Abstract
Sometimes the planets just align.
Here we are at the time of putting together this publication, which is a couple months in advance of when you will see this, and Donald Trump is railing against Mexicans and Muslims, and we have a book here under review that explains How Propaganda Works and another that looks at newspaper coverage of America’s imprisonment of Japanese-Americans—Community Newspapers and the Japanese-American Incarceration Camps: Community, Not Controversy.
We have the world’s new most wanted man from the Paris attacks, Salah Abdeslam, and we have a book on Covering Bin Laden: Global Media and the World’s Most Wanted Man.
We have students—and faculty—in Missouri attempting to intimidate a journalist from covering a public protest, and we have a book about Balancing Privacy and Free Speech.
We have journalists digging through the belongings of two dead terrorists on national television—raising all kinds of ire about tastefulness and news media ethics—and we have a book about Heroes and Scoundrels: The Image of the Journalist in Popular Culture.
We have research out of Binghamton University that posits that if text messages end with a period, they are perceived to be less sincere than messages not containing punctuation—go figure—and we have a book on Digital Shift: The Cultural Logic of Punctuation.
We have Kobe Bryant announcing his retirement in a poem—not through the traditional mediation of sports journalists, but through that latest form of disintermediation The Players’ Tribune—and we have a book on Sport History in the Digital Era.
We have Vladimir Putin putting new censorship rules into place, which belies the topic of a book on Unlearning the Soviet Tongue: Discursive Practices of a Democratizing Polity.
And during this latest election cycle, we have many questioning the veracity of the news media and who actually controls its conduct and content—the Fairness Doctrine, anyone?—and we have a book about America’s Battle for Media Democracy: The Triumph of Corporate Libertarianism and the Future of Media Reform.
And then back to Donald Trump whom the Huffington Post has just decided to quit covering as entertainment and take seriously—about time—and we have a book on Parasocial Politics: Audiences, Pop Culture, and Politics.
And one more Trumpism—I am beginning to sound like BREAKING NEWS on CNN. In a garish manifestation of a transition taking place in news media ethics driven by the untamed digