisms of prisons exist but are limited and marginalized. Each theme, he contends, capitalizes on the emotions they arouse in viewers, but fails to deliver substantial, accurate, factual information. Based on interviews with inmates, Yousman provides a list of fifteen points that could be covered on TV news for which he found no evidence in his analyses, beginning with the disproportionate incarceration of people of color and ending with the extent and causes of inmate suicidal behavior.  As he bitingly summarizes, “2 Million Americans Imprisoned, Television News Looks the Other Way, No Details at Eleven.”

U.S. TV news pays little attention to the fact that we have become an “incarceration nation.” Fictional representations, however, step into the void. Yousman analyzed three prime-time television crime shows—NYPD Blue, Law & Order, and The Practice—that “regularly feature images of prisons and prisoners in their ongoing dramatic narratives about the battle between the forces of good and the forces of evil.” With glimpses of prison cells here and there, TV drama takes viewers a tad closer to prison life, but Yousman concludes that they are not much better than TV news at accurate depictions. He observes a lack of scenes of daily prison life where inmates interact with one another or guards; flat characters used as plot devices; moralizing about guilt and innocence; justification for the brutality of prison life; and defense of the criminal justice system. Throughout the book, he references representations of race (as well as class, gender, and sexuality where relevant), and notes a marked difference in the treatment of whites, blacks, and Latinos. For example, Latino and white prisoners are often depicted as “misguided,” while blacks tend to be portrayed as purely innocent or purely evil. Law enforcement agents like police and attorneys tend to be the more fully developed human characters, often heroes, in contrast to the shallowly constructed inmate “evildoers.”

Yousman devotes a full chapter to the critically acclaimed HBO drama Oz, which presents an unforgiving look at the guts of a maximum-security prison. Though prisoners are finally the “subjects rather than the objects of the discourse,” alas, they prove to be, he says, yet another example of distortion. Using detailed scene descriptions, content analysis, and dialogue excerpts, he focuses on the extreme violence that he concludes is exaggerated and even celebrated. Oz inmates are shown as sadistic, remorseless, and monstrous. And despite the show’s self-promotion as “groundbreaking,” there is little evidence of progress, for instance, in moving away from the centuries-old stereotype of black males as “violent savages.” This is particularly problematic, Yousman points out, because of the dearth of images of black men on television in general. Et tu, Oz? A program that could have offered a trend reversal is still guilty of a primary interest in attracting viewers via “misery and chaos and terror.”

Yousman is not the first to raise these issues. Other media critics and criminologists have addressed the skewed or nonexistent images of prisons, and Prime Time Prisons covers ground previously trod by David Wilson and Sean O’Sullivan’s Images of Incarceration: Representations of Prison in Film and Television Drama. The 2004 work takes a broader view, looking at dramatic films in addition to television, and provides a slightly more upbeat perspective in its acknowledgement of the potential for penal reform arising out of the mediated images discussed. (Yousman regards television as a conservative force, not one instrumental in social change.)

With its sound methodology and focus on U.S. small screens, however, Yousman’s work is an essential contribution to media studies and criminology. He concludes with an emphasis on the power of stories—both fiction and nonfiction—and refers to his text as a “case study in the construction of a hegemonic moment.” His point, well made despite some telltale academic repetition, is that media images tell stories and have a direct and potent effect on public perceptions and, ultimately, on criminal justice policy.

KATHLEEN COLLINS
John Jay College of Criminal Justice
The City University of New York

News at Work: Imitation in an Age of Information Abundance. Pablo J. Boczkowski. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2010. 272 pp.

News Talk: Investigating the Language of Journalism. Colleen Cotter. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2010. 294 pp.

Many studies of the cultural and sociopolitical effects of news stories tend to ignore the journalistic practices that have produced those texts, focusing on larger structures of power and domination. Both of these books rebalance the equation by highlighting instead how daily routines in newsrooms determine the selection, narrative, and presentation of news stories—routines that are increasingly shaped not only by professional practices but also by journalists’ expectations of what the public wants to read. 

Reading both volumes in these hand-wringing times over the future of journalism is a refreshing reminder that journalists working at legacy media are above all professionals, not devious conspirators or pawns of other interests. It is also a wake-up call that the demands of online media might be altering those routines in ways that are pernicious for both journalism and the media’s role in public affairs.

In her book, News Talk, Cotter, a linguist at Queen Mary University of London and a former U.S. newspaper reporter, seeks to ground sociolinguistic inquiries regarding  “news talk” in the actual daily routines that journalists undertake when putting together a story, and to show how those routines are linked to professional norms and to understandings of their communities. This emphasis makes her book a must-read for any scholar of the language and discourse of mass communication, especially those who have not worked extensively for a news media organization.

As flagged by the title of his book, News at Work, Pablo Boczkowski, a long-time scholar of new media who teaches at Northwestern University, also centers his study on journalists’ practices. He adds a comparative print-online analysis and then takes it further to the news readers, looking for how the producer-product-consumer interaction has created what he calls the paradox of today’s media—how in “an age of information plenty, what most consumers get is more of the same.” His groundbreaking volume is a most welcome addition to any course in journalism studies, and it will be particularly precious to students of new media.

For her part, Cotter essentially updates for the twenty-first century the sociological and anthropological work of classics like Gaye Tuchman’s 1978 Making News. She takes the norms, values, and routines that any contemporary journalism student or professional in the United States learns by heart—from objectivity to the “boilerplate” paragraph—and shows them to be essential to the formation of news discourses. A journalist would find very little new information in this book, which relies on ethnographic observation of newsroom workings, textbooks, and trade publications, though Cotter also makes explicit the easy-to-ignore links between mundane practices and pervasive societal values. For academics without direct experience, however, this text amounts to a necessary field guide to “the motivations, conventions, and rituals of a community and their output in discourse.”

Organized along a production chronology, News Talk starts with learning the craft of journalism and its best practices, then moves to determination of newsworthiness and story selection, and concludes with the actual composition of a news item for publication. Throughout, the essential contention is that texts and journalistic discourses cannot be studied without a clear comprehension of the processes and practices that create them.

Of the latter, Cotter maintains, the key determinant is news values—themselves constructed as essential to the “craft” of reporting and writing, and thus socialized into all news professionals either in journalism schools or through an apprentice model. Every cub reporter knows them: “proximity, impact, change, prominence, conflict, timeliness, usefulness, and the unusual,” or some variation. A reporter, and her editor, uses them as a checklist in choosing a story—the more checks, the better the chances that an event, a tip, an idea will actually become the news. The same values will then influence the “lede” (often the only part read), source selection, the inclusion of contextual and background information, and story placement in the newspaper and on the page. As Cotter rightly points out, although the lay public may increasingly see those choices as overtly ideological, for most journalists, it is simply a matter of what fits the canons of what’s news—even though those very criteria hide cultural meanings.

As an example, Cotter examines coverage of a California ballot proposal aimed at denying illegal immigrants certain public benefits. She observes that the very simplified, non-attributed, descriptive summary of Proposition 187 is used by reporters repetitively and nearly verbatim in multiple stories as the “boilerplate” providing necessary background over many months. Actually, though, the practice ends up giving an apparently uncontested framing of a deeply controversial issue.

One of the most interesting findings in Cotter’s book is the extent to which “the audience is a co-participant in the construction of news discourse” by being on journalists’ minds constantly when making editorial decisions. From the early story meeting, when ideas are brainstormed, to pagination, from reporter-source relationships to assumptions about prior knowledge in ongoing stories—the faceless “reader” (or viewer, one assumes) is part of the journalist’s thinking, Cotter says, an echo of coorientation theory. One feisty newspaper masthead exemplifies the inextricable link between news media and their communities: The self-description of the Mason Valley News of Yerington, Nevada, reads, “The only newspaper in the world that gives a damn about Yerington.”

Boczkowski’s book carries the same insight a step further by methodically analyzing news consumption as well as news production for their impact on news output—and its political consequences. The starting point is a provocatively simple observation: Since the advent of online journalism, most people read or hear news during their work days, not during leisure time at home or to kill time while commuting. Those changed routines of consumption put a premium on quickly scannable, easily readable news bits updated frequently enough that they can provide a short break from work demands. Given that online tools have also made it all too easy for journalists to base their choices on what the public is reading now—not only are clicks fast to count, but the competition is newly visible—how is consumption changing production and the product?

To answer those questions, Boczkowski takes Argentina’s two leading newspapers and their independently operated websites, and then interviews their print and online editors as well as their readers, and, finally, conducts a content analysis of their news stories from 1995 to 2007. The comprehensive research design masterfully exposes the links among those spheres and, if one generalizes the conclusions beyond Latin America, provides a convincing argument for why new media seem to have ushered an era of more stories about less content, especially in the realm of public-affairs news.

The central mechanism that Boczkowski analyzes is imitation and the resulting homogenization of news content. In his ethnography of work routines at Clarín.com, the country’s most popular online news site, he finds that the increased pace in the hard news section of the newsroom leaves little time for anything more than pushing out short stories—some 85% of stories are authored in less than thirty minutes. Constant online monitoring of competing media organizations is the idea-generator for most stories, which, of course, fuels imitation so pervasive that stories across the media environment are increasingly similar not only in subject matter, but also in narration and presentation. Through reader interviews, Boczkowski finds that not only are consumers aware and feel powerless before such homogeneity of content, but also that their new habit of “news at work” pushes them to avoid controversial topics that would fare badly in watercooler exchanges. For journalists, this tendency exacerbates the conflict between their professional calling to cover public affairs and the economic mandate to please readers with fluffier stuff. As a print national desk editor complains to Boczkowski, “It is very difficult for us to place [a story] … because people are not interested.”

As a consequence, News at Work’s conclusions are quite dire. A public preference for light news, transformed into journalistic routine through competition and imitation, means that news media have to chose between lose-lose options. If they abandon hard news, they lose their ability to shape the public agenda, but if they buck the trend and abandon the mass public, they also lose what makes them powerful to begin with. Boczkowski also finds dim prospects for the traditional media’s replacement by consumer-generated content, based on his analysis of the cursory and passive nature of online news consumption. His sample readers tend not to use the web in any meaningful interactive way—leading one to wonder whether this alone among the book’s findings might not be different for the U.S. context or for younger news users who have grown up interacting online.

Regardless, a systemic failure of mainstream news media would have grave consequences for the public, and both Boczkowski and Cotter provide urgent reminders of how symbiotically media and their audiences work to paint increasingly skewed pictures of the world.

GIOVANNA DELL’ORTO
University of Minnesota

The New York Times Reader: Science and Technology. S. Holly Stocking and the Writers of The New York Times. Washington, DC: CQ Press, 2011. 258 pp.

As a veteran of home ownership and the frequent repair of vehicles, buildings, toys, and appliances, I have a sizable collection of tools in my garage. I have organized those tools, some of which I know how to use, into separate toolboxes according to the job they would be used for. There are boxes for plumbing, electrical, mechanical, and general, so when the inevitable household disaster strikes, the appropriate box can be quickly located and delivered to the scene. Knowledge of which tools to keep in each box, as well as how to use them, came from a wide variety of experiences with my father, my father-in-law (who knows everything—just ask him), and my own trials and frequent failures. 

The New York Times Reader: Science and Technology by S. Holly Stocking, a journalism professor at Indiana University, and her Times colleagues is a guidebook for students and professionals who aspire to be science journalists. It is organized in much the same way as the tools in my garage. The chapters are focused on the particular applications of science journalism: discoveries, scientific meetings, features that explain, features that cover scientists, features that cover issues and trends, extended narratives, and commentary—including essays, blogs, reviews, and editorials. Each section includes a description of the tools essential to the task, along with instruction and strategies for making the best use of those tools.

To illustrate, the tools listed in chapter 3 for “explanation” include familiar comparisons, clear definitions, vivid and conversational language, humor, visuals, and transformational explanations (explanations of concepts that violate readers’ ordinary understanding of the concepts). In addition, each chapter contains a collection of model stories used to describe strategies for using the tools. Each model story is preceded by a brief introduction pointing out significant elements, as well as the tools and techniques used, followed by a “Making Connections” insert suggesting focused discussion questions and projects. Finally, several chapters include a brief interview with a working science journalist.

The Reader contains four stories that are annotated by the author to visibly highlight and explain the particular lessons to be learned from the model. Four annotated stories appears to be about the right number. Too much annotation discourages the student from critically reading each piece. I found the annotations especially useful in the “trends and issues” section, where the guidelines are not as specific because of the structural complexity of the science and technology stories. However, the book could benefit from perhaps one more annotated story in the section that treats extended narratives. This story type is challenging, but in a different way from the others. While the story is factual, it employs some elements common to nonfiction writing for the purpose of explaining a concept and illustrating its effect or application in a practical sense. There are model stories presented in this section, but the addition of an annotated model could make the elements of this style more understandable to the student reader.

I like this book very much. Even in the first chapter, as I read through the examples, considered the annotated example story, and attempted one of the “Try This” activities, I found myself recognizing the parts of the stories and beginning to understand them as a more coherent whole. Reading this book makes me want to go do this! At least it makes me want to try to learn how to do this. The explanations are clear, the model stories are interesting and varied, and the pedagogy seems sound. The projects appear to be especially useful at expanding the reader’s understanding while providing opportunities for actual writing and obtaining feedback from an instructor. The book says what it has to say in a vivid and memorable way without degenerating into a word salad, the heartbreaking path taken by so many textbooks.

This is certainly not a book that can be fully appreciated if read in a weekend. To get the full impact, the reader must actively engage the material, pause for discussion and consideration of the techniques used in the model stories, and participate in the excellent activities and projects suggested in the frequent “Try This” boxes. Beyond their instructional value, there is much to be gained from just reading the thoughtful collection of model stories that cover a wide range of scientific activity. While it could be used in isolation, the book is more likely to be used as part of a class that includes writing, feedback, more writing, discussion, and an ongoing dialogue with peers and instructors. In this case, the book should not be expected to cover absolutely all aspects of every type of science writing. Even so, it appears to come close. This book should be a powerful supplement to a challenging class.

Experiencing this book strengthens the notion that all students, not just journalism students, should be learning to “explain.” While the explanations might be in writing, or speaking, or multimedia, or in some other form, there is a need to explain specialized concepts to non-specialists who need or want to understand how or why something happens or what will happen eventually if we keep doing what we are doing. But the people who need or want to know often do not have the background to understand the concepts or even where to begin to look for information. This book offers guidance to find the tools to get the job done.

SAMUEL P. WALLACE
University of Dayton

Media, NASA, and America’s Quest for the Moon. Harlen Makemson. New York, NY: Peter Lang Publishing, Inc., 2009. 272 pp.

Harlen Makemson has written a thorough and well-researched history of America’s lunar program through three perspectives. The charge given the National Aeronautics and Space Administration at its birth in 1958 was to provide “the widest practicable and appropriate dissemination of information concerning its activities.” But the agency had no guidelines for how to accomplish that goal. Makemson, an associate professor in the School of Communications at Elon University, details some of the internal battles within the agency and between its early public relations apparatus and the press as NASA struggled to find a balance between information control and transparency. During some early crises, critics charged that NASA actually stood for “Never A Straight Answer.” 

The book also examines the relationship between devoted space advocates and the news media. Makemson points to the influence of Wernher von Braun’s early articles in Collier’s magazine during the 1950s, which showed that print media could turn the country’s attention to the stars. As the space program took off in the 1960s, the young U.S. TV journalism field took off with it. Makemson details how broadcast network news executives fought fierce battles internally to fund coverage of the space program, whose activities sprawled over multiple locations all around the country. NASA’s early reluctance to provide easy access to the launch sites and Mission Control in Houston meant that television had to work especially hard to create the visuals so necessary to the medium. Once the networks committed to covering the space program, however, they spent enormous sums of money to out-do one another in a ratings race that eventually devolved into “competitive inanities,” as one network executive put it.

Makemson also provides a history of how millions of Americans experienced the accomplishments and tragedies of the early space program through TV and print media. He refers to hundreds of newspaper and magazine articles, aerospace industry reports, editorials, trade journal discussions, and internal documents produced by the networks to outline how and why the coverage unfolded as it did.

The book begins with a description of von Braun’s 1952 article in Collier’s, “Man on the Moon: The Journey.” Von Braun soon got a call from Disney, which was planning a TV program to tout its new California theme park. The “Man in Space” and “Man and the Moon” episodes of the Disneyland television series in 1955 whet the public appetite for the infant space program. Once the Soviet Union launched Sputnik in 1957, the space race became a media focus for its military implications as well as for the drama of men on the moon.

Because the early space program was an offshoot of the military’s missile programs, NASA’s early media policy reflected security and secrecy. The general rule was “Do First, Talk Second,” and all press requests had to go through the Office of Public Information. But once the inaugural members of the astronaut corps were ready to be introduced to the nation, NASA had to revise its public information policy to accommodate the celebrity of the seven men chosen to fly.

Makemson unearths a wealth of details about how NASA balanced the needs of a more and more demanding press with the need to shelter the agency from scrutiny while it attempted to work out a staggering number of technical and mechanical difficulties. After a series of difficult negotiations, NASA permitted a live pool video feed of the first U.S. manned flight, a suborbital journey by Alan Shepard, despite the chance that the mission might spectacularly fail. President John F. Kennedy himself touted the mission as proof that America could accomplish as much as the Soviets, and under the full scrutiny of the world.

Throughout the Mercury and Gemini programs, NASA generally loosened many press restrictions. Especially for broadcast journalists who anchored live programs, this led to an unprecedented chance to connect with audiences and display knowledge and familiarity with mission details. The network anchors, especially Walter Cronkite, heralded each mission as another step forward in the race with the Soviets to the moon. Makemson devotes some attention to criticism that the networks were overly enthusiastic boosters and failing in their watchdog duty. This became all too real a charge when the Apollo 1 fire on the launch pad killed three astronauts and taxed NASA’s ability to respond to a media, as well as a programmatic, crisis.

The agency’s behavior regarding releasing information in the hours and days after the Apollo fire was misguided, at best. The ensuing investigation by a congressional review board blamed, in part, NASA’s rush to meet the timetable of putting a man on the moon by 1970, a goal repeated over and over by the media. The space press corps used the accident as an opportunity to look inward and determined that they had perhaps become willing partners with NASA in creating a mythic vision of American spaceflight that was impervious to questions of funding, competence or discretion. Twenty years later, both NASA and the space press corps would revisit such self-examinations in light of the space shuttle Challenger disaster; another incident in which early NASA reports that insisted the crew had died instantly were later contradicted by heart-wrenching audiotapes from the doomed vehicle.

After painstakingly detailing the early years, Makemson seems to rush through the remainder of the Apollo program, focusing most of his attention in the final two chapters on Apollo 8, the first flight to send a U.S. crew around the moon, and Apollo 11, which landed men on the lunar surface. The final two chapters deal with the prolonged arguments over whether astronauts would take TV cameras with them and send live video back to earth during the missions. It is breathtaking to think that the iconic Christmas Eve images of the earth rising above the horizon of the moon or the ghostly video of Neil Armstrong as he made “one small step for a man” might not have been available to an awed public. Even then, some NASA officials and some of the astronaut’s themselves did not want to accommodate the media.

Makemson deals with the remaining Apollo flights only briefly, stating that the American public lost interest in the space program. He might have spent some time exploring how the technological advances of the manned space program indirectly benefitted the media—the miniaturization of video cameras, the invention of the first personal-sized tape player for astronauts to listen to music in the capsule, etc.—but overall the book makes a useful contribution to our understanding of this time period in U.S history. Makemson has pulled together hundreds of materials from news sources, print and video archives, oral history projects, books written by some of the key players, and government documents and reports into one thorough narrative that helps the reader understand the complexities of this relationship. On the eve of the end of the U.S. government-funded manned space program, it is fitting to look back to where we’ve been.

KATHLEEN A. HANSEN
University of Minnesota

Lines of Attack: Conflicts in Caricature. Neil McWilliam, ed. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010. 86 pp.

What a hoot this is! Illustrated in color and black and white, Lines of Attack is a catalogue of an exhibition of journalistic caricature as a medium of political commentary held at Duke University’s Nasher Museum of Art in the first half of 2010.  I only wish I’d seen that display. Dick Cheney and former President George Bush (the younger), both widely represented here, can be glad they didn’t.

McWilliam, who teaches art and art history at Duke, along with several student contributors from Duke and the nearby University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, range widely over two specific periods of graphic political expression to demonstrate that while artistic methods and techniques change, some of the basic visual “skewering” process remains much the same. Leaders have always been ridiculed in a variety of ways, some more obvious and blatant than others. 

The first period is 1830s France and the “July Monarchy” of Louis Philippe, while the second is 170 years later—the early-twenty-first-century administration of the younger President Bush. Both held power for eight years.

As the introduction makes clear, the purpose of the exhibit and this catalogue is political, but it is not intended to be partisan. Sections of the exhibition catalogue look at comic critique of bodies (chiefly those of Philippe and Bush), the changing face of caricature between the two periods, primitivism and portrayals of the Bush presidency, and censorship of political caricature in both periods of time.

The number of times political “cartoons” are takeoffs on famous pieces of high art is one point clearly made.

The art forms include sculpture as well as works of various modes on paper. Former President Bill Clinton also appears here and there as a kind of political balance. Some of the images are damning, others worth a funny glance. Insightful text blocks tie it all together.

CHRISTOPHER H. STERLING
George Washington University

Journalists in Film: Heroes and Villains. Brian McNair. Edinburgh, UK: Edinburgh University Press, 2010. 256 pp.

It’s no news to anyone who watches movies that journalism is a perennial and popular subject. Tales of intrepid investigative reporters working the mean streets at home or in exotic locations abroad, and who overcome countless obstacles as they doggedly seek the truth are, as Brian McNair observes in Journalists in Film: Heroes and Villains, inherently dramatic. Toss in compelling—if flawed—personalities to add some human interest, and you have a recipe for cinematic success.

You also have a useful—if also flawed—teaching tool. I have included popular films in both my media law and media ethics classes for many years. Although some purport to be docudramas adopting a serious and reverential tone—All the President’s Men (1976) and Good Night, and Good Luck (2005) immediately come to mind—many are unabashed comedies. Even though no one would take literally the satire of His Girl Friday (1940), films with humor appeal to students, and can, by eliciting laughter, prompt thoughtful discussion and debate. 

McNair, a professor of journalism and communication at the University of Strathclyde, claims to focus on a fairly thin slice of cinematic history: seventy-one films released theatrically in the United Kingdom between 1997 and 2008. Some are Hollywood blockbusters; others are small, indie films with limited or no distribution in the United States, or anywhere else for that matter. But his book is more than simply an examination of ten years of film. McNair draws on a handful of iconic films to frame his analysis.

As indicated by the title, McNair divides his discussion into two broad categories: journalists as heroes and journalists as villains. His “heroes” include watchdogs (Edward R. Murrow), witnesses (mostly foreign correspondents, such as Daniel Pearl), artists (Truman Capote), and “heroines” (Veronica Guerin). McNair treats the women separately, he writes, not to ghettoize female reporters, but to reflect the reality that they present a “distinct category of movie journalist,” often stereotyped, marginalized, and relegated to women’s issues.

The journalists in the “hero” category are an estimable bunch. Many end up as martyrs, literally or symbolically, who uncover corruption and right wrongs, often at great cost. But as McNair points out, even the best of them struggle, not only with their personal demons, but with the eternal ethical dilemmas. For example, should a foreign correspondent strive for objectivity or subjectivity; stand aloof or become a participant?

Edifying as these heroes may be, the villains are clearly more fun. McNair’s irresistible groupings include “Rogues, reptiles and repentant sinners” as well as “Fabricators, fakers, fraudsters.” The “rogues” can be traced to the rollicking era of 1930s screwball comedies starring Cary Grant and Clark Gable, and more recently the likes of Richard Gere and George Clooney. “Reptiles” include plenty of paparazzi, along with manipulators like Robert Downey Jr.’s TV show host in Natural Born Killers (1994) or Kirk Douglas’ washed up reporter who resurrects his career by exploiting the story of a man trapped in a cave in Ace in the Hole (1951). The fabricators are writers like Stephen Glass in Shattered Glass (2005), ruthless in the pursuit of fame and fortune. But despite unfavorable public attitudes toward journalism, McNair points out that many of the films that criticize journalism ethics (or the lack thereof) were flops at the box office. Shattered Glass made less than $3 million worldwide, “approximately one hundredth of the revenues taken   by ‘Borat,’” the mock-umentary featuring Sacha Baron Cohen as a Kazakh TV journalist). Critics may enjoy anguishing over the industry’s flaws, but viewers prefer their reporters noble or, better still, funny.

McNair’s final category, “King-makers,” includes media barons like Citizen Kane (1941), as well as gossip and celebrity journalists and the press agents who feed them. In fact, the cover photo on the paperback edition of the book is a portrait of Burt Lancaster in his role as the odious Walter Winchell-type columnist J.J. Hunsecker in Sweet Smell of Success (1957). Although relatively few films take on public relations, which McNair calls “a necessary but unloved element of the communications process,” he cites two recent examples: Wag the Dog (1998), with its manufactured war created by a Hollywood producer, and Thank You for Smoking (2006), depicting manipulation of public opinion by the tobacco industry. Both, of course, are satires. Or are they?

McNair wraps up with an appendix containing synopses of his seventy-one chosen films, including a brief critical commentary, production details, and box office receipts (the big winner was Spider-Man 3 at $890,871,626).

There is already plenty of literature describing and analyzing journalism in film, some going back to the days of silent movies. So why read this particular book? McNair provides an exhaustive list of recent films, including a few I had never heard of and would now love to see (such as Rag Tale, a 2005 satire about life at a British tabloid). The book is very easy to dip into, and to find films that can be used not only in journalism ethics and law courses, but also for classes in literary journalism or even history.

But beyond that, McNair’s analysis is thought-provoking, especially when he ruminates on the impact of citizen journalism and the transition to what he calls “the new reality” of reporting on the depiction of the media on film.

Will the next great journalism film classic, he asks, be called Citizen Citizen?

JANE E. KIRTLEY
University of Minnesota

International Blogging: Identity, Politics, and Networked Publics. Adrienne Russell and Nabil Echchaibi, eds. New York, NY: Peter Lang, 2009. 205 pp.

Everybody (or so it seems) writes them and presumes that somebody beyond family and close friends just might read them. Blogs have become the most democratic of media, with their low entry costs and widespread free distribution, although our understanding of their audiences and impact is a mite constricted.

This new study approaches blogs globally, and explores the way blogging is being conceptualized across and within different countries. Russell teaches digital media studies at the University of Denver, while Echchaibi is at the University of Colorado-Boulder. 

The authors of these ten papers generally pass over the most popular sites in order to shed light on larger developments, sometimes questioning assumptions that form the foundation of much of what we read about blogging, and, by extension, on global amateur or do-it-yourself media. Among the topics assessed are chapters about the case of the Bondy Blog in France, theorizing Muslim blogs, thoughts on how people use blogs in China, blogging in Russia, mapping the Australian political blogosphere, political blogging in Israel, offline politics and the blogosphere in Morocco, one year in the life of an Italian blog, and re-mediating politics with blogs in Singapore.

This anthology thus suggests a varied approach to understanding how the varied blogosphere serves communication needs in different national contexts, how blogs exist in relation to one another, where they exist apart as well as where they overlap, and how they interact with other forms of communication in the larger media landscape.

Bottom line: blogs are far more widespread than many of us think, and their impact is growing.

CHRISTOPHER H. STERLING
George Washington University

Intellectuals Incorporated: Politics, Art and Ideas Inside Henry Luce’s Media Empire. Robert Vanderlan. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010. 384 pp.

This is a study about the intellectual tensions that filled the editorial side of Henry Luce’s Time, Fortune, and, to a much lesser degree, Life magazines. It is a study of self-defined intellectuals and how they operated within Luce’s control from the 1920s to the 1950s and eventually broke free—though often later fibbing about why they had really left the well-paying jobs they held with Luce’s magazines. 

Dwight MacDonald, Archibald MacLeish, James Agee, Margaret Bourke-White, and Walker Evans are among the writers and (in the last two cases) artistic photographers who contributed to (or, more likely, were on the staff of) Luce’s magazines, and who are detailed here. At times, let it be said, you get the idea the writers especially complained too much in later years about having had to prostitute their abilities to “write down” for the general audiences Luce sought. Funny—they didn’t complain at the time they made the large salaries he paid his top people, especially during the Depression. There is a bit of maddening “holier than thou” in their later complaining, that somehow working for Luce kept them from completing their really good work.

In contrast, Cornell University historian Robert Vanderlan argues that working for a growing commercial enterprise may actually have aided all of these intellectuals in achieving their best. From his melding of discussions about their lives with the story of Time Inc. (later Time-Life),  and relating a number of biographical vignettes in each case, we catch a glimpse of an exciting time in American magazine journalism. The editorial disagreements highlighted a period of exciting ferment in these periodicals—even if it was an exhausting one for the participants.

A good deal of the creative and institutional tension was political as Luce moved to the right (we’d say moderate today) and his creative writers shifted (or always were) left. How far they could   take criticism of the American business enterprise was a constant battle of give and take, with Luce and his editors, of course, always in the driver’s seat. Frustration with that drove most of the subject writers elsewhere by the late 1950s if not before.

But, as with John Hersey and Theodore White, for example, these writers had first made their mark in the corridors of the Luce empire. Their writings critical of Luce (often in the form of thinly designed characters in novels and short stories published in later years) couldn’t take away the vital early “training” the magazine work provided.

We seem to know more about Luce’s magazines than about other American periodical publishing empires, perhaps because much of the needed archival material survives. This study adds to an already fascinating shelf of works (some supported by the company itself) that take us behind the magazine covers to the editorial duels that helped create an exciting era that most of us never experienced firsthand, and that few now remember.

CHRISTOPHER H. STERLING
George Washington University

Identity Games: Globalization and the Transformation of Media Cultures in the New Europe. Anikó Imre. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009. 257 pp.

Though it has now been more than two decades since the fall of the Iron Curtain, many of us still have little knowledge about life or media in Central or Eastern Europe—let alone experience. Identity Games should help fill that gap, as author Anikó Imre examines the corporate transformation of the post-communist media landscape in the region.

Avoiding both uncritical techno-euphoria and the nostalgic projections (by some) of a simpler and thus better media world under communism, Imre, a faculty member at the University of Southern California’s School of Cinema Arts, argues that the demise of Soviet-backed regimes and the transition to transnational capitalism have had crucial implications for understanding the relationships among growing nationalist pride, media globalization, and identity. 

Imre analyzes situations in which anxieties arise about the encroachment of global entertainment media and its new technologies on heretofore protected national cultures, examining the aesthetic hybrids that have developed during the past two decades. Where the media were once American, as Jeremy Tunstall observed, the global media landscape—and its impact on cultures—has become much more diverse and less dominated by the West.

In Identity Games, Imre investigates the gaps and continuities between the final communist-controlled generation and the initial post-communist populations in education, tourism, and children’s media culture. She examines the racial and class politics of music entertainment (including the Roma Rap and Idol television talent shows), and media configurations of gender and sexuality (including playful lesbian media activism and masculinity in “carnivalistic” post-Yugoslav films). The wide range of topical material helps to underline how media feed upon and at the same time project the images of these new (but very ancient) countries.

Throughout, Imre uses concepts of “play” and games as metaphorical and theoretical tools to explain the process of cultural change, as well as an emerging engagement with play across a variety of relevant scholarly disciplines. In the vision Imre provides, political and cultural participation are seen as a series of these games where rules are continually open to negotiation.

CHRISTOPHER H. STERLING
George Washington University

A History of Communications: Media and Society from the Evolution of Speech to the Internet. Marshall T. Poe. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2011. 337 pp.

This has all the signs of becoming a very important book in the field, possibly a landmark study, though such global judgments will have to await both further time and more critical reaction. In any case, understand that this is by no means just another standard media history book.

A professor of history at the University of Iowa with a number of books about Russian history to his credit, Poe has developed a new theoretical approach to the wide sweep of communications change from initial efforts at speech to the present digital era. 

Rather than focusing on times, events, and places—or a traditional sequence of print, film, and electronic media—Poe provides what he terms a “push” theory of communication development and then shows how it can be applied across the centuries. He argues that social demands create media change, not the other way around. In turn, media push social institutions in often (though not always) predictable directions.

In true academic fashion, Poe’s chapter titles even begin in Latin. But they cover broad chunks of time and technology, speaking of the “age” of speech, manuscripts, print, audiovisual media (meaning radio, film, television), and the Internet. In each case, they speak to what is the same and what changes with each new era of innovation.

An introduction speaks to media causes and effects, and in both text and diagrams, and outlines his basic approach, which draws initially on the ideas of Canadian economic historian Harold Innis. Several tables and charts supplement the text.

This is heady stuff, ambitious and broad-ranging, and well worth the time it takes to read the well-written material.

CHRISTOPHER H. STERLING
George Washington University

The Frontier Newspapers and the Coverage of the Plains Indian Wars. Hugh J. Reilly. Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2010. 162 pp.

Nineteenth-century U.S. press culpability in encouraging heavy-handed military solutions regarding the troublesome Plains Indians is always worth a study. In a word, then, Hugh J. Reilly’s The Frontier Newspapers and the Coverage of the Plains Indian Wars is best described as useful.

Reilly, an associate professor of communication and Native American studies at the University of Nebraska at Omaha, has collected newspaper accounts and editorials of nearly thirty years of press coverage of what he calls “watershed” events involving primarily Sioux, Cheyenne, and Nez Perce Indians, and their tragic relationships with the U.S. government. 

His rationale for what constitutes a “watershed” event pivots on the event’s historical significance and subsequent news coverage, as well as the newspapers’ proximity to the event. Not surprisingly, his case studies, beginning with the 1862 Dakota uprising in Minnesota and ending with the 1890 massacre at Wounded Knee, South Dakota, show that with the possible exception of one Omaha newspaper (Omaha Herald, later Omaha World-Herald), editorial sympathies hardly ever lay with the Indians.

Even so, Reilly’s book, relying as it does on news accounts from Nebraska, Colorado, and Minnesota newspapers, provides a welcome examination of often ignored nineteenth-century newspapers outside major American cities, notably New York. “Unlike the large Eastern newspapers, which were reporting on events remote from their offices, the frontier newspapers were reporting about events taking place in their own backyards,” Reilly observes, although it is not clear how a Colorado newspaper, for example, was in the backyard of Wounded Knee, or how Omaha newspapers were proximate to the U.S. Calvary’s chase of the Nez Perce through Montana (or, for that matter, why the Nez Perce is considered a Plains tribe). As the chapters unfold, the author’s bias toward Omaha newspapers emerges. While not necessarily problematic because by the mid- to late-nineteenth century Omaha had become an important bustling river town with crucial links to the Union Pacific Railroad’s routes to points west, this preference needed some justification.

While it was likely not Reilly’s intention to duplicate Dee Brown’s sweeping Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee or John Coward’s important The Newspaper Indian, inevitable comparisons do not favor this book, which lacks the strong, graceful narrative arc of Brown’s history or the theoretical depth of Coward’s. While heavy on newspaper excerpts, it is light on analysis, giving the book a rushed feel. This is too bad because missed opportunities for original analysis abound here. I was surprised, for example, by the sympathetic voice found in the Omaha Herald (and Omaha World-Herald) compared to its yellow rival the Omaha Bee, whose accounts of Indian trepidations were usually wild exaggerations. While a reviewer should not base critiques on wishful thinking of what might have been written, it seems Reilly had some unexplored territory to exploit but did not. Inevitably, the book’s consistently thin analysis lessens the book’s potential importance to our understanding of the nineteenth-century press and its treatment of Native Americans and to communication scholars.

For any work of history, the devil is in the details. In this regard, Reilly’s book, unfortunately, has several problems needing attention. In chapter 3’s opening sentence, he writes, “By 1868, the United States had been making treaties with Native Americans for almost 200 years.” The United States did not exist in 1668. In the Battle of Little Big Horn chapter, the author suddenly demotes General Custer to “Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer.” Other careless mistakes include referring to Chief Justice Roger Taney as “Judge Tansy” or to John Coward as “journalist” and not journalism historian, or inferring that the telegraph was not in use when the Sioux defeated Custer, thus delaying news about the battle. Such errors reduce the book’s quality and the reader’s trust.

Understandably, Reilly cuts a broad swath here, trying to give the reader as many newspaper excerpts as possible, but he often fails to distinguish editorials from news items. Also, in citing newspapers, he assigns them human qualities, pushing his writing style toward clumsy. In one passage, he writes, “The Rocky Mountain News sarcastically suggested that ‘high officials’ should pacify the Indian.” Obviously, he means the newspaper’s editor suggested this, but the effect is startling. Writing elsewhere, he observes that, “. . . the Omaha newspapers had not yet fully developed the stereotypes they would later use so  frequently.” Newspapers did not develop stereotypes. Such poor phrasing occurs throughout the book, signaling again the need for a close edit before going to press.

Still, Reilly does appear to know his subject matter, and despite the careless errors and lack of strong theoretical footings, The Frontier Newspapers and the Coverage of the Plains Indian Wars gives the reader many rich examples from which future scholars can carve out new research projects. For example, the poignant excerpts from Suzette La Flesche, writing under the nom de plume Bright Eyes describing the pitiable state of Wounded Knee’s survivors, left me wanting to know more about her. So, for these and other examples, the book has merit.

BRIAN GABRIAL
Concordia University

Fashioning Teenagers: A Cultural History of Seventeen Magazine. Kelley Massoni. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, 2010. 256 pp.

Walk into any shopping mall and you’ll see a variety of stores peddling merchandise aimed at teenagers—clothing, jewelry, music, etc. Although this focus on teen consumers might seem like the recent brainchild of a savvy marketing guru, its roots can actually be traced to a magazine.

When Seventeen made its debut in 1944, it was the first publication to recognize the potential of the teenage population, specifically, teenage girls. The magazine was initially created to provide information to teen readers who, up to that point, had no such written material produced specifically for them. The promotion of the magazine ultimately prompted an awareness of this population on the part of marketers and merchandisers, which led to the creation of an industry catering to their retail needs. 

In Fashioning Teenagers: A Cultural History of Seventeen Magazine, Kelley Massoni traces the history of Seventeen magazine and explores the impact the publication had on the development of the teen consumer market. A sociology lecturer at the University of Kansas, Massoni published articles related to Seventeen in several academic journals prior to the release of her book. In this work, Massoni discusses the creation of the publication and shows its evolution as both a magazine as well as a retail influence over the years.

Fashioning Teenagers begins with an explanation of how Seventeen came into existence. The publication started with an idea from magazine veteran Helen Valentine, who believed teenagers were not recognized as viable readers by the publishing industry. She convinced publisher Walter Annenberg to take a chance on reaching out to the untapped teen market by launching a magazine that would specifically address their needs. Annenberg liked the idea and hired Valentine to serve as Seventeen’s first editor-in-chief, a position she held for six years.

Massoni’s early chapters talk about the philosophy behind the magazine and the approach taken to reach out to the teen market. Chapter 2, for example, includes a letter from Valentine, which appeared in the premiere issue and outlined the focus of the magazine.

“SEVENTEEN is your magazine, High School Girls of America—all yours!” she wrote. “It is interested only in you—and in everything that concerns, excites, annoys, pleases or perplexes you.” This was to include, “how you dress,” “how you feel and how you look,” “what you do,” “what you think,” and “what you are.”

The book’s first few chapters also address how this philosophy was conceived, and how the approach to carrying it out differed between editor and publisher as the magazine began to take hold with the public. Later chapters discuss the content development of Seventeen, as well as how it was marketed to both readers and advertisers. Two of the book’s chapters explore the tactics used by the magazine to show the possibilities the teen market held as a potential goldmine for advertisers and marketers. According to Massoni, Seventeen helped create a niche market for retailers that has mushroomed into what exists today in the teen consumer market.

The book concludes by addressing some of the changes that took place once Valentine left the magazine in 1950 and by showing how the publication has evolved to its present-day state.

What’s interesting about Massoni’s approach is that she simultaneously traces the magazine’s history while describing the behind-the-scenes internal politics that took place at Seventeen, particularly between Valentine and Annenberg. Because of the friction between the two, Massoni says, Valentine has largely been written out of the publication’s history books and deserves to be recognized for her enormous contribution to the magazine’s creation, development, and growth.

Massoni has done an admirable job of showing how and why Valentine deserves this recognition, and she is determined to leave readers with a clear understanding of Seventeen’s true history, as opposed to the expurgated version that has been passed off as its history by Annenberg’s publishing company. Massoni accomplished this through archival research, transcripts of conversations with Helen Valentine, letters between Valentine and Annenberg, and personal interviews with one of the magazine’s original staff members.

Fashioning Teenagers: A Cultural History of Seventeen Magazine is likely to appeal to those interested in magazine history, as this particular magazine led the charge in the creation of the host of teen-oriented publications that followed. It also may appeal to those interested in learning more about advertising, marketing, and promotion, as it shows how creative advertising and promotional techniques can really make a difference in influencing consumer trends.

ANDI STEIN
California State University, Fullerton

Explaining News. Cristina Archetti. New York, NY: Palgrave/Macmillan, 2010. 257 pp.

Cristina Archetti is a British political scientist with teaching experience in Washington and Amsterdam and an interest in international news.  Explaining News is her ambitious study of eight newspapers in four countries that explores what shapes the news. The book, based on her Ph.D. thesis at the University of Leeds, is  a tough read. It is clearly written, but densely packed with data, hypotheses, and theories. Advanced graduate students and faculty can perhaps fully appreciate it, especially for its wealth of data. 

Archetti looks at how elite newspapers in the United States, France, Italy, and Pakistan covered the 9/11 attacks in 2001 and the start of the U.S. war in Afghanistan. The author believes the U.S. newspapers (the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal) and the Pakistani papers in the study (Dawn and Nation) operate within an objective model of journalism. Newspapers in France (Le Monde and Liberation) and Italy (Corierre della Sera and Repubblica) operate in what she calls an interpretive model, providing commentary within their front-page news articles. Archetti coded sixty-four days of front-page articles in the period from 9/11/2001 to 11/14/2001, the day that Kabul fell to U.S. and coalition forces. She has four general research foci, examining, (1) correlation of news and political discussion, (2) news flow from the West to other countries, (3) globalization vs. localization of news coverage, and (4) the impact of organizational variables on journalists.

She wound up with more than 1,000 coded entries that generated more than 18,000 “idea elements” related to coverage of either 9/11 or the “Afghanistan issue.” In the end, Archetti, like previous researchers, finds that her research was unable to explain news patterns fully, although she does believe that politicians (“sources”) play a strong role in “framing” the news, especially international news. But she also finds that just about anywhere you look, journalists reshape the frame to conform to “editorial policy,” which in turn reflects “national interests” that are shaped by “political and economic elites.” And so forth. There is no indication that Archetti used a panel or other assistance in categorizing or coding, which always raises the question of a coder’s subjectivity. She uses charts to emphasize and simplify, but the database is at times so segmented that her charts are difficult to comprehend. One pie chart on newspaper sources has twenty-seven segments, while another has twenty-one. Even the clear-headed specialist will find these a challenge.

Although Archetti’s research method is basically correlation, like all content analysis users, she hopes to identify causation, but finds little evidence of it. The problem in correlating political statements with news content is, of course, a question of which caused which. Although she defines “news,” especially international news, as what sources say is the news, she does not find any correlations. She does find in the newspapers studied that variables such as national political policy, journalistic culture, and editorial policy influenced selection of news sources. But she found little evidence that these sources directly influenced the news, or that a newspaper’s editorial policy translated into tight control of front-page content. She sees this as a refutation of the claim that “news management” is an important variable in shaping coverage. Neither in Pakistan, with its military government, nor in the United States, where the Bush administration famously tried to control the political messages that went to the public, did she find a significant correlation between political statements and news content. This suggests a substantial editorial barrier still exists against political efforts to shape the news. These barriers are local, she says, with no indication that there is a homogenization of news because of global pressures.

Archetti defines news as not what happens but what someone says has     happened or will happen. This is, of course, necessary because no news      operation can cover everything, especially during national crises such as      9/11 and the Afghanistan war. She does identify several key variables—national journalistic culture, editorial policy, and national political culture—that do shape news. But she says they do so indirectly by affecting the selection of sources. This is, of course, gatekeeping theory, but Archetti prefers to call these editorial gatekeepers “bouncers.” Rather than select sources, she says, these newspaper editors act like nightclub “bouncers” to keep out sources with views that are not “respectable” in the eyes of their readers. Still, these “bouncers” allow lots of conflicting statements onto their news pages. The New York Times, for example, accepted sources saying, “This is war!” and “This is not war!” about the 9/11 attacks. Coherence can be found only on the editorial pages, she notes.

This is an impressive work, and the thirty-three pages of notes and eighteen pages of bibliography in English, French, and Italian show the depth of the author’s research. But in the end, Archetti comes to the same conclusion as many other researchers in trying to find out what shapes the news. It is a difficult challenge, especially when dealing with international news. She believes that additional multidisciplinary approaches integrating political communication, international communication, and news sociology will help us better understand the process.

JAMES F. SCOTTON
Marquette University

Envisioning Media Power: On Capital and Geographies of Television. Brett Christophers. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield/Lexington Books, 2009. 467 pp.

In a sometimes quite complex book, Brett Christophers develops an original geographical perspective on the nature and exercise of power in the international television economy, essentially a study of programming trade.

He applies theories of political economy as the basis for a comparative empirical examination of the television markets in both Britain and New Zealand, while considering those markets’ respective relationships with the far larger American market and its globally influential media corporations. That power is often expressed in terms of money accumulation is made clear. Sharing a common (well, largely common) language across the three nations makes for ready comparisons. 

The book’s eleven chapters are divided into three main sections: knowing the television economy, capitalizing and circulating power, and from space to place. To these, the author adds an introduction, section conclusions, and an overall coda or epilogue.

In presenting his geographical perspective, Christophers, a research fellow in social and economic geography at Uppsala University in Sweden, critically addresses the power to produce, reproduce, and (always important) extract profit from territorially based (e.g., national) media markets. To explain these different powers, he examines the sometimes varied processes in each country of creation and dissemination of industry knowledge, their often quite different structures of industry governance, and the locational characteristics of television’s operational economy.

Through its combination of conceptual insights with empirical substance, Envisioning Media Power helps to make clear the fabric of television’s increasingly international economy, and ultimately offers a new theoretical argument—suggesting that power, knowledge, and geography are inseparable not only from one another, but from the process of accumulation of media capital.

Along the way, many program examples help to clarify the arguments. Several charts and a map illustrate key points.

Christophers’ book is based on his doctoral dissertation at the University of Auckland. What he has accomplished is to help readers discern how the increasingly global television market operates and some of the implications of that growing trade.

CHRISTOPHER H. STERLING
George Washington University

Convergence Media History. Janet Staiger and Sabine Hake, eds. New York, NY: Routledge, 2009. 211 pp. $125 hbk. $34.95 pbk.

Drawing on papers from a conference held at the University of Texas-Austin, where both editors teach communication and culture, the eighteen papers included in this anthology explore a variety of kinds of convergence—not simply the digital kind we are living with today.

Many of them raise provocative ideas, some from media studied before, but not with modern concepts. Most of the papers utilize motion pictures as the means and medium of study.

The papers appear in four sections. “New Methods” reviews such things as franchise histories as a study of the “negotiated process of expansion,” the study of the leftists in Hollywood from both theory and political economy approaches, the many factors once used to sell cigarettes on television, and exploring the inter-medial borders of media history. 

“New Subjects” turns to what an early film exhibition (at the 1907 James-town Exposition) can tell us a century later, nationalism as reflected in exhibitions in Mexico in the 1920s, the recording industry’s role in media history, forging a citizen radio audience into the 1940s, and the short instructional films made in Hollywood.

The section “New Approaches” reviews silent film stars and the public sphere, neorealism in motion pictures and America’s understanding of the world, camp and cult in What’s New Pussycat?, Andy Warhol as an example of selling out but buying in, and why the movie-of-the-week disappeared from network television.

Finally, “Research Issues” includes discussion of challenges in doing soap opera history, capturing media history through the use of elusive and ephemeral archives, and looking into the history of web design. As can be seen, many of these papers are based on the study of film.

Collectively, this book represents a search for new ways to look at old media, drawing lessons from very different periods for better understanding of our own time. Many of the contributors are relatively new media scholars, their work suggesting some of the newer theoretical initiatives that are informing media history.

CHRISTOPHER H. STERLING
George Washington University

Can Journalism Be Saved? Rediscovering America’s Appetite for News. Rachel Davis Mersey. New York, NY: Praeger, 2010. 167 pp.

There is a considerable and growing body of literature about the future of journalism. Most of it paints a bleak picture, for a variety of reasons. Audiences appear to be shrinking for both print and broadcast news. Resources are being reduced—nationally, daily newspaper newsrooms have been cut by nearly 25% during the past ten years. Many mainstream news organizations are losing money on their legacy operations, and they have yet to figure out or embrace alternative business models that could lead to profitability online. The problem is the result of two major simultaneous changes in the business environment of news organizations—emergence of digital technologies and the increased diversity of communities. 

Rachel Davis Mersey’s new book, which asks, Can Journalism Be Saved? is a valuable and important addition to this conversation. In very clear and compelling prose, the assistant journalism professor at Northwestern provides a review of existing scholarship and available data in a way that makes clear that, in large part, the issue here is a conceptual one—there is a need for news organizations to think differently about what it is that citizens want and need from them in today’s world. She then lays out the case for a new approach to conceptualizing journalism, one based on the construct of identity, which serves as an intermediating variable between individuals and news use, and follows the logic that when journalists understand their audience and how members of that audience connect to their communities, they can engage them with important and relevant news.

In doing so, Mersey addresses three important deficiencies in the existing literature in a way that will help guide future research on this topic. The first, and most important, of these deficiencies involves what kind of “journalism” a democratic society needs today. The conventional view assumes that the public is engaged and that the job of the press is to provide citizens the necessary common body of information that can provide the basis for a rational public discussion of issues of common concern. Those who advocate this view work from what is called the “social responsibility” model first enunciated by the Hutchins Commission shortly after WWII. It also assumes that the audience can be treated as a single mass, and that it is entirely the job of the journalist to determine what is necessary, or “relevant,” for this audience.

Working from a more pluralistic view of democracy, Mersey effectively critiques this social responsibility model and offers an alternative, which she labels the “identity” model. Getting citizens “relevant” information is also a key news value in this alternative approach, but what is “relevant” has a very different meaning—the individual, and his or her “identity,” play a central role. As Mersey makes clear, the problem with the social responsibility model is its implicit assumption that residence per se is what makes someone a member of a given community and determines what is relevant. She argues that news organizations must know how and why people are attached (or not attached) to their geographic communities to understand how best to communicate with them. Simply recognizing audiences as residents is not enough.

In developing her alternative model, Mersey is careful to draw a distinction between her “identity” concept and the so-called “market” model of simply giving people what they want. Years of journalistic accepted wisdom and scholarship claim it is wrong, even dangerous, to give people “what they want to know”; journalism should give them only “what they need to know.” Mersey’s identity model is not about giving people what they want, but about “creating news products that connect individuals to topics that matter broadly in a way that matters to them personally.”

A second deficiency of the social responsibility framework is that it conceptualizes the work of journalists, or journalistic organizations, as a single, integrated activity that involves three steps: gathering, editing, distributing. In fact, what the Internet has done is to break these three steps apart, so that the citizen/consumer can play a different role in each, and in so doing help determine the “relevance” of a given story for themselves as well as others.

This is Mersey’s primary concern, but she doesn’t stop there. She goes on to address a third deficiency of the conventional model: the relationship between journalism per se and the business of journalism. Typically, these two are treated as distinct topics, in part reflecting an adherence of many authors to the social responsibility model. That is not only a “mass” model, but it also assumes implicitly that the practice of journalism is somehow distinct from the business of journalistic organizations. Journalists talk about the “wall” separating the newsroom and advertising, and publishers talk about “the need to make money so that we can continue to do quality journalism” (as though the journalism is simply a byproduct of the business). Mersey, herself a former Arizona Republic reporter, makes it clear that to reconceptualize the practice of journalism, news organizations also need to reconceptualize their business model, and to do so in a way that makes the individual citizen more central to it, thus revitalizing America’s appetite for news.

This is a book that is aimed at both practitioners and scholars seeking to help those practitioners respond effectively to this new environment. And it is a book that both will find extremely valuable.

DAN SULLIVAN
University of Minnesota

Bring on the Books for Everybody: How Literary Culture Became Popular Culture. Jim Collins. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010. 288 pp.

During the last two decades, the popularity of books has grown exponentially. According to Bowker, book production through traditional avenues in the United States alone has grown from just over 100,000 titles in 1993 to nearly 300,000 in 2008, and the number of fiction titles has more than doubled. This does not account for the more than 750,000 self-published and print-on-demand books published in 2009 alone. In a nutshell, books are big business. In Bring on the Books for Everybody: How Literary Culture Became Popular Culture, Jim Collins, professor of film and television and English at the University of Notre Dame, explores the impact of the convergence of literary, visual, and material cultures on the book publishing industry. 

Collins begins by analyzing the audience—readers, starting with a historical examination, including readers of Ladies Home Journal in the early twentieth century, who were encouraged to “read only the best books” as a means of obtaining culture. He discusses the difference between “high-brow” professional readers—literature scholars and critics—as opposed to “middle-brow” unprofessional readers. As literacy rates have increased, the popularity of books, particularly literary fiction, progressed naturally. By the 1990s, the growth of the book superstores such as Amazon.com, Borders, and Barnes & Noble, along with the rising popularity of book clubs, took book discussions from the hallowed halls of academia into the homes of ordinary, everyday people. Oprah Winfrey’s Book Club, for example, created instant bestsellers, although his discussion of Oprah’s Anna Karenina show is a laborious and tedious transcript that serves only to challenge Winfrey’s authority as the “national librarian” for those Collins views as unprofessional readers.

While film adaptations of books have existed since the silent era, Collins presents the “Miramax formula,” which garnered the Weinstein Brothers more than 200 Oscar nominations in the last two decades. Many of these book adaptations intertwine sexual passion with a love of all things literary, resulting in a “quality cultural experience” that, combined with intensive marketing, guarantees grand box office success. Collins supports this argument by providing comparative textual analyses of Shakespeare in Love, The English Patient, and The Hours both as books and films.

Collins closes by exploring the literary bestseller, and questions what is, indeed, “literary.” Should literature be appreciated because one resonates with the characters on the page or is the author’s craft more important? While he discusses the rise of “change your life fiction,” which he refers to as quality fiction on the bestsellers’ displays in the superstores, he does not explore what really makes a book a bestseller. Many would argue that bestsellers are not written, but rather created by marketing strategies—cooperative advertising in stores that places the title in prominent places, media coverage, and sometimes the author’s own good looks and sex appeal.

Collins’ discussion of the hybridization of book distribution through electronic delivery systems such as films and television is an important one in examining how literary culture becomes popular culture. Since a book is simply content that is packaged in the format of a book, the impact of e-books and other new technologies are worth exploring. While e-books have been around as long as the Internet, the introduction of the Amazon Kindle in 2007 made this format more popular and accessible. Less than three years after the release of the Kindle, Amazon sold more e-books per quarter than traditional paper-and-ink books. Other retail outlets like Barnes & Noble and Borders followed suit with their own e-readers. Rather than reinventing itself, the book industry has allowed electronic companies to create new technologies to direct its future.

The rapid growth of self-published books and print-on-demand technology has also affected literary culture. During the last decade, the number of non-traditionally published new titles has increased from 30,000 in 2002 to more than 750,000 in 2009. When some self-published books sell well enough to go to auction and garner advances up to seven figures, many have challenged the assumption that self-publishing is only for those who aren’t good enough to land publishing contracts with one of the six major publishing houses. Technological advancements mean that authors no longer have to wait for a contract from a traditional publisher and, in effect, give authors the power to control their own literary destinies.

There is a multitude of reasons why literary culture has become popular culture. While Collins provides in-depth analyses of literature and film, the proliferation of new titles and the accessibility of content through electronic delivery systems are certainly worth exploring in detail. As content and marketing avenues become more readily available to the consumer market, the popularity of content packaged in the form of books or e-books continues to increase.

TREVY A. McDONALD
University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill

Audience Evolution: New Technologies and the Transformation of Media Audiences. Philip M. Napoli. New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2010. 272 pp.

Philip Napoli’s new book, Audience Evolution: New Technologies and the Transformation of Media Audiences, is a good combination of a critical approach to audience measurement as well as a thorough review of the development of audience information systems. His key argument is that technologies foster the collection and compilation of audience information beyond the traditional exposure model, and allow new dimensions of audience information be incorporated into business use. 

Napoli, a professor in the Graduate School of Business at Fordham University and director of the Donald McGannon Communication Research Center, focuses on the institutionalized audience, in which the audience is understood and used as currencies in the formal procedures and practices of institutions such as media organizations and advertisers. “The concept of audience is constructed and defined to reflect the economic and strategic imperatives of media organizations,” he says.

The book consists of six parts: (1) introduction, (2) contextualizing audience evolution, (3) the transformation of media consumption, (4) the transformation of audience information systems, (5) contesting audiences, and (6) the implications of audience revolution. Throughout, Napoli reminds readers that new and alternative dimensions of audience, such as engagement and appreciation of content, should be considered for a more complete picture of the audience’s interaction with the content beyond the traditional exposure model. He also suggests that the new dimensions may increase acceptance of audience research results by content producers.

The book builds on his previous Audience Economics: Media Institutions and the Audience Marketplace (2003). In this work, Napoli recognizes two key phenomena causing the change in media industries’ conceptualization of audience related to technologies: audience fragmentation and audience autonomy. The proliferation of media platforms and outlets has resulted in diverting audience attention to more media channels. Various interactive technologies empower audiences to make choices and create user-generated content.

The process of rationalization of audience understanding in the media industries highlighted in Audience Evolution is of high relevance to practitioners and researchers. By using “scientific methods” to collect audience information and then base business decisions upon them, media industries have moved from an intuitive model based on executive judgment to a more rational and objective model. There are, of course, negative consequences of such a model, such as stifling creativity and encouragement of homogenization.

I like Napoli’s discussion of the political economy of the audience measurement industry, in which various established media and stakeholders resist changes for their own interests and do not support new measurement initiatives. “Flaws in established systems may in fact serve to tilt the competitive balance in the marketplace in a direction that benefits certain stakeholders in the detriment of others,” Napoli observes. The whole system is a negotiation among various stakeholders, rather than a means to seek truth. I also shared Napoli’s concern about the policymakers’ reliance on flawed audience measurement and, thus, its impact on policymaking. In light of recent efforts in Congress to eliminate public broadcast funding, for example, concern about audience conceptualization and measurement is increasingly relevant. I would add that new media, in order to gain legitimacy and acceptance from advertisers, play a key role in pushing for the changes and additional metrics in the audience information systems.

Napoli also notes the expansion of the narrative experience of media content on the web and in other social media as another interesting audience phenomenon. By offering media content in different formats and on multiple platforms, audience engagement in media content can reach a new level. How success is to be judged under the emerging new audience information system will be one of the most intriguing questions for researchers and practitioners alike.

The impact of audience evolution or, more specifically, audience research evolution, is well beyond the media industries themselves. As Napoli points out, more regulation in audience research may loom, as more personal and private data are collected. How such data are used may well contribute to policymaker decision making in evaluating new media regulations—as recent concerns over geographic tracking of smartphone users illustrate. Napoli’s advocacy of “preserving and promoting a media system in which audience members and media organizations are on equal footing in terms of their ability to access audiences” in media policy development represents his ideal media environment.

This book will be of high reference value not just to audience researchers, but also to those who want to know the practices of the media industries and the audience research industry. The implications of audience research are not well understood by content producers, and Audience Evolution is an objective and comprehensive guide on the whole process of why and how audience research is being used by various industry stakeholders. It contains both original research materials from interviews with professionals, participant observation in industry events, and other documentation analysis, and good reviews of past literature on the topic.

LOUISA HA
Bowling Green State University

Alarming Reports: Communicating Conflict in the Daily News. Andrew Arno. New York, NY: Berghahnbooks, 2009. 216 pp.

Based on an unusual anthropological approach, Alarming Reports offers sharp insights into the dynamics of the news as it moves through complex social systems. The first published monograph in the University of Hawaii’s new Anthropology of Media series, Andrew Arno’s work contributes to a new media anthropology. The book thus is part of advancing the theory of media and communication studies in ways that dovetail with cultural activism (e.g., Ginsburg, 2008), transnational media (e.g., Mankekar, 2008), and so forth. However, Arno goes beyond these methods by deploying an anthropological approach to news as a special speech genre. Alarming Reports is thus refreshingly original, and deserves the special attention of media and communications scholars. 

Arno’s primary concern is news whose intrinsic characteristics are formed by the inextricable web of social conflict, and are perceived as noticeable by the audience. Based on this observation, Arno strives to investigate the intrinsic characteristics of news by the means of various interdisciplinary theories, then expanding his analysis to news media in a context of society’s whole structure.

Arno, an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Hawaii, analyzes news from the eyes of the audience. News as a social process is not formed when an event takes place or when a report of the event is created, but when an individual receives the news with a sense of alarm. This argument, in some sense, does not look fresh, compared to existing reception theories. However, Arno’s approach is quite different. His understanding of news is entirely as a theoretical participant critic and as an anthropological observer. As a matter of fact, he draws upon various language theories in order to buttress his argument: one of them is Austin’s language theory—locutionary (the act of meaningful utterance by face-to-face talk), illocutionary (intent of an utterance), and perlocutionary (effect of the utterance on the person) speech. That is to say, Arno’s concept of news as an alarming report is a specific kind of perlocutionary act of language.

Arno sees news as a unique kind of speech act that occurs in the social dialogue as well as in alarming reports to the audience. For this, Arno borrows the    concepts of entextualization and co(n)-textualization from Michael Silverstein and Greg Urban: entextualization refers to the extraction of a discursive segment from society (news coverage), and through cotextualization, the extraction becomes produced as an autonomous text (news production); this text is inserted again   into social contexts by contextualization (news distribution). Arno concludes that news has a well-developed text ideology dimension drawn from the ongoing discourse of social life. This kind of argumentation becomes possible because Arno painstakingly connects anthropological observation with various theories of humanities, linguistics, and social science.

As a former newspaper journalist for fifteen years, I find the freshest and most persuasive aspect of Arno’s work is his insight that news is basically drawn from social conflict. He defines news as “institutionalized forms of communication about conflict.” A news story without social conflict is not news because conflict as well as communication is the “most powerful and basic elements of social life.” Media sociologists explain news as something that is socially constructed or that newsmakers make up; political economists see news as a means to mobilize support for the special interests of a power group. But Arno does not adhere to these explanations and instead examines the new dimension of news that is located in social conflict. Since social conflict is one of the major features of modern society, the understanding of news should start from the linkage of conflict and news.

In the first half of the book, Arno’s approach is based on microanalysis of news flow in society. However, he says, anthropology “must find ways of documenting the interrelations of macro and micro processes of meaning.” That’s the reason he develops his analysis forward to the societal level in the second half of the book. He proposes another concept related to news—“control communication,” or response mechanisms to social conflict. Mass media share a central defining characteristic with other control communication institutions such as law, religion, and social science, but news media, Arno argues, are a special “conflict discourse system” that functions as a mediator among different social conflict discourse.

Anthropological sensibility, on the one hand, is the concern for different organizing perspectives or systems, and on the other hand, is characterized by an holistic approach not isolated from relations of each relevant element. Arno’s micro and macro approaches provide explanation for the dynamics of conflict discourse systems in news media content, and offer a way of relating news to other important forms of communication. Furthermore, since social conflict is increasingly interwoven with social institutions, news as a reflection of social conflicts also is getting more complex. Thus, Arno’s anthropological approach to news based on social conflict is valuable. If I add one small wish, I hope he deals with journalists as well with a visionary anthropological approach in his next work.

CHANG SUP PARK
Southern Illinois University

Pen and Sword: American War Correspondents, 1898-1975. Mary S. Mander. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2010. 188 pp.

Evaluation and Stance in War News: A Linguistic Analysis of American, British, and Italian Television Reporting of the 2003 Iraqi War. Louann Haarman and Linda Lombardo, eds. London: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2009. 256 pp.

Both these books concern an increasingly vexing contemporary issue: the role of a free press during wartime. They use cultural history and analysis to examine the subject, and this approach will be frustrating to some journalists or historians seeking a treatment that might tell the story of the challenge of war reporting or shed light on its chronological development. Nor are the authors firsthand witnesses, having neither worked as journalists nor served in the military. 

Mary Mander is a professor emeritus of communication at Penn State and editor of other cultural studies. Because she does not deal with her subject here as a chronological story, with beginning, middle, and end, her treatment will strike some readers as dizzyingly circular and sometimes repetitive. We go back and forth between the Spanish-American War, World Wars I and II, and Vietnam, and not necessarily in that order. She does not include the Korean War, “because it was the first war of the United Nations.”

Much has happened to both media and military since the Vietnam War, and by limiting the analysis at that point, the issues remain unresolved. A more straightforward chronology is still needed to tell the evolutionary story of the media-military relationship from the partisan weekly newspapers of the American revolution; to a press divided by Civil War and a president (Lincoln) who wanted to jail editors; to a media mogul (Hearst) who fanned the Spanish-American War into flames for his own profit; to a journalism profession that willingly capitulated to a government fighting two World Wars to end all wars; to news media that could show the atrocities of the Vietnam War in American living rooms in full color and thus were less able to conceal the reality of war; to the new wars of the twenty-first century with new media platforms and a much more sophisticated military public relations apparatus that could embed the press in foxholes with the soldiers. But Mander’s book doesn’t tell this whole story.

Mander calls her work “grounded-theory research” that is “archival research” relying on “certain tools of interpretation” entailing “a constant process of triangulation.” Her concern here is mostly with the process of the formation of an ideology of war and journalism, and to do this she has studied military records, the papers of war correspondents, and articles and books written by journalists.

It isn’t until page 29 that she quotes a statement expressing what journalists and journalism academics would normally regard as the central issue of a free  press operating in wartime, and her quote is not from a journalist or journalism scholar but from an Army field regulation issued in 1914: “It is a fact that the press occupies a dual and delicate position, being under the necessity of truthful[ly] disclosing to the people the facts concerning the operations of the Army, and at the same time, of refraining from disclosing those things which, though true, would be disastrous to us if known to the enemy.” Mander obviously does not regard this duality as an adequate description of the issue.

For Mander, the relationship between American military and American journalists is symbiotic, not adversarial. Both parties—journalists and military—are seeking the same goal, she contends: “preservation of the rule of the people, by the people, for the people.” So they conduct their relationship as a kind of dance, “a complex tango where the state and press engage in a highly structured set of steps that are at once formalized and intense.” Many U.S. journalists would reject this characterization, even though Mander finds it enshrined in the documents she studied. Journalists would prefer to think they are engaged in a serious wrestling match in the search to find and disseminate the truth, not a tango of partners who expect to end up in bed. Many journalists who have written about their work in Vietnam have emphasized the adversarial role they tried to play.

The First Amendment and censorship are key issues for Mander, and she brings interesting insights to each. She writes that the First Amendment is often thought of as sacred, a notion she rejects. “A law is not a sacrament,” she writes, “it is a rule governing our public conduct.” Further, she later adds, “The Constitution …. and the Bill of Rights are not calls to worship.”

The idea of censorship is crucial to her entire study. She states the concern a bit oddly at times and confusingly if taken out of context. “If journalists are fish,” she writes, “censorship is the sea. Without water, fish die. Without the possibility of censorship, journalists cease to exist.” What she apparently means by this is that once the military censors a subject, it becomes more newsworthy, a definition that might raise some journalistic eyebrows. She defines censorship as a cultural experience rather than a set of restrictions externally imposed on the press.

She writes that a major shift took place in War World II “in understanding the role of the journalist from one having to do with intelligence to one having to do with public relations.” In other words, whether out of patriotism or laziness (she doesn’t say which) journalists become apologists and thus propagandists for the state. At the same time, she points out that the military increasingly sees its role as one of public relations rather than physical combat on a battlefield. American journalists might agree with the notion that journalism is culture-based, but most would reject the idea that they are propagandists for the state during wartime or unduly influenced by military PR, no matter how much PR the military practices.

Mander’s book is exclusively about the American experience. In the second book, Louann Haarman and Linda Lombardo, both professors of English and linguistics in Italy, have brought together seven essays to dissect four different cultures (British, French, Italian, and American), and their television news coverage of the first month of the Iraq war in 2003. They use “corpus linguistics” with qualitative tools of discourse analysis to understand what they regard as an “extremely complex linguistic phenomenon.”

The studies presented by editors Haarman and Lombardo also represent post-modernist cultural analysis, and offer a further counterpoint to Mander’s thesis—namely that war coverage is nationally and culturally based as well as professionally. The British, French, Italian, and American television journalists all reported the first month of the Iraq war differently, and these authors conclude that this stems not only from variations in national culture, but in journalistic culture as well.

The researchers confirm the “Liberal Anglo-Saxon model” of politically neutral journalism, versus the “Polarized Pluralist model” of southern Europe. In these Mediterranean countries, “facts are not seen as speaking for themselves, commentary is valued, and neutrality appears as inconsistency, naiveté or opportunism.” They examine the mark-up and narrative structure, the news presenter as a socio-cultural construct, the relationship of presenter to audience, the effects of embedding, the role of visual elements, and the techniques and patterns of attribution.

In a comparison of CBS and BBC, author-editor Linda Lombardo of Luiss Guido Carli University in Rome found striking differences. At CBS, she identified a positive association with the war. While apparently objective, at times the CBS anchor “personalizes events and expresses an explicitly patriotic stance,” she finds. “U.S. soldiers are presented in a favorable light, while the Iraqis are most frequently portrayed as beneficiaries of American actions or as acting in unexplainable ways.” The news presenter at BBC, on the other hand, “seems to adopt a style of reporting typical of investigative journalism which tends to challenge official sources and which construes events as problematic.” Her overall impression of the BBC was the reporter as impartial news provider.

Elsewhere in the collection, Laura Ferrarotti of the University of Rome looked at CBS and BBC as well as two Italian broadcasts, RAI Uno and TG5In, a study of the use of we and you. At CBS, she found a low frequency of inclusive we, pointing to a more detached anchor-audience relationship. At the BBC, viewers are constructed as you and not we, and thus aligned with the newscaster in “dialoguing with reporters.” On Italian broadcasts, the “relatively high frequency of inclusive we and you suggests that viewers share similar understandings and goals with the presenter, creating a more personal relationship.”

Patterns of attribution also reveal cultural, language-driven, and structural differences. Roberta Piazza of the University of Sussex found that CBS and BBC journalists show a greater preference for transparent representation of other voices than did the two Italian telecasts. BBC and CBS preferred more neutral reporting verbs than the Italians. The greatest disparity is between TG5 and CBS. “Paradoxically,” Piazza says, “TG5 appears to be more balanced in representing a variety of voices, especially when compared with CBS, which is more focused on putting the Anglo-American forces in the spotlight.”

Piazza’s conclusion seems to fit all the essays here: “This study has shown that the different modalities of reporting within the four cultural models, which can be related to institutional differences between the individual countries, appear to be instrumental in determining diverse construals and interpretations of reality.”

Mander would certainly seem to agree.

RAY E. HIEBERT
University of Maryland

Digital Media Law. Packard, Ashley (2010). Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. pp. 352.

The Internet is a predominant “change agent” in the continually evolving communication law. Professor W. Wat Hopkins at Virginia Tech prefaced the 2011 edition of Communication and the Law: “The Internet is having an increased impact on regulation of expression, and that impact is addressed in this edition” (p. v). (Disclosure: The reviewer has contributed the “Defamation” chapter to Hopkins’s book since 1998.) 

Digital Media Law by Ashley Packard, a professor of communication and digital media studies at the University of Houston-Clear Lake, is a commendable effort to place media law and regulations in the context of Internet-driven media. The book’s underlying theme is that “[o]ur global shift to digital media has precipitated a shift in information control and thus “[w]hen anyone can become a media producer, everyone should know something about media law—both to protect their own rights and to avoid violating the right of others” (p. vii).

The rights and liabilities for the production and use of digital media are informatively examined in the twelve-chapter book. Some chapters are more sharply focused on cyber issues than others. The “Internet Regulation” chapter is a case in point in that it centers on Internet governance, net neutrality, virtual law, and cybercrimes.

Like other books that are designed primarily for undergraduate American college students, Digital Media Law covers nearly all the usual subjects: free expression as a right, defamation, privacy, obscenity, advertising, intellectual property, access to information, journalistic source protection, and broadcasting and Internet regulation.

Meanwhile, the substance and structure of Digital Media Law make the book distinct from other U.S. media law texts. Its “Conflict of Laws” chapter sets the book apart from others because it addresses the rarely discussed but increasingly important area of international media law. The author correctly observes: “One might assume that nations and states have no recourse to battle content that is published elsewhere in the world—particularly through a medium like the Internet that goes everywhere.  But it does occur and with greater frequency” (p. 82).

In “Conflict of Laws,” Packard, who has published about the conflict of laws and related issues (see The Borders of Free Expression, 2009), explains how jurisdiction, choice of law, and enforcement of foreign judgments play out in transnational media law litigation. Several key cases of U.S. and foreign courts, including Dow Jones & Co. v. Gutnick (2002) of the Australian High Court, are duly noted. Her in-depth discussion of the conflict of the laws is readable, although some readers will find it rather challenging.

Another strength of the book is the author’s international and global outlook on freedom of speech and the press. Many readers most likely will learn a lot from her judicious reference to international and foreign law. Illustrative are her comments on the EU Data Protection Directive and on access to government records as a widely accepted right overseas.

On the other hand, Packard devotes far more space to intellectual property than any other topic. Two chapters revolve around copyright, patents, trademarks, and trade secrets. There is no doubt that digital media have impacted on IP and that IP law affects digital media, especially in recent years. But some discerning readers might wonder about the author’s seemingly excessive emphasis on IP. The fifty-two-page treatment of IP stands in contrast with little or no attention to access to government meetings and court proceedings that remain important to media law.

Packard discusses the Freedom of Information Act, the OPEN Government Act, and other access-related statutes. However, her discussion forgoes open meetings law such as the Sunshine Act, which is closely connected with FOI. Further, the book rarely analyzes access to court proceedings or lack thereof as a right for the press. The unending free press-fair trial confrontation (see Lyle Denniston’s SCOTUS blog, “Prop. 8: New plea to release video of trial,” at http://bit.ly/l0bQS2) should have   been explored, albeit selectively. Significantly, Brigham Young University plans a multidisciplinary symposium, “The Press, the Public, and the U.S. Supreme Court,” in January 2012. The event will explore how to “improve public understanding of the Supreme Court and its work.”

Each chapter of the book ends with four discussion questions about the chapter topic. The questions are probing and analytical. Three of the questions for the “Defamation” chapter, for instance, are:

•                    How does the American concept of libel law differ from other common law and civil law countries?

•                    How does knowledge of falsity differ from reckless disregard of the truth?

•                    Why have ISPs been given immunity from their subscribers’ libelous posts?

In order to keep up with the rapidly changing digital media law, the book has a companion website, “What’s New” (www.DigitalMediaLaw.us). Although it needs to be more frequently updated, it is a useful supplement to the book. It updates cases and statutes discussed in the book while noting new developments in American and foreign law.

The website supplement to “Conflict of Laws” discusses the SPEECH Act that President Obama signed into law in August 2010, and it provides a link to the Act. The “Information Access & Protection” page features the author’s summary of the U.S. Supreme Court case in FCC v. AT&T (2011), along with the full text of the court decision in PDF. (The reviewer last visited the “What’s New” website on May 15, 2011.)

Digital Media Law is the latest welcome addition to the shelves of twenty-plus media law books in the United States, especially for American students and teachers who are keen to expand their horizons in the global twenty-first century. The reviewer, who has used the book as the main text for his communication law class, has also found it to be valuable as a sourcebook. The book’s extensive source documentation and comprehensive index, together with its table of cases, are certain to enhance its scholarly value.

KYU HO YOUM
University of Oregon

Cultural Meaning of News. Berkowitz, Daniel A. (ed.) (2011). A Text-Reader. Los Angeles: SAGE. pp. 408.

When reviewing a text for a course, I often stop and make sure to read the preface, prologue, or other material before the first chapter for thoughts, ideas, and motivations of authors. This allows me some insight into what will make the text work or not work, how ideas will be presented in the text, and whether or not I might ultimately adopt the text for my courses. This is the same process I followed for Daniel Berkowitz’s Cultural Meaning of News. A Text Reader. The passion and dedication found within the text will make perfect sense after reading these first few pages. 

Berkowitz offers three questions that guide the whole of the text: “What is news?”; “Why does news turn out like it does?”; “What does news tell us about the professional culture and the society that produces it?” (p. xi). This is how Berkowitz prepares his readers for the paradigm shift he wants them to take—from journalistic critic to cultural scholar of journalism. Each essay selected (all have been previously published) addresses these questions, allowing the reader to develop her or his own understanding of the particular ideas each author presents as well as applications of those ideas.

In his introduction, Berkowitz sets up the position of the reader for this text:

The cultural scholar sees journalists as people living and working within the culture of a newsroom, a media organization, and a society. And it views the texts that news organizations produce as an artifact of the culture that represents key values and meanings (p. xii).

In so doing, the reader may be challenging her or his own preconceptions of what the journalism student and scholar should hold (exactly the same challenge Berkowitz references in his Acknowledgments), while reminding the reader why he or she picked up this particular volume in the first place—Berkowitz and the authors collected here present different perspectives on what journalism is and why we should study the way “a news story ‘is supposed to go’” (p. xii). He explains that a key goal of this text is to help readers, writers, and critics of news consider the cultural meanings of news beyond the story itself. To do so, he offers three frameworks through which to make sense of the news—meant to help organize our own understanding, not “to call for considering news in a multidimensional grid built from a combination of the three frameworks” (p. xii). Rather, the frameworks will aid readers in identifying the foundations of each story; in this way, the reader now has organized models through which to examine a specific news story or event and gather those ideas for her or himself and others.

Berkowitz continues to present his case for why a cultural perspective on and approach to “news” is an important component for students and researchers alike. Three “vantage points” or dimensions are presented: “Journalistic,” “Sociological,” and “Cultural.” The first two, along with their chronological and epistemological orientations, are compared and contrasted to the latter, furthering Berkowitz’s argument as to why the cultural approach needs to be investigated further. This is one area with seminal citation and quotation from within cultural studies, and critical theory would help to support this move further. If there is an argument as to what would substantiate the core position of the text’s purpose, this might be it. Having said that, Berkowitz does expand his rationale for the text by bringing in the various ideas (in general) that are oft considered hallmarks of a cultural or critical approach and what differentiates it from more positivistic or social constructionist approaches to “meaning making” (p. xv). Again, though, connecting to the seminal work would help the reader make the same connections that Berkowitz is making.

Berkowitz closes the introduction by presenting a typology to help organize the various research and meaning-making paradigms, the questions often asked through those paradigms, and the ways (methodologies) those questions are addressed. This approach helps situate those various questions and approaches within their appropriate ontologies and epistemologies for both researchers and students. In particular, this approach is quite accessible for students who may be brand new to the idea of research. Berkowitz explains how certain perspectives may or may not align with particular questions. This interconnection of paradigm and method aids in his positioning of the text, in particular its formatting. This is an excellent reference and resource to point out to students of all levels before the text itself is engaged.

The chapters are organized around six “parts”: a framework for thinking about the meaning of news, cultural practices of journalism, making meaning in the journalistic interpretive community, repairing the journalistic paradigm, news narratives as cultural text, and news as collective memory. Each unit is comprised of three to four essays selected from various journals within the mass communication, communication studies, psychology, and anthropology disciplines. Before each unit, there is an opening statement by Berkowitz that helps to frame the unit within the larger project. This is common practice for reader collections such as Cultural Meanings. What is important to note within these opening statements is, again, the passion and commitment that Berkowitz invests into each element of this text. He makes a point of asking the reader not to see these essays as “the only way” to make sense of the news. Rather, Berkowitz asks the reader to understand these essays as one of several or many ways (both present and absent) to engage “the news.” In addition, he ensures that the typology introduced at the beginning of the text is referenced throughout the units. So, be sure to have students read the introduction, or, at least, be sure to introduce students to the material before they move through the essays.

Berkowitz’s closing Epilogue provides a recap of each major element and rationale within the text as a way to answer the opening three questions (particularly the third one) offered in the Introduction. He points out that the text seeks to provide answers to the questions we should be asking about “news” and “journalism,” answers that may seem counterintuitive or even, “to the professional culture of journalism … dissonant or wrong” (p. 368). Berkowitz explains that, “regardless of how you encounter these concepts, the goal is to help think about news from a fresh perspective” (p. 368).

The epilogue then provides a final case study, the 2009 kidnapping and subsequent escape of the New York Times reporter David Rhode among others from Afghanistan. The ethical considerations of whether to report on the kidnapping (NYT chose initially not to, with other news agencies agreeing to the “black out”) are examined via the cultural perspective that Berkowitz has constructed throughout the text. In particular, the example provides evidence supporting why one case can and should be examined through multiple lenses, further supporting Berkowitz’s opening thesis. At the end, Berkowitz again reminds the reader, “this book is not intended to be a comprehensive survey of cultural meanings of news” (p. 370). Rather, the text is meant to provide examples of how this lens can and should be integrated into current research trends and professional journalistic practices and consumption: “By doing so, readers can develop a keen eye for analyzing new instances that build a conceptual argument and test out new ideas through encounters with journalists and the news that they produce” (p. 370).

Overall, Cultural Meanings of News is a strong and appropriate foray into understanding the meaning-making practices both within and outside the journalistic profession. The typology provided by Berkowitz allows readers to develop a series of lenses and filters to help understand the news culture around them, while the essay selections demonstrate how and why these lenses are important.  If this book were adopted, a brief but dense introduction into the ideas of culture, hegemony, power, discourse, text, and the theorists who have been central to developing those ideas would be appropriate while moving through the Introduction to the text. In this way, not only are the tools developed and crafted, but where those tools come from is not lost in the meaning-making for the students and researchers.

ADAM W. TYMA
University of Nebraska at Omaha

Understanding Ethnic Media: Producers, Consumers, and Societies. Matsaganis, Matthew D., Vikki S. Katz, and Sandra J. Ball-Rokeach, (2011). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, Inc. pp. 314.

Press theory can be complex: Who does or should the press serve? What informs it? What sustains it? What goals drive it? In a classic essay published 1918, Hilaire Beloc, the Catholic apologist, described the press as capitalist in origin, evolution, and effect. Beloc wrote of “the evil of the great modern Capitalist Press, its function in vitiating and misinforming opinion and in putting power into ignoble hands.” In the same breath, he offered “its correction by the formation of small independent organs, and the probably increasing effect of these last” (p. 1). 

That “correction” may have emerged nearly a century later in the form of a colorful ethnic press. Today in the United States live 57 million “ethnic adult” consumers who patronize some 3,000 ethnic media outlets, according to New America Media, a San Francisco-based advocacy group. Ethnic-specific programming represents the “fastest growing sector of American journalism” because of the quickly diversifying demographic profile of many urban areas. It offers a counterweight to what critics such as Noam Chomsky and Robert McChesney have observed: that America’s mainstream press is positioned to apologize for the plutocracy of a few media Goliaths, rather than to speak for any underdog.

In the complex milieu of press theory do Matsaganis and his fellow authors situate the ethnic press. But two quick observations: First, the book presents, for the most part, a study of media, not press. To this reviewer, “media” suggests that the authors envisaged an institutional role that includes entertainment and socialization compared to “the press,” an institution of politics that tends to either operationalize a Meiklejohnian self-rule or advance the state.

Second, the term “ethnic” is loaded in many ways. Using the term can reflect a patronizing attitude in neo-dominant culture toward older and local traditions. It can connote a distinction, and hence exclusion, of the local in cuisine, clothing, and festivity from the presumed sophistication of an emerging mainstream. Ethnic can mean, as Merriam-Webster offers in its first definition, “heathen,” who is an “unconverted” or “uncivilized or irreligious person.” In this book, the authors do well to eschew stereotypical judgment. They “define ethnic media broadly to include media by and for (a) immigrants, (b) ethnic, racial, and linguistic minorities, as well as (c) indigenous populations across different parts of the world” (p. xiii). They offer a succinct explication of that definition in chapters 1 and 2, emphasizing geographic context, roles of ethnic media, and a quick historical overview of the ethnic press in Europe, America (including Native American and Chinese press), and Mexico.

The book offers a rich smorgasbord of discussion, covering immigrants’ media, minorities’ media, audience trends, ethnic media organizations, and policy development. Its eleven chapters and 314 pages present,

…a far-reaching review and analysis of how ethnic media affect ongoing negotiations of self-identity, perceived lines of division between “us” and “others,” and how the production and consumption of ethnic media affects the character of the larger media and societal landscape (p. xiii).

It presents the ethnic press, mostly in America but also in Mexico, France, and Canada, as not only a reflection but also a catalyst of societies that are rapidly heterogenizing by race, language, and national origin.

The book includes twenty-five pages of references, six pages of author index, and fourteen pages of subject index. In addition to old-fashioned tables, attractive graphic elements jazz up the pages. A very useful “chapter objectives” section precedes every chapter, and thoughtful sections titled “summary,” “study questions” (or “case analysis questions”), and “notes” conclude every chapter.

The authors betray no ideological mooring, and underpin their labor with a broad-based descriptive approach. One of the finer chapters is titled, “Globalization and the Ethnic Media Organization” (chapter 7). It presents an overview of globalization theory in three approaches—those of the “hyperglobalists,” the “skeptics,” and the “transformationalists” or “moderates.” The chapter identifies six types of media organizations: small scale and local operations, large ethnic media corporations, multinationals, transnational ethnic media, public and nonprofit broadcasters, and virtual ethnic media organizations. It may have done better with more examples, but like the other chapters, it is crisply composed. The chapter also offers a discussion of ethnic media ownership, discussing the consolidation among owners of ethnic media serving various communities.

Another riveting chapter is the one on policy development (chapter 8), which describes who makes policy to impact the creation and development of ethnic media, how globalization affects policymaking, models of policy, and trends in media policy that are affecting ethnic media. It offers a masterly discussion on the various state approaches to immigration and their impact on ethnic media in Australia, Canada, America, Belgium, Finland, Sweden, Germany, Austria, France, Greece, Italy, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the Netherlands.

The book scores high on presentation, perhaps the three best parts of which are: (1) creative monochrome graphics that bring the content to life, (2) helpful “study questions” at the end of every chapter, and (3) well-defined and thoughtful sections and subsections in every chapter. The book could do better (but maybe not much better) on three other counts: (1) an inadequately expressed, strong, or well-developed theoretical mooring for its discussions of ethnic media, (2) a somewhat shallow or overly descriptive approach, at the expense of offering insight, to the discussion of some topics, and (3) perhaps a general failure to address the “so what” question, that is a larger justification for the authors’ labor of scholarship.

The book abounds in small, substantive niceties that would make it appealing to a wide base of readers. For example, it includes, as part of the chapter on professional challenges for ethnic media journalists (chapter 10), a two-page section on the role that journalism education plays in the future of ethnic media. But clearly, the book seems to be intended for undergraduate students. This reviewer would recommend its use by students in junior- and senior-level courses of not only ethnic media, but also media literacy and audience studies.

Over the last century, Beloc’s thesis of a capitalist press has evidently played out in news business models that support not only wealthy advertisers and unbridled consolidation, but also a rampant cultural hegemony that tends to exclude minorities from news coverage. On the other hand, America’s press has also reflected a view of politics elaborated in the Progressive Era of the early twentieth century, as sociologist Herbert Gans documented in his famous study titled Deciding What’s News (1979). In the Gans mold exists an ideology of news that “is not so much conservative or liberal as it is reformist,” with domestic coverage focused on conflict, corruption, protest, and bureaucratic malfunctioning. Matsaganis and his colleagues have produced a welcome bridge to that dichotomy, and with a focus on the ethnic thrown in for good measure. Overall, it is a valuable textbook for the growing field of ethnic media studies.

NIKHIL MORO
University of North Texas

Global Journalism Ethics. Ward, Stephen J.A. (2010). Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press.  pp. 296.

Ward notes that traditional journalism values and practices are being questioned due to the global nature of modern journalism and the rapid changes brought about by digital and wireless technologies. Ward concludes that journalists are struggling to maintain a “credible ethical identity as they sail the roiling sea” of the modern media world (p. 3). Ward’s bold objective is to look at journalism’s future and offer conceptual inventions to help move journalism ethics forward, with an eventual goal of converging theoretical foundations and practical proposals. Although those looking for concrete practical proposals to follow in a global setting might be disappointed that Ward doesn’t get quite that far, his impressive theoretical framework provides an excellent starting point for scholars interested in journalism ethics in a wired, globalized world. As Ward writes, the goal of the book is to supply “the basic philosophical concepts to begin the invention of a detailed and theoretically solid global [journalism] ethics” (p. 235). 

The book is divided into two sections, although it covers three distinct topics. In the first and longest section, Ward explains his approach to ethics and presents his general theory of ethics. In chapter one, Ward explains the basic idea of ethics and his naturalistic approach, which conceives of ethics as a rational, human invention.  In chapter two, he describes his holistic approach to “reflective engagement,” explains his three-level theory of ethical reasoning, and presents an accompanying model of journalism ethics informed by that theory. Ward uses chapter three to argue that the aim of ethics should be a congruence of the good—a theory that humans should strive to flourish or grow on four levels—and the right—“a Rawlsian theory of right for a liberal democratic society or well-ordered society” (p. 103).  Ward argues this congruence leads to ethical flourishing or a combination of “the good” and “the right.” Ultimately, the goal of these first chapters is to argue that the true aim of ethics is the creation of a liberal democracy in which citizens are truly free to govern themselves with meaningful decisions that actually influence the structure and function of government. In the second section, Ward expands on his theoretical foundations and discusses how his theories of ethics form the basic concepts of global journalism ethics, with an emphasis on how journalism can advance democracy. In chapter six, Ward presents his third topic, and finally applies his ethical framework to a practical question: To what extent can a global journalist be a patriot?

The book’s greatest strength is Ward’s presentation of his personal approach to ethics and his systematic theoretical discussion of ethics and philosophy, as he lays the foundations for his vision of ethics and global journalism ethics. Ward’s intelligence is evident, and his deep appreciation for and understanding of the classic works of political and moral philosophy greatly inform his work. His approach to ethics is rooted in social contract theory, classic liberal democratic theory, John Rawls’s theories of justice and the human good, and cosmopolitan ethics, an ethical system that asserts “the equal value and dignity of all people as members of a common humanity” (p. 154). This emphasis on liberal democratic theory and the role of journalists in promoting a global democratic world lead him away from simplistic discussions of the role of objectivity in modern journalism, or yet another analysis of the differences between bloggers, commentators, and journalists. Instead, Ward focuses on how journalism may serve the greater goal of advancing the public good in a multitude of settings and locations. While Ward is interested in the convergence of theory and practice, it should be noted that he does not advocate for one unique code of journalism ethics as a practical goal. In his conclusion, Ward posits the goal of global journalism ethics should be “the gradual adoption of a cosmopolitan attitude that works as a force for improving global media and reducing the dangers of parochial journalism” (p. 236).

Unfortunately, Ward spends so much of the book explaining his theoretical foundations, he is left with little room to actually apply them to journalism. Although Ward discusses journalism ethics as a type of applied ethics in the first three chapters, it is not until nearly 170 pages into the book that he truly begins to apply his theoretical framework to journalism, and even much of this discussion operates at the level of metaethics rather than applied ethics.  Anyone without at least some foundation in classic philosophical and political theory or a profound interest in these topics could quickly become frustrated with Ward’s exhaustive and nuanced writing or his overwhelming focus on theory.

It is difficult to know exactly how best to use Ward’s book. While the book is a must-read for serious scholars of journalism ethics or anyone interested in the changing role of the press in a liberal democratic society and should be consulted by anyone who teaches journalism ethics, the book’s heavy theoretical focus and Ward’s dense writing style make much of the book inaccessible to less advanced students of ethics. Sections of chapters one and two could be used in an introductory course—for example to help students understand the meaning of ethics and why ethics are important. However, it is unlikely an undergraduate would make it through the entire first 102 pages of the book without a great deal of difficulty. While graduate students would benefit from Ward’s excellent discussion of the foundations of ethics, liberal democratic theory, and Rawls’s theories, they would certainly need at least one introductory ethics courses to fully grasp Ward’s advanced analysis. The best use of the book would be in an advanced graduate seminar on global journalism ethics in which the first half of the course was devoted to reading the original works that Ward uses to construct his philosophical foundations and the second half was dedicated to a close reading of Ward’s book. That’s certainly a course I would have enjoyed in graduate school.

DERIGAN SILVER
University of Denver

Mediactive. Gillmor, Dan (2010). Self-published under Creative Commons license. pp. 183.

Journalism is broken, and with Mediactive, Dan Gillmor aims to fix it. But he doesn’t start where you would expect—with a new financial model for the digital age.

He starts with educating the audience. After all, classic, “capital J” journalism is but a small part of the information we consume. Gillmor correctly aims more broadly, including blogs, targeted e-mails, user-generated content—the entire rabble of the web today. His goal is to help us become active users of mediated information. His principles? Be skeptical. Exercise judgment. Open your mind. Keep asking questions. Learn media techniques. In essence, the media consumer needs to think like a journalist, curate his or her own feed, and create meaning from examination of layers of linked sources. Gillmor then offers specific tools to navigate the Internet, from basic search and RSS to specific ways to evaluate the credibility of web-based information. It’s a useful primer in media literacy, especially useful to young audiences whose first instinct is to just “Google it.” 

Gillmor then turns to media creation. His perspective accommodates any content creator, whether journalist, hobby blogger, or corporate writer. Here, his values emphasize “honorable” content creation through these principles: thoroughness, accuracy, fairness, independence, and, most important, transparency. What about objectivity? He states,

“It’s an ideal rather than a principle, and it’s impossible to achieve—no human being is or can be truly objective.  We can get closer to this ideal now than ever before, in part because the Internet’s built-in capacity for collaboration makes it easier to find counterpoints to our own views and for our critics to find us (and then for us to respond) … I believe all of the principles in my list help us approach the ideal of objectivity” (p. 64).

Gillmor offers a lightning tour of the tools and tactics a modern content creator can use to communicate, including tips on purchasing web domains, hosting, backing up data, and setting up a content management system, such as WordPress. He discusses the value of personal branding and how to gain influence through using these tools. This section is useful for anyone interested in joining the online marketplace of ideas, journalist or not. He closes the how-to section on a hopeful note, advocating entrepreneurial journalism and start-up thinking. Chapters on the law and teaching new media round out the book.

Writing about digital can be like walking on quicksand, so Gillmor has wisely made Mediactive much more than a book. The printed version (also available in Kindle and Nook formats) features underlined text to show links in the online version, at mediactive.com, where you can read the full text or download a pdf. The site also features annotations, updates, and Gillmor’s blog. The entire project is licensed under Creative Commons to facilitate sharing and exchange of ideas.

Mediactive would be an excellent text for a class emphasizing media or news literacy. It would also be a good choice for advertising or public relations classes with a digital emphasis. It begs for a lab experience to complete the lessons.

Journalism is going through transformative change, and some institutions will fail. But it won’t be the end of journalism. Our economy is more information-dominant than ever. Barriers to entry have never been lower. Millions are publishing and gaining influence in their chosen spheres. And who knows? Out of these millions of seedlings may grow the New York Times of the future. If you want to participate in this dynamic marketplace of ideas, Mediactive is a useful guide that will speed your progress.

DAVID KAMERER
Loyola University Chicago

When News Was New. Terhi Rantanen. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009. 154 pp.

The clever title of this brief historical study harks back to earlier times as changing technology provided a constantly renewed window through which to view what was happening in the world. Ranging from medieval storytellers through nineteenth-century news agencies to the bloggers of today, the book’s theme is that “news” has meant very different things at different times.

Director of the global media and communications master’s program at the London School of Economics and Political Science, and long a student of news agencies, Terhi Rantanen provides a brief but insightful survey of how technology has helped to shape our perception of what “news” is and means. 

“The newness of news has been regularly reconstructed,” Rantanen writes, “and that news is mostly old stories made new. At the same time, these stories inhabit temporal and spatial structures that challenge our ideas about our mental space in the past, the present and the future.” Rather than a chronological approach, as might be expected, she arranges her material by several basic themes.

The factor of time is where the book begins—how what is new is defined by (while also helping to define) our governing sense of time. The regularity of the appearance of news helped to form a sense of (soon weekly and then daily) schedule as well. Rantanen turns next to the early importance of cities (rather than nations or regions) within and among which news was exchanged. Early news exchanges—forerunners of wire services—were based in major marketing towns and grew thanks to printing and eventually the telegraph.

Technology helped news become a more global commodity with the development of submarine telegraph cables in the late nineteenth century. How news agencies developed and carved up coverage of the world is described as a part of this eventual trend to news globalism.

A focus on the telegraph and how it changed the transmission and consumption of news comes next. For the first time, news could travel faster than people or vehicles. Breaking the bonds of physical transport hugely changed our conception of what news was, and how rapidly we expected to be informed about it. This, in turned, helped news become a commodity with sometimes very limited shelf life in an increasingly competitive market for news that was new.

Chapter 5 turns to localization, and how electronic services from the telegraph on helped to emphasize a sense of place, the “here” where we learn about news from “there,” where events happen.

Two brief chapters conclude this fascinating book. The nationalization of news chapter offers case studies of German, Russian, and U.S. news agencies, some of the material drawing from the author’s earlier historical monographs—she has published extensively on global news, is author of six previous books and dozens of articles taking in the global nature of news and information. Each of these case study offers different stories demonstrating why even having a news agency became an important means of national identity. In a thoughtful epilog, Rantenan reviews the very notion of news “newness” over time. “Rather than asking whether news is ‘objective,’” she writes, the goal is to explore “the temporality and spatiality of news, in order to show how it changes not only itself but the space around it.”

This is the kind of book a seasoned scholar like Rantanen can best provide. It is based not only on decades of research but also on thinking about the trends the research seems to uncover. This is a “big picture” analysis based on a host of specific examples. It makes for compelling reading.

CHRISTOPHER H. STERLING
George Washington University

War and the Media: Essays on News Reporting, Propaganda and Popular Culture. Paul M. Haridakis, Barbara  S. Hugenberg, and Stanley T. Wearden, eds. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, Inc., 2009. 265 pp.

A collection assembled under such a broad title might invite doubts as to coherence. Yet the editors, all of Kent State University, have meaningfully coordinated a thoughtful, critical volume of twelve U.S.-focused case studies. Part I focuses on images of war from music, photography, film, and animation, World War I to Vietnam. The theme of Part II is institutionalized propaganda of both world wars, covering advertising, comics, government discourses, and public relations. And Part III considers the effects of news coverage of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. 

The editors observe that how each new medium is enlisted in war plays a unique role (Brett Lunceford’s conclusion envisages cyberwar implications for impeding enemy communications, including psyops, intelligence, and viruses). In Part I, Richard Lee shows how protest songs provided information about the Vietnam War that was not regularly reported yet spread rapidly even without heavy media airplay or exposure. Koji Fuse and James Mueller apply fantasy theme analysis to Clint Eastwood’s movies Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima. In the narration of Flags, we are all fallible; images are only part of reality; and the individual is insignificant compared to the mission. In Letters, Japanese are also human; the Japanese who have experience in the United States are benevolent and civilized, and only those Japanese who were indoctrinated by Japanese propaganda are suicidal maniacs. The authors note that Eastwood paradoxically projected the American viewpoint in disguise of a Japanese one.

In his essay, Wesley O’Brien traces “ghosts of Vietnam” in combat films released in the 2000s. These demonstrate a progression from personalized heroism to heroism thwarted and finally to heroism destroyed. In Three Kings, for example, heroism is not predicated on national allegiance, but on personal morality. We Were Soldiers repositions the hero’s allegiance by foregrounding familial and fraternal bonds. The myth of the American soldier in Jarhead becomes a “conflation of unconsummated sex and unconsummated heroism.” In Redacted, U.S. soldiers are not protectors but abusers; redemption will be possible only in the “epiphany that the cause was unjust.” Where In the Valley of Elah is utterly despairing—a symbol of freedom, the American flag, is inverted into a symbol of desperation—Stop-Loss offers impoverished redemption through the hero’s near disavowal of a country whose alienating characteristics are also those that keep him from disavowal. Rekha Sharma studies how Hollywood war cartoons mocked Hitler’s “master race,” even while perpetuating racial divisions at home. She cites the later Chuck Jones series, Road Runner and Coyote, and others, as self-conscious Cold War propaganda. Long after the wars that inspired them, recent cartoons continue earlier ideological work even while furnishing resistance through satire.

In Part II, Kathleen German examines the promotional short film Autobiography of a Jeep, which transitioned the Jeep from military vehicle to mass civilian production by playing on transcendent value clusters of optimism, comradeship, and loyalty. James Kimble and Trischa Goodnow analyze the U.S. Treasury’s  1942 War Victory comics and their role-model characters as vehicles for persuading youth to purchase war stamps, emphasizing the many possible ways they could fund the purchase of stamps and trade them for war bonds. Roy Schwartzman compares and contrasts Nazi Germany’s Der Kampf and America’s War on Terror—both framed social policies as constant battle. Schwartzman explores how the “construction and deployment of a specific frame … establishes the bounds of logically allowable responses.” Der Kampf linked racial theories to differentiation between peoples and the need for all-out struggle. But America’s War on Terror “never set the terms of the everyday citizen’s contribution to the struggle,” and, “without consistent tangible objectives or enemies (it) … became an assault on phantoms.” Its narratives proved internally inconsistent and unsustainable. Alternative frames, such as criminal justice, would likely have worked better.

Burton St. John assesses the lessons of World War I for journalism and public relations. Journalists and the public became increasingly aware that propaganda had contaminated news reporting. Edward Bernays’ writings on public relations helped counteract this with the notion of “pro-social truths.” The construction of “objectivity” as something realized by “facts contextualized by experts” led to professional journalism’s “unanticipated synergy with propaganda.”

Examining coverage of the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars in Business Week, Forbes, and Inc., Karen Stout concludes that “stories of large corporations garnering huge contracts were ignored and obscured” as were “stories of corruption and greed that have inflated war costs.” These business magazines “obscured and … concealed war profiteering,” and erroneously downplayed projections that the wars would be long and messy. David Weiss applies critical linguistics to a single story in the Albuquerque Journal, demonstrating how a medium that supposedly represents the community as a whole uses linguistic strategies such as transitivity; inanimate, abstract or organizational subjects; modality; transformations and passivizations, to falsely imply war consensus. M.F. Casper and Jeffrey Child consider whether television stories of the Iraq War that featured embedded reporting enhanced parasocial interaction and perceived realism. Their controlled experiments demonstrated higher parasocial interaction for embedded reporting, which possibly serves as a recruitment tool. Terri Patkin studied journalist and audience perceptions of the media blackout of the story of Prince Harry’s deployment to Afghanistan. Differences of perception related to the different orientations of the two groups toward the process of newsgathering. The overall impact of the blackout was to transform perceptions of Harry from celebrity to hero.

The book provides successful examples of different methodological approaches, but also highlights the need for meta-theorization in the field of war, media, and propaganda.

OLIVER BOYD-BARRETT
Bowling Green State University

The Uncrowned King: The Sensational Rise of William Randolph Hearst. Kenneth Whyte. Berkeley, CA: Counterpoint, 2009. 546 pp.

Why yet another biography (and a partial one at that) of the long-dead press titan? you ask. Surely we have enough already, for what could possibly be new or different in this one?

To begin with, this long biography focuses entirely upon a very short but crucial period—1895-1898, when Hearst moved from San Francisco to the news cauldron of New York City to compete fiercely with Joseph Pulitzer in what has come to be pejoratively known as newspapers’ period of “yellow” journalism. For another, Kenneth Whyte’s view is quite different from the accepted account, which dates to Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane of 1941, W.A. Swanberg’s best selling Citizen Hearst (Scribners, 1961) published two decades later, and several more recent and well-received biographies. 

Whyte’s Hearst is seen to play a far more positive role in journalism, that of a genuine innovator with concern for the problems of the common man, something he very clearly was not. Editor of Maclean’s, Canada’s weekly current affairs magazine, and founding editor of the National Post, Canada’s daily, Whyte comes to his subject with an extensive practical journalism background that earlier students of Hearst lacked. He knows the process and problems of trying to build and retain a readership and the advertisers needed to serve and sell to it. And he concludes here, after a five-year examination, that Hearst has been badly treated by historians and thus by posterity.

What is amazing is how fast Hearst established himself. Starting with the San Francisco Examiner, he learned the ropes, as Whyte relates. But the 1895 shift to New York City, the country’s premier news market, dominated by Pulitzer’s World, was a gutsy move, even for someone with seemingly endless financial resources. Buying the anemic New York Journal, Hearst turns it around in just months to become at least the equal of its older, established competitor. How and with whom he accomplished all this makes for fascinating reading, even if you know (or think you know) the basics of the story. Whyte’s research efforts and writing abilities make for easy and compelling reading about an amazing time.

The focus of this tale is on people (in an era when publishers and editors were far better known, and celebrated their dislike of one another on the pages of their dailies), technology (especially the arrival of color illustrations and printing), competitive juice (the absolute drive to excel and succeed), and a pervasive excitement (when gangs of newsboys got involved in creating and distributing the wonders of each day’s multiple editions). Hearst is seen as an innovative and hands-on editor who sought to and succeeded in shaking up the previously somewhat staid (with the exception of Pulitzer’s newspaper) world of New York journalism. His innovative use of color in comics and news pages, dynamic on-the-scene reporters (Richard Harding Davis, the dashing model of a war correspondent), and artists (including Frederick Remington), and thinking in terms of millions, not mere thousands, of readers, reshaped journalism not just in New York, but across the nation. The paper’s crusades became the nation’s. The man had flaws—and Whyte discusses them—but his brilliance and growing arrogance lit up New York’s Park Row, then the center of the city’s press.

Even if you’ve read one or more of the existing books about Hearst, this one is worth your time, as it challenges the image of the low-market yellow journalist we all think we know.

CHRISTOPHER H. STERLING
George Washington University

Stories of Oprah: The Oprahfication of American Culture. Trystan T. Cotton and Kimberly Springer, eds. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2010. 188 pp.

The ubiquitous Oprah Winfrey is a global media icon. Her syndicated daytime talk show, The Oprah Winfrey Show, is the highest-rated talk show in American television history, and when it ends in September 2011 will have aired for a quarter-century. Her Book Club recommendations virtually guarantee best-sellerdom for authors. Harpo, Inc., her production company, is behind films, television shows, satellite radio programs, and O: The Oprah Magazine. In January 2011 she launched her own 24/7 cable network. She even dispenses millions of dollars through Oprah’s Angel Network philanthropy. Regardless of her platform, Oprah’s message is positive, inspirational, and spiritual as she exhorts her fans to, “Live your best life.” 

So what’s not to like?

Well, according to Stories of Oprah: The Oprahfication of American Culture, Oprah’s message of personal empowerment and New Age self-help may prove uplifting to individual fans, but it often ends up being a depoliticized, deracialized, non-threatening balm that fails to address the systemic and institutionalized cultural oppression at the root of many people’s problems. At the same time, Oprah fails to credit the social movements and forces that helped propel her rise from her hardscrabble Mississippi beginnings to preside over her current media juggernaut. From a communication theory standpoint, Oprah’s message matters because given her media empire’s worldwide hegemonic reach, she is the ultimate agenda setter, telling people not what to think but what to think about.

Co-editors Trystan Cotton, an African American studies professor at California State-Stanislaus, and Kimberly Springer, a senior lecturer in the American Studies Department at King’s College London, pull together eleven chapters written by fifteen contributors—mostly American and European academics, ranging from doctoral students to department heads. Stories of Oprah examines Oprah’s impact on topics as wide-ranging as race, feminism, philanthropy, self-help, teen-age sexuality, and the 9/11 attacks and subsequent war in Iraq. Springer argues that the book shows that “it is possible to admire and even envy the accomplishments of an American cultural icon while maintaining a critical perspective that asks for more than what is presented on the surface by the Oprah Culture Industry.”

While acknowledging Oprah’s power and accomplishments, many of the contributors claim she shirks a larger duty to address deeper problems that might cause her audience—or advertisers—to reject her. Political science Ph.D. candidate Jennifer Rexroat writes that Oprah, as a de facto feminist, “refuses to pigeonhole herself as an explicitly identified feminist because of the many problematic and often pejorative associations made by numerous Americans with the feminist label.” Adriana Katzew and Lilia de Katzew explain Oprah’s failure to serve as a role model to many Chicanas by noting “a cultural gap that comes across in Oprah’s message when her measure of happiness and self-fulfillment for women does not take into account the specific ethnic and cultural life-worlds of diverse women—specifically that of Chicanas,” many of whom deal with poverty, powerlessness, and other problems.

In other essays, Oprah takes a drubbing for her “Oprahfied brand of ‘soft’ news” that “characterizes the devolution of mainstream broadcast news under the guise of advocacy journalism,” and for Harpo Inc.’s film Their Eyes Were Watching God, whose producers “deracialize the novel and mute [novelist Zora Neale] Hurston’s black feminist voice, thus glossing America’s social consciousness of racial, class, and gender inequalities.”

One of the strengths of Stories of Oprah, however, is that so many of the contributors build on a common theme: Oprah’s perception of failure and its solutions as a personal rather than a structural problem, and how her approach to personal improvement and fulfillment displaces viewers’ political engagement. Whether this was by design or accident, this makes for a unifying tone to the overall essays. Another is that most of the writing is well-sourced and also clear and compelling; although the book is intended for an interdisciplinary academic audience, only a few pieces were mired in tired-sounding theoretical jargon.

The book’s main shortcoming seemed to be a refusal by many of the authors to understand the corporate or cultural pressures that might be shaping Oprah’s approach to doing good. Would advertisers and audiences be put off if she reframed her message in an avowedly feminist manner, or if she attacked the political and economic underpinnings of Africa’s AIDS crisis rather than give gifts to AIDS orphans? Probably. I think the writers failed to give sufficient credit to Oprah for navigating the real commercial boundaries required to make it as a media star. Also, as a black woman operating in a white man’s media world, she may well have cultivated and internalized the idea that her success is linked to a non-threatening persona.

A second, lesser issue was the organization of the eleven chapters into three parts: “Oprah the Woman, Oprah the Empire,” “Contesting the Oprah Experts,” and “The Oprahfication of Media.” The categorization seems unnecessary, as the essays held together on their own.

Stories of Oprah does make a solid overall contribution to the paucity of academic studies of Oprah’s extraordinary influence. The introduction notes that as of the publication of this book in 2010, academic research and writing about Oprah have been limited to only four books of critical analysis, one published anthology, and various journal articles and book chapters.

As co-editor Springer observes, “It would not be far off, given the wealth of material yet to be investigated, to situate Stories of Oprah within a field of Oprah Studies.”

PEGGY DILLON
Salem State University

Show Sold Separately: Promos, Spoilers, and Other Media Paratexts. Jonathan Gray. New York: New York University Press, 2010. 247 pp.

What do a Star Trek lunchbox, a child playing with a Buzz Lightyear action figure, and a water cooler conversation about last night’s Colbert Report have in common? According to Jonathan Gray in Show Sold Separately, these are all media paratexts. More than merely extensions of a central media text, Gray argues these paratexts are all equally vital to cultural and individual meaning-making. Gray, an associate professor of media and cultural studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has explored these issues throughout much of his career, most notably in his book Watching with The Simpsons: Television, Parody, and Intertextuality. What sets Show Sold Separately apart from his previous works is the assertion that media and cultural studies need to step away from the emphasis on close readings of primary texts and instead focus on what he labels “off-screen studies.” This form of study, he argues, can best be accomplished through examining the constitutive role of paratexts in creating a mediated experience that breaks up the notion of a central or primary text. 

Explaining how this is accomplished succinctly is quite difficult, primarily because Gray fails to provide a specific definition for the term “paratext.” In the introduction he defines it by what it is not (that is merely an extension of an original text) with the unfulfilled promise that a more complete definition will follow later. It doesn’t. Instead, Gray uses the book to provide specific examples of paratexts and how they play at least an equivalent role in textual construction as what we often see as the text like a film or television show. Gray accomplishes this by providing extremely thorough and persuasive readings of paratexts, successfully showing, for example, how Jaws is not Jaws without its famous poster. By integrating these readings into a larger understanding of textuality, Gray effectively shows how close readings of singular texts fail to capture textuality as thoroughly as studies that combine paratexts.

The book demonstrates how paratexts like movie posters often serve as entryways into the textual experience. Gray also discusses in medias res paratexts, or those paratexts that continue the constitutive process beyond the initial exposure to texts. Gray notes how things like movie tie-in toys as well as events like playing with said toys act as paratexts, continuing to shape and expand a text beyond first exposure. This has a couple of interesting consequences for media and cultural scholars.

First, it shows that a paratext’s label of entryway, or in media res, is relative to experience. For example, one could certainly see Jaws the film before its poster. Second, this relativity means that texts are both cultural and individual products. Gray, for example, comes to read Star Wars primarily through the experience of playing with the toys. This reading is quite   different from mine, as I understood it through video games (another subject of interest in the book), and both would differ from those who know the iconic movie primarily as, well, a movie. Yet despite our individual experiences, we share a similar overall understanding, suggesting that paratexts work culturally as well.

This positions Gray’s book in both a longstanding research program on textuality and within an emerging and exciting turn in media and cultural studies. The study of paratexts both as entryway and in media res expands theories of reading codes and polysemy, since paratexts often open texts to interpretation. Yet Gray argues that professionally produced paratexts like DVD bonus material as well as amateur contributions like movie reviews are able to (re)construct understanding and close reading alternatives as well. While these conclusions are not altogether new to these theories, Gray adds paratextuality to the conversation while moving research beyond an audience-only focus to concerns of production, something Gray supports throughout the book with numerous quotations from leading professionals.

Show Sold Separately will also likely become an essential read for those interested in the study on intertextuality. First, Gray begins a hierarchy by placing paratextuality as a subset of intertextuality. He never makes it clear what exists under the umbrella of intertexts beyond paratexts, so such positioning seems immediately questionable. This is only a minor quibble, however. Of greater concern is what the book adds to future research, which is the understanding that paratexts work together to make meaning. Equally important is the fact they are being created by both Hollywood and audiences. Gray demonstrates that the line between producer and audience is disappearing because of what is described as media convergence, a concept further emphasized in Henry Jenkins’ 2006 book Convergence Culture. Points of connection, however, also exist with other recent works like Brian Ott’s The Small Screen (2007) and Lawrence Lessig’s Remix (2009). Therefore, as part of this research program, I believe Show Sold Separately will prove invaluable to those concerned with how intertexuality shapes culture and the self.

For some JMCQ readers, the emphasis on cultural studies may be off-putting. Not only is Gray’s writing approachable to those unfamiliar with cultural studies, the book also includes examples of quantitative and qualitative studies of paratextuality that can serve as jumping off points for researchers. Therefore, I feel it is important to conclude this review by recommending Gray’s book as a useful starting point for scholars from theoretical and methodological backgrounds other than cultural studies interested in joining the (inter)textuality scholarly conversation.

CHRISTOPHER A. MEDJESKY
Bowling Green State University

News to Me: Adventures of an Accidental Journalist. Laurie Hertzel. Minneapolis, MN: University of Min-nesota Press, 2010. 224 pp.

In her memoir, News to Me: Adventures of an Accidental Journalist, Laurie Hertzel makes short work of her first husband.

No, he wasn’t the subject of one of the many homicide stories published in the Duluth News-Tribune during Hertzel’s eighteen years on the staff. He is, rather, a very minor character in this coming-of-age story about Hertzel’s life at the mid-sized northern Minnesota daily. 

Hertzel is the first to acknowledge that when she was married in her mid-twenties and divorced four years later, she was, in fact, not married to a man but to her job. The legal marriage didn’t work for many reasons—one of them being that she worked nights during most of it and had a social life separate from her husband’s. And the only reaction the unsurprising news of her divorce drew from her colleagues was a cool observation from one female reporter that she could finally rid herself of the cumbersome hyphenated last name she had adopted for four years.

News to Me is the story of that newspaper marriage, and it is also an account of the growth of a city and the antics of the characters who populated the Duluth newsroom. Those people made up Hertzel’s family for nearly two decades, and they had a great influence on the way she viewed the world of work and the world in general. She began at the paper as an editorial clerk in 1976, during a time of upheaval in society and in the press. Much of the book consists of her reflections about change in both those venues. It is also an account of how she matured and grew along with the times.

The News-Tribune of the 1970s was a politically incorrect place—a blessing and a curse, according to Hertzel. The book is filled with characters straight out of Damon Runyon, only they were real. And the late 1970s gave them license to exercise their, uh, quirky personalities. Cigarette butts flew through the air, men could post clips of the borderline misogynistic comic “The Lockhorns” (noting how it mirrored their own lives), and stories routinely described the physical appearances of women but not men. Many of the guys may have been sexist pigs by today’s standards, Hertzel notes, but they were her sexist pigs, and most were warm-hearted and went out of their way to help her if they could.

The book could be used as supplemental reading for a course on memoir, or a beginning or mid-level undergraduate journalism course; while it is not a history of newspaper journalism, it does illustrate the role and workings of newspapers during the era in which Hertzel worked: the late 1970s until the present.

Some of the stories, while certainly amusing, may be too “inside baseball” for the layperson who has never worked in a newsroom. Still, in the bigger picture, News to Me could be the story of anyone who enters the workforce at a young age and gets a load of on-the-job training in how to deal with office politics, people, and the disappointments that come with the daily grind.

Hertzel is particularly attuned to the pivotal role of chance in life, and in her reflections she indicates that it was frequently luck or providence—not necessarily a plan—that led to life-changing opportunities. She is also keenly attuned to the passage of time, a phenomenon observed by anyone born before the Clinton Administration. Once the youngest person in the newsroom—the kid—she wakes up one day to find many of her friends gone, and new, very young kids taking their place.

But she continued to thrive, and after eighteen years, left her beloved Duluth and the News-Tribune to move to the Twin Cities, where she is now book editor of the Star Tribune in Minneapolis, and no doubt continuing to observe the rapid changes taking place in today’s media environment—and in life.

MARILYN GREENWALD
Ohio University

News Agencies in the Turbulent Era of the Internet. Oliver Boyd-Barrett, ed. Barcelona, Spain: Government of Catalonia, Presidential Department, 2010. 313 pp.

This valuable anthology combines the work of nineteen authors who describe the state of world and national news agencies around the world. The volume is the fifth in the Catalan government’s Col-lecció Lexikon series of studies on different aspects of journalism. Three have appeared in the Catalan language, while this and one other on European press subsidies have been published in English. Though not stated specifically, the book appears to have been issued in celebration of the tenth anniversary (in 2009) of the formation of the Catalan News Agency (ACN), one of the few new European news agencies formed in recent years. 

The collective theme of these papers is how the changes increasingly impacting newspapers and electronic media clients of news agencies are forcing the latter to consider and develop services directly aimed at end users. The editor, who has taught at Bowling Green State University in Ohio since 2005, has been a long-time student of global news agencies (see, for example, The International News Agencies [1980], and The Globalization of News [1999], both from Sage).

After an introduction focusing upon changes in news agencies over the past decade, the chapters examine a literal world of existing news agencies and the pressures they face. Papers examine the innovative technology model of the ACN, Agence France Presse in both French and global contexts, possible strategies for news agencies in Italy, the agencies of Australia and New Zealand, news agencies across Canada, DPA and other agencies in Germany, and the role of agencies based on the experience of EFE (the Spanish news agency) in Latin America. Other chapters look at the Inter Press Service as an alternative approach focusing on news of the developing world, the Portuguese agency LUSA, the move to online service and the U.K.’s domestic Press Association, the trials and tribulations of the four domestic Indian news services, changing news agencies in Russia, and the operations of the Xinhua news agency in China.

This is a handsomely produced paperback volume, with two-color printing, dividers between papers, footnotes in page margins (so much better than the usual back-of-the-book location), graphs and tables, and documentation. The only thing it lacks is an index, which would have made it far easier to reference. Still, the papers provide a valuable and current assessment of the status of selected national and global agencies amidst dramatic technical and economic upheaval in the international news business.

CHRISTOPHER H. STERLING
George Washington University

The New York Times Reader: Business & Economics. Mark W. Tatge. Washington, DC: CQ Press, 2010. 282 pp.

Business and economics journalism, despite advances in the past two decades, still remains a backwater in terms of education in journalism and mass communication programs. That’s why Mark Tatge’s reader on business and economics coverage in the New York Times is a welcome addition.

Tatge, a former Forbes senior editor and Wall Street Journal reporter, uses examples from the Times to explain how stories about major business and economics topics were reported, and adds interviews with the reporters and editors who produced the stories so readers understand the difficulties, and the tricks, in covering such beats. That makes this a book that could be a valuable addition to the syllabus for corporate PR classes as well as reporting and business journalism classes. 

Business journalism is undergoing a tremendous upheaval, as are all media. Many daily newspapers have cut their stand-alone business sections and buried that news inside other sections. Weekly business newspapers and websites in metro markets have stepped up to fill that void, while national and international media organizations such as Bloomberg, Reuters, and the Wall Street Journal have expanded their staffs to cover more business and economic news.

Meanwhile, there’s a major discussion going on about business journalism and whether the coverage did its job leading up to what has been called the current Great Recession. Some argue that the business media were too soft on Wall Street and didn’t do enough to warn consumers that the economy was heading for trouble, while others point out that it’s not the job of business reporters to tell people when and how to invest, or whether to sell their home before the price drops.

Tatge straddles the line between these two camps. He’s more interested in improving the quality of journalism students coming out of universities in their ability to cover business and economics news, and reaches no conclusions about the current quality.

This Reader is part of a series from CQ Press that examines a variety of reporting areas, from arts and culture to sports. Tatge, a former business journalist himself who oversees the business journalism  program at Ohio University, is an excellent choice to put together the business and economics entry.

There are many different ways to teach business journalism, and Tatge falls in the category of using examples with his students and explaining how the topic is covered by one of the pre-eminent media outlets for business and economics journalism. The New York Times won more awards—fourteen—than any other paper in the 2009 Best in Business Contest by the Society of American Business Editors and Writers.

The bulk of this book’s text is the articles from the Times. Where Tatge adds value is that he takes some of the articles and breaks them down by highlighting certain parts and explaining to the reader what the writer is trying to accomplish with the sentence or paragraph.

For example, a story on a recent jobs report about the economy shows how Times reporters David Leonhardt and Catherine Rampell break down the concept into terms that the reader can understand and explain what is missing. Tatge also points out when they use an example and what that does for the reader, and how they reinforce earlier points later in the story.

Perhaps the most valuable portion of the book, however, is when Tatge interviews the journalists at the end of each chapter, asking them how they got into business journalism and about strategies for reporting and writing stories on their beats. We find out that Leonhardt, for example, was a math major in college and sometimes has difficulty talking to economists, and how economics reporter Louis Uchitelle comes up with his story ideas.

Also valuable is a section at the end of each chapter called “Making Connections” that helps budding journalists understand the significance of writing about business and economics issues and how they can develop similar stories.    The downside is that there’s not enough of these features throughout the book. Although Tatge previews each story in the book with a short introduction, one wishes for more examples broken down in the detail that Tatge offers with a handful. In addition, the interviews with the journalists leave me wanting more of those, too. Like Oliver Twist, I’d also like more, please, of the “Making Connections” features, which are neatly formatted in text bubbles on a page at the end of each chapter.

And, like any book attempting to cover a wide swath of journalism, there are some business news topics that aren’t covered in this reader. If you’re looking for a textbook that tells students how to cover merger and acquisition stories or the Federal Reserve, then you’ll need to look elsewhere.

Still, this is a strong book that will make a contribution to improving business journalism, and help the burgeoning business journalism education movement in academia.

CHRIS ROUSH
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

New New Media. Paul Levinson. Boston, MA: Allyn & Bacon, 2009. 225 pp.

It’s increasingly difficult to keep up with the rapid growth of new forms of communication created by the Internet. Change happens so fast that even a relatively new format—such as Wikipedia, launched in 2001—seems old and familiar just ten years later.

Paul Levinson, an author and professor of communication and media studies at Fordham University, says one characteristic that distinguishes “new new media” from simple “new media” is that in the newer form the consumer is also a producer. 

Levinson defines categories of “new new media,” noting that the written word plays a role in all forms—print, audio, audio-visual, and photographic. His   book provides history and insight into many of those forms, devoting chapters to blogging, YouTube, Wikipedia, Digg, MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, Second Life, and podcasting. He draws heavily on his own experiences with each of these formats; the index refers to his own blog, Infinite Regress, sixteen times.

Perhaps because of his own experience, his book becomes, at least in part, a how-to resource. His blogging chapter, in particular, provides an easy guide for novices, including spelling out detailed ways to try to make money in the blogo-sphere. Most of these “new new media” formats will not be new to savvy Internet users. However, Levinson provides numerous examples of the impact each has had on communication in recent history. He recalls that the Obama Girl became a sensation thanks to a YouTube video in 2007, and he describes the use     of Twitter as a way that protesters shared information during the Iranian election of 2009 (and we have seen more recent examples in recent Middle Eastern upheavals).

He compares new formats to old media—the revolutionary impact of the telegraph for reporters who could file newspaper stories instantly as a precursor to the way blogging allows everyone to become instant reporters. He even finds an analogy between T-shirt slogans of the 1970s and 140-character messages on Twitter.

Levinson notes that distinguishing elements of “new new media” are both its immediacy and permanence. The introduction of the iPhone in 2007, he says, marked the beginning of a new phase in the “new new media” revolution, permitting near-unlimited portability as consumers could easily connect to the Web from almost anywhere. And many of these new formats allow consumers to connect easily with one another as well, whether it is as Facebook friends or Twitter followers.

Because Levinson publishes this combination mini-history and guide via an old medium—a book—it lacks “new, new media” immediacy. He acknowledges that rapid changes in technology may leave out newer, more important formats than those he singled out for mention or full chapters. Of course, he’s right. The book pre-dates or fails to index, for instance, the iPad or Tumblr, a simple blogging platform that reached 1.5 billion page views a month in 2010, according to TechCrunch, which collects and analyzes such data. Today, even Groupon, a deal-a-day discount company, might be added to the list because consumers with their buying decisions determine whether a deal is on.

Levinson’s last three chapters veer from his earlier emphasis on particular formats. Instead, he discusses the dark side of new technologies, the 2008 election, and hardware. His “guns and pillows” analogy for new technology is excellent. Just as a pillow can be used for good (comfort) or evil (suffocation), he notes technology is neither inherently bad nor good.

The book is a great introduction to rapid changes in technology and communication, particularly for technophobes. It also provides a quick history for students who, having used sites like MySpace or Facebook for years, forget that those communication tools have not always existed. Even better, the book makes valuable connections between “new new media” and older forms of media.

SUE BURZYNSKI BULLARD
University of Nebraska-Lincoln

Media Industries: History, Theory, and Method. Jennifer Holt and Alisa Perren, eds. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009. 283 pp.

Offering twenty original scholarly essays, this anthology provides a solid collection of recent surveys of various media industries, melding description, analysis, and even some predictions. Collectively, they provide a sense of how “media industries” is fast becoming a recognized field of study in its own right—along with an idea of some of the work still necessary to make that happen. 

The editors teach communication at the University of California-Santa Barbara, and George State University, respectively. They and their cast of contributors (many among them fairly senior scholars with impressive records) demonstrate the value of multidisciplinary studies by applying methods of anthropology, sociology, economics (and more specifically industrial analysis), political economy, cultural and policy studies—and even journalism.

The essays are arranged in four sections. “History” includes six papers on such topics as the problem and development of media historiography (by Michele Hilmes, a key practitioner of the art), archives and media studies, film industry studies, broadcast and cable TV networking, advertising’s role in radio-TV development, and new media and how they transform our concept of media history. A “Theory” section features five essays that turn to an articulation of media political economy, thinking globally rather than simply nationally, in a chapter by Michael Curtin, a film studies professor at Santa Barbara who formerly directed the global studies program at the University of Wisconsin. Latin America is an example of regional media industry study; these authors also examine the concept of nation and media industries, and Mark Dueze of Indiana University writes on the modern convergence culture and media work.

“Methodologies and Models” opens with Philip Napoli’s review of the role of media economics in the study of media industries. John McMurria examines issues in regulation and the law (drawing examples from cable and digital media policymaking), and Toby Miller of the University of California–Riverside applies critical cultural policy studies in a chapter titled “Can Natural Luddites Make Things Explode or Travel Faster? The New Humanities, Cultural Policy Studies, and Creative Industries.” Two concluding essays in the section look at media production studies and media industry operations, and the “moral economy” of Web 2.0.

The final section on “The Future” offers four different visions or approaches: consumer-centered analysis, the role of politics and theory in media industry studies, the concept of change as seen from an industry perspective, and working toward media industries research that synthesizes the work and methods of many researchers.

Each essay in this collection is documented and provides something of a survey of the research literature to date in each specialty. While some of the cited “pioneers” are nothing of the sort (the real pioneering work on media industries dates to the 1940s and 1950s, if not even earlier), the book’s papers collectively provide a very useful stock-taking of where things stand. And the emphasis on the value of a variety of methodological traditions is especially useful.

CHRISTOPHER H. STERLING
George Washington University

The Magazine Century: American Magazines Since 1900. David E. Sumner. New York, NY: Peter Lang, 2010. 242 pp.

Magazines today are in trouble—some venerable titles have changed hands, others have disappeared entirely. For most, ad pages are down (often sharply) as are circulations. The periodical publishing industry is clearly seeking a new viable business model for the increasingly competitive digital world of the twenty-first century. Fewer than 20% of new titles survive for as long as three years.

That dour outlook recedes a bit as one reads this retrospective survey of a century when magazines ruled, or so it seemed. As the author, David E. Sumner of Ball State University, makes clear in his opening remarks, however, the very number of magazines that have been launched over the past century is daunting—as Sumner notes, the number of magazines grew by nearly 600% between 1900 and 2000. 

Thus, he rightly focuses his survey to include only examples of the more important and varied general consumer magazines (some 9,500 titles by early in the twenty-first century), bypassing discussion of the huge professional and trade (let alone research) sectors. Further, Sumner seeks out the editors and publishers who sought to be innovative rather than merely imitative. His use of decades as a mode of organization (as opposed to magazine type, the more usual approach), helps to emphasize the historical context for the magazines he includes.

So, who’s here? After a brief discussion of the late nineteenth century as the birthing era of modern magazines, we read about Bernarr Macfadden fitness and romance magazines, Hearst’s Cosmopolitan and Good Housekeeping, and Condé Nast and his fashion titles. The pioneers of the 1920s include the Wallaces and Reader’s Digest, Henry Luce and Briton Hadden’s Time, and Harold Ross at The New Yorker. The 1930s are epitomized by Fortune and then Life, but also the supermarket monthlies. The 1940s see the emergence of black magazines, the Rodale empire, and Peterson’s Hot Rod, progenitor of a host of auto titles. Mid-century brings TV Guide, Playboy, and Sports Illustrated, among others. And so on—you get the idea. Often in just a page or two, Sumner uses examples to illustrate larger themes.

Sumner is well grounded in his topic, having published a “complete guide” to the magazine industry in 2006, and coauthored a volume on feature and magazine writing in 2009. This effort, however, is much more exhaustive, seeing a nation and an entire “magazine century” through the pages of its monthly and weekly publications, some enduring, some transitory, all clamoring from overcrowded newsstands for the attention of an often fickle audience.

Boxed features throughout The Magazine Century help the reader keep track of the numbers—who was big, when titles began, typical circulations, and the like. And a brief topically arranged bibliography opens the doors to a literature larger than many may suspect. Overall, this is a satisfying survey of a medium once dominant and now seeking its way.

CHRISTOPHER H. STERLING
George Washington University

Dangerous Curves: Latina Bodies in the Media. Isabel Molina-Guzmán. New York: New York University Press, 2010. 256 pp.

Latina/o Stars in U.S. Eyes: The Making and Meanings of Film and TV Stardom. Mary C. Beltrán. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2009. 222 pp.

Latina/o Stars in U.S. Eyes: The Making and Meanings of Film and TV Stardom and Dangerous Curves: Latina Bodies in the Media join other recent books about Chicano, Hispanic, and Latino issues and contribute to research about class, ethnicity, gender, race, and sexual orientation in different but important ways. 

These books by Mary C. Beltrán and Isabel Molina-Guzmán, as well as others—including Latina Teens, Migration, and Popular Culture by Lucila Vargas (Peter Lang, 2009) and Latino/a Communication Studies, edited by Angharad N. Valdivia (Peter Lang, 2008)—represent a continuing interest in the portrayal of people of color in global popular culture. Latina/o Stars in U.S. Eyes and Dangerous Curves, which complement and reinforce each other, belong side by side on the bookshelves of media scholars committed to making sense of proliferating images of “Latinidad” in the United States and abroad.

Marketed primarily to those interested in women of color and popular culture, both of these books are organized around the lives and careers of individual entertainment and news celebrities. They deal primarily with American texts and audiences, but refer often to international issues, and both inform and advocate for social change. Although the titles might indicate otherwise, the authors refer to both female and male icons.

In each of their works, both Beltrán and Molina-Guzmán employ aesthetic, cultural, historical, sociological, and textual criticism. Both books include extensive analysis of the life and career of actress and entertainer Jennifer Lopez, and Dangerous Curves addresses the media representation of sexual orientation in discussions about Lopez, America Ferrera (the star of Ugly Betty), and the 2002 film Frida.

Latina/o Stars in U.S. Eyes is divided into seven chapters that feature Mexican actress Dolores Del Rio, who became a star during the silent film era; Desi Arnaz, actor, musician, and television producer best known for starring in I Love Lucy (1950-1957) with his wife Lucille Ball; and Puerto Rican performer Rita Moreno, who was celebrated for her film roles during the 1950s and 1960s. Freddie Prinze, the Puerto Rican and German-Hungarian actor who played Francisco (Chico) Rodriguez in Chico and the Man (1974-1978), is the focus of this chapter. Also featured in subsequent chapters include Edward James Olmos, star of Stand and Deliver (1988) and other 1980s films; Jennifer Lopez, who has starred in films as diverse as Selena (1997), The Wedding Planner (2001), and Angel Eyes (2001); and Jessica Alba and other recent examples of “racial hybridity” in contemporary film and television.

Because the book covers developments from the 1920s to the present, it necessarily relies upon summary and broad brush strokes. The encyclopedic nature of the study suggests that numerous celebrities may be omitted and that discussion of themes may be secondary to the development of a timeline. For example, the popularity of figures such as Antonio Banderas, Benjamin Bratt, Penelope Cruz, Benicio del Toro, Salma Hayek, and Jimmy Smits may eclipse that of other stars featured in each chapter; although these and other significant figures surface in the study, the author does not analyze their impact on cultural attitudes. It might be that consideration of their lives and careers would either reinforce Beltrán’s arguments or lead to different conclusions.

Some opinions in Latina/o Stars in U.S. Eyes would benefit from further support. Examples include claims that Jennifer Lopez’s relationship with entertainer Marc Anthony “has appeared … of less interest” to American audiences than her marriage to Ben Affleck; that “backlash” against Lopez and Affleck resulted in some of their projects “faring poorly,” and that Alba “notably has had many doors open to her that are still not available to other Latinas, in large part because of her off-white appearance and image.” Interviews with actors and performers who are still living might inform the study, as would lengthier discussions of these and similar issues.

Nonetheless, the author promises in the introduction to address the ways in which “star images reflected or challenged the shifting status of Latina/os in relation to racial, class, and gendered notions, and notions of citizenship and national identity,” and she succeeds admirably with this goal. An assistant professor of communication arts and Chicana/o and Latina/o studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Beltrán here extends the work she began as co-editor of Mixed Race Hollywood (NYU Press, 2008).

The value of Latina/o Stars in U.S. Eyes is its expansive view. The sheer number of references and its conclusions make this resource valuable, and its reminder that “Latinidad as constructed by Hollywood still rests on notions of distinctive elements and traits, a conundrum with which actors have to contend” remains essential.

For its part, Molina-Guzmán’s Dangerous Curves features Jennifer Lopez on its cover, and is organized around case studies. Like Latina/o Stars in U.S. Eyes, it critiques film and television texts but also addresses representations in tabloid newspapers, broadcast, print, and online news venues, and in online discussions. Molina-Guzmán includes opinions about “Latinidad” from journalists, readers, scholars, and viewers in the United States as well as in Mexico, Latin America, the Spanish Caribbean, and other international locales.

Problematizing perspectives on what constitutes “Latinidad” in today’s popular culture, Molina-Guzmán relies upon numerous examples: “While at times the ethnic and racial signifiers of Latinidad may work in concert with one another, such as media representations of Salma Hayek as Mexican and brown, at other times they may contradict our commonsense assumptions about Latinidad, such as white Cameron Diaz’s more recent identification as Latina.” By examining audience responses to media portrayals, she draws conclusions about the way some discussions “destabilize dominant U.S. ethnic and racial classifications of nationhood and citizenship.”

Chapter titles in Dangerous Curves suggest the breadth of Molina-Guzmán’s research and the nature of the case studies. In order, the chapters are “Saving Elián: Cubana Motherhood, Latina Immigration, and the Nation,” which deals with the 2000 international custody battle involving Elián González; “Disciplining J.Lo: Booty Politics in Tabloid News,” which addresses the objectification of Jennifer Lopez by both fans and critics; and “Becoming Frida: Latinidad and the Production of Latina Authenticity,” which addresses Salma Hayek’s award-winning portrayal of artist Frida Kahlo and the international debate about Hayek’s racial and ethnic identity, and Kahlo’s sexual orientation, that followed the film. Other chapters include “‘Ugly’ America Dreams the American Dream,” which deals with America Ferrera and her portrayal of  Betty Suarez in the television hit Ugly Betty, and “Maid in Hollywood: Producing Latina Labor in an Anti-Immigration Imaginary.”

Like the introduction, titled “Mapping the Place of Latinas in the U.S. Media,” the conclusion grounds the study in theory and clarifies contemporary debates about international perspectives on what constitutes racial and ethnic identity. “In the decade since I began the research for this book,” Molina-Guzmán writes, “the visibility of Latinas in the global mediascape has proliferated.” Although she clearly celebrates this fact, Molina-Guzmán also calls for what she calls more “nuanced” portrayals: “What I and other audiences expect from the media is not to get rid of commercially profitable or negative news depictions of Latinidad but instead to create more opportunities for nuanced, compelling, and diverse articulations of Latina/o identity.”

An associate professor of communications and Latina/o Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Molina-Guzmán might consider extensive interviews—not only with those who blog, but with the entertainment and news celebrities whose narratives she appropriates. The perspectives of Jessica Alba, Cameron Diaz, the family members of Elián Gonzalez, and others might reinforce or undercut some of Molina-Guzmán’s claims.

Like many scholars immersed in a study of class, ethnicity, gender, race, and sexual orientation, Molina-Guzmán appreciates any “unique opening for meaningful conversations about the media, social justice, and ethnic and racial equality” in our classes and our intellectual communities. Not incidentally, of course, she and Beltrán have produced academically rigorous texts that will   facilitate those conversations.

JAN WHITT
University of Colorado

Kings of Madison Avenue: The Unofficial Guide to Mad Men. Jesse McLean. Toronto, Canada: ECW Press, 2009. 231 pp.

Pop-culture writer Jesse McLean apparently intends to be as versatile as possible in his guide Kings of Madison Avenue, the Unofficial Guide to Mad Men. Not only does the book explain how the writers of the popular television show take cues from a diverse group that includes Sigmund Freud, Maya Angelou, Helen Gurley Brown, and others—and not only does he include capsulized histories of the Kennedy Administration, the second-wave feminist movement, and the Redskins’ presidential prediction record—but Kings also includes at the end a section on “how to party like a mad man.” 

This “unofficial guide” (which implies there must be an “official” one) may indeed send readers scrambling for the official guide, if such exists. If so, here’s hoping it is better written, better edited, and more focused than its unofficial counterpart.

Kings of Madison Avenue is certainly not meant be a sober (no pun intended) or scholarly guide to the award-winning AMC series about misogynistic life among admen of the 1960s—an extremely entertaining and unique hodgepodge of cultural history, politics, drama, and comedy. But the book tries so hard to be everything to everyone that it probably won’t be too much fun to read for even the most enthusiastic Mad Men fan, nor would it be very worthwhile as a text or guide for popular culture classes. The quotes and allusions to poets, philosophers, and respected writers are interesting, but they do seem strained at times, even if one does acknowledge the talent and intelligence of the show’s writers.

Kings of Madison Avenue is so “inside” that it would be of little interest to anyone who hasn’t seen the show; at the same time, much of the material has been recycled so many times that it would be old hat for serious fans of the show (i.e., the actor who plays the senior ad executive, Robert Morse, appeared decades ago in “How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying,” which in itself was about ad agencies, wink wink. Or, the fact that there weren’t many women ad execs in the 1960s, and most women in the office were secretaries seeking husbands, etc.).

McLean, a Toronto TV and film critic who also has written for the online “journal of literary satire” YankeePotRoast.org (“Hastilly Written & Slopilly Edited”), has a writing style—or lack thereof—that doesn’t help matters. His sentences sometimes take circuitous paths before getting to the point, and occasionally two clauses in the same sentence have little relation to each other. For instance, in a bio of actor Vincent Kartheiser (account man Pete Campbell), he writes, “While Vincent Kartheiser may enjoy the high quality of the scripts and the peers he encounters each day on the set, the journeyman actor can’t help but find the pragmatic silver lining in his role.”

Or, when explaining why he wrote the book, McLean notes, “The investigation of shifting societal mores are (cq) more than just a framing device; they actually inform every episode in a way that current events inhabit our own daily lives.”

Still, Kings does have its moments. The brief biographies of the cast offer some intriguing tidbits about the actors—for instance, Jon Hamm’s early childhood is reminiscent in some ways of Don Draper’s, the character he plays. And McLean does present a few fresh insights into the cultural precursors to Mad Men. For instance, the vastly entertaining Doris Day-Rock Hudson Lover Come Back (1961), in retrospect, does have Mad Men elements to it, and the author’s brief discussion of Richard Yates’ Revolutionary Road is appropriate and interesting. But an index, in addition to the bibliography provided, would have aided in a search of these references.

McLean seems to have designed the book as part light pop-culture history and part scholarly study; he probably would have had more success if he had concentrated on the former and forgotten about the latter. Fewer but more fully developed examples, anecdotes, and analogies might have helped his goal of shedding light on the phenomenon of Mad Men.

MARILYN GREENWALD
Ohio University

Journalism in Crisis: Corporate Media and Financialization. Núria Almiron, trans. by William McGrath. New York: Hampton Press, Inc., 2010. 212 pp.

This is the most important available analysis of the crisis of journalism, exhibiting critical skills of which alarmingly few North American analysts are capable. Núria Almiron is lecturer and researcher in communication at Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona. Her political economy approach goes well beyond the platitudes of death-by-Internet sermonizing, even beyond the themes of concentration and overreach so well-rehearsed by Robert McChesney. McChesney and Nichols (2010) regret the passing of a Golden Age that preceded advertising. For Almiron, journalism is in perpetual crisis, hapless child of bourgeois parents—freedom of the press as formulated in the Declaration of Rights of the State of Virginia (1776) and in the French Revolution’s Declaration of the Rights of Man (1789), eternally abused by the “instrumentalization” of dominant classes. 

Journalism remains caught in the contradiction between its emancipating potential and the conditions imposed on it by financial globalization. No longer even the plaything of erratic conglomerates and moguls, it has entered a post-corporate era characterized by the supremacy of the capital (finance) over the industrial sphere (production) “inherent to the evolution of modern capitalism.” The term “financialization” (first employed by Andre Orlean in 1999) is identified by Gerald Epstein (2005) as one of three main trends in global economics of the past thirty years, the others being neoliberalism and globalization, and defined as “the increasing role of financial motives, financial markets, financial actors, and financial institutions in the operation of the domestic and international economies.” It is the product of the ending of fixed international Exchange rates, disorganization of raw-materials markets, privileged position of transnational corporations, budget deficits, deregulation, liberalization, and monetary disintermediation. The result is conversion of the financial sector into one of today’s principal sources of profit, but also of global instability—manifest in overinvestment and financial engineering as egregiously illustrated by “tax havens” that hold a third of the wealth of high net-worth individuals, and by other forms of money hiding, laundering, and extreme speculation. These lead to overcapacity, concentration, and implosion. These basic capitalist cycles are far more enduring and predictable than the information, digital, ICT, and other “revolutions” that bedazzle those who should know so much better.

Media and finance are closely interlinked, illustrated by the development in the mid-nineteenth-century of Reuters, not long after the London Stock Exchange, providing financial, business, and economic information flows that have become the bedrock of the very structure of modern capitalism. The technology of information flows is dependent on the raising of capital in financial markets, which are also insatiable consumers of communication technologies and financial news. Banks exert a fundamental influence on information corporations: they determine which and how many media will survive, their degree of concentration, autonomy, and diversity. These relationships bind concentration, internationalization, industrialization, and financialization, this latter passing through three main stages of absolute family control, relative family control, and managerial control.

Financialization coexists with media moguls, but moguls’ empires have fallen to its logics, just as the financial industry in turn has become dependent on the favorable spinning of the media friends it controls. The consequences are media gigantism—justified by synergies and the competition-driven needs for technology investment and global expansion, and executed in partnership with financial capital, mostly banks, private equity firms, and stock markets. The result is unsustainable indebtedness, declining profit, complicity in securitization fraud, and domination of media boards by representatives of the finance industry. The financial industry partners with media in many ways: It is a major topic for coverage, a client and advertiser—amounting to totally irreconcilable conflicts of interest. These account for the abject failure of mainstream media to predict the totally predictable collapse of modern capitalism from 2008.

News media owners are highly interlocked with the power elite. Of the forty-one media conglomerates with more than $2 billion in news-media assets in 2008, 41% are American; 93% are North American or European Union. Finance-dominated institutional investors control more than 60% of GE, 64% of Disney, and 82% of Time Warner. Almiron’s study updates an old controversy about the “managerial revolution”—it is not that managers exercise influence independent from shareholders, but that managers are co-opted into the financial logics imposed by bondholders, those who lend to the issuers of the debt on which the modern media conglomerate depends. The majority of top media owners finished 2008 with a debt/equity ratio of more than 1, indicating that a company has been aggressively financing its growth with debt. By 2009, media companies everywhere were seeing that debt turn into junk status, depriving them of their only source of redemption: refinance. “The reason for the crisis wasn’t the global financial crisis but business strategies based on growing as much as possible as fast as possible regardless of the consequences,” Almiron observes.

This impacts media corporate goals through financialization of the core business—financial services get priority above media services; or financial information and markets become the core business; or media corporations become speculative actors in the financial markets, desperate to grow revenues and profit. Other aspects include the financialization of labor through market dependent pensions, and of the workplace (using financial schemes to compensate labor). Almiron concludes that “financialization has increased the proximity of the financial power elite to the management of media companies at the same time that is has increased the distance between management and journalistic concerns,” inaugurating “a renewed estrangement from the criteria of social responsibility of the financialized news firm,” since all the actors are compromised by the penetration of financial industry logics. More and more, news content is about the financial sector, targeted to investors and entrepreneurs, with no independent journalistic investigation, and no adequate resources for coverage of topics of unparalleled public concern, including (I would add) U.S. universalization of war crime, and global climate catastrophe.

OLIVER BOYD-BARRETT
Bowling Green State University

The Great Typo Hunt: Changing the World One Correction at a Time. Jeff Deck and Benjamin D. Herson. New York: Crown Publishing Group, 2010. 288 pp.

Any professor, writer, schoolmarm, or even semi-literate reader can empathize with Jeff Deck, a young, single editor stalled in his career who saw one too many prominent typos and went berserk.

We’ve all been there. The rustic carved wooden sign announcing “The Johnson’s” house. The grocery checkout for “15 items or less.” The eternal pain of the dear departed spinning in their graves at the “Oak Lawn Cemetary.” These are cries of pain for Deck and his green-eyeshade partner, Benjamin D. Herson. 

The Great Typo Hunt is no weighty work of research, but it surely is a sign of the times (a sign that, as a cover blurb points out, is too often missing an apostrophe). The misuse and abuse of the language became so unbearable that these two typo hunters were projected on a cross-country orgy of copy editing in public.

Deck and Herson were writers on the fringes of the publishing world—Deck as an associate editor for some special interest magazines in Washington, D.C., and Herson a bookseller. Their credentials as public editors were thin—both had published short stories, and Deck won two junior high school spelling bees—but their typo sensitivity was set high; typos leapt out at them everywhere—“bread puding” on a restaurant chalk board, “hungy Please help” on a homeless man’s cardboard sign, “mens contemporary suits” at Filene’s department store, “Quarter’s Slots” and “carmel corn” in Las Vegas neon.

The quest to change the world, one typo at a time, started when Deck suddenly registered on a sign near his apartment that he’d walked past scores of times: “Private Property No Tresspassing,” on a fence around a vacant lot.

Deck wrote,

Sure, I’d noticed this sign before . . . . This time, though, the sign’s offense struck deeper. How many spelling mistakes had I noticed over the years in shop windows, street signs, menus, billboards and other public venues? Not an enterance. NYC Pasta and Pizza at it’s best! . . . There was the answer—typo hunting was the good that I, Jeff Deck, was uniquely suited to visit upon society.

Deck recruited Herson and some support troops, created the Typo Eradication Advancement League (TEAL), and set off on a ten-week trans-American road trip, armed with a variety of Sharpies, Wite-Out, and other typo-correction gear.

Before they were finished, they had traveled the country east to west and north to south, documenting 437 public typos and editing 236 of them. One of these was on what prosecutors later called “a priceless historic artifact,” a 1932 hand-painted sign at the Grand Canyon that landed them in federal court in United States of America v. Jeff Deck and Benjamin Herson. The court documents were frightening, but the effect was marred by all governmental typos.

Their wanton editing on U.S. Park Service property cost them a trip back to Flagstaff, AZ, attorney fees and court costs, a guilty plea to federal conspiracy charges, and a $3,000 fine. (“When it comes to marking up historic signs,” the Associated Press reported, “good grammar is a bad defense.” Deck and Herson dispute the Arizona Republic’s report describing them as “two self-anointed ‘grammar vigilantes,’” saying they had never described—or anointed—themselves as vigilantes.)

It’s difficult not to admire the Quixotic nature of the TEAL experiment. Their book is an easy read, kind of a copyeditor’s version of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance Lite. Aside from their roadtrip stories, The Great Typo Hunt ends with renewed commitment to a literacy effort on the next TEAL trip, and reveals questions about U.S. sociology, race, education, and the power of language. The book also concludes with an intriguing bibliography on language and a brief “Field Guide to Typo Avoidance.”

Many in this age of the 140-character Tweet and vowel-free texting decry the end of literacy, but in truth language started deteriorating almost as soon as there was language to misuse, misspell, and mispunctuate. Writer William Zinsser once observed about English that, “Probably no other language has such a vast supply of verbs so bright with color,” but the poet George Eliot thought in the 1800s that rules had ruined the language: “Correct English is the slang of prigs who write history and essays,” she said.

H.L. Mencken, that journalistic curmudgeon, agreed, arguing that rules get in the way of true expression. “Correct spelling,” he said, “is one of the arts that are far more esteemed by schoolma’ams than by practical men, neck-deep in the heat and agony of the world.”

But the men from TEAL would disagree. “[T]ypos are a symptom of a larger problem,” Herson says. “Taken as a whole, they can point to widespread misunderstanding about spelling and grammar, not to mention lagging education in language.”

To which Deck adds, “Typos mess with the most important aspect of written communication: clarity. . . . Language is bound up in every part of our lives. So when it goes awry, that indicates more than just a spelling and grammar problem.

“No typo exists in a vacuum,” he says. “Behind every misplaced comma or junction error is a story—whether it be about education, carelessness, or socioeconomic and privilege.”

EDWARD C. PEASE
Utah State University

Globalizing Ideal Beauty: How Female Copywriters of the J. Walter Thompson Advertising Agency Redefined Beauty for the Twentieth Century. Denise H. Sutton. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. 224 pp.

Denise H. Sutton’s Globalizing Ideal Beauty: How Female Copywriters of the J. Walter Thompson Advertising Agency Redefined Beauty for the Twentieth Century is founded upon the notion that one cannot separate the creator from the creation. With this in mind, advertisements are not just a reflection of client requirements, but also belief and value systems of those who create the campaigns. 

As such, the advertising campaigns covered in the book are not simple tools used to sell a product, but reflections of the complicated role that the female copywriters faced at JWT, one of the largest advertising agencies in the world. They were neither the secretaries that some expected to find in the workplace, nor were they the accepted “ad men.” These women, led by Helen Lansdowne, occupied a complicated position where they were representatives of a specific kind of woman who had to work with and through expected stereotypes in defining their place in work culture and in creating an idealized notion of beauty.

Through a blending of archival re-search and analysis of key ad campaigns created by JWT, author Sutton, a Ph.D. in women’s studies, provides a look at “the forgotten story” of a group of female copywriters who were able to use their special status to create and market the Women’s Editorial Department while creating innovative and, in some cases, slightly scandalous ads. To explain hiring female copywriters and creating the Women’s Editorial Department, JWT emphasized that women were best suited to understand the point-of-view needed to sell products to women. Although they were not permitted much interaction with clients, the female copywriters left their mark on the advertising world in other ways.

Where Sutton’s work excels is in taking the emphasis away from just the depiction of women in advertisements to looking at the contribution of women in advertising. Through focusing on JWT, once known as the pioneer agency for hiring women to create advertisements, and two specific campaigns—Pond’s Cold Cream and Woodbury’s Facial Soap—the intersection between the suffrage movement, modern advertising, science, sexuality, and consumer culture becomes clear. Both of these campaigns not only contained elements still present in current advertising, but they were also spearheaded by women. In fact, the women on these campaigns were credited, at least at JWT, with devising the first use of sex appeal in ads and the creation of the testimonial advertisement. Lansdowne’s department also challenged the workplace culture at JWT, as the female copywriters felt the need to differentiate themselves from women in traditional roles, such as secretaries.

In showcasing women’s contributions at a single agency, Sutton’s book also shows how these college-educated women were able to bring elements of their life into the ads they created. Several of the women Lansdowne hired had backgrounds in the suffrage movement and sociology. Perhaps because of these interests, many of the ads those women created tapped into the same language and motivational factors that the suffrage movement employed, thus linking the suffrage movement and advertising women with consumer culture.

As with any work, there is always room for improvement. Perhaps the most noticeable weakness comes in the chapter on international expansion. While interesting and approached with the same intensity of other chapters, this section pulls away from the contributions of the female copywriters at JWT to focus on the male executives and their approach to advertising on an international level. The language and approach of these male executives are an interesting study in cultural imperialism, but feel a bit off track with the rest of the book’s focus on the women’s contributions to advertising.

In terms of style, there are places throughout the book where the writing could be tightened up and some points emphasized a bit less while retaining the same impact. For example, the fact that these women were, for the most part, college-educated from prominent universities is repeated to the point of annoyance. Additionally, several sections use the   inelegant transition phrasing of “this section shows…,” which may be remnants of Sutton’s dissertation from Clark University.

Although many scholars have studied the impact of advertising on women from various perspectives, Sutton’s work fills a void by looking not just at the impact, but also at the history of those who created the ads. Her specific focus on JWT’s Women’s Editorial Department allows a glimpse at how women were able to negotiate the male-dominated work environment, the stereotypical images of women in advertising, and the impact of their own belief systems upon the advertisements. The “behind the scenes” elements brought to the analysis of the campaigns highlighted in the book provide a much richer examination of the campaigns and the people behind them.

TRICIA M. FARWELL
Middle Tennessee State University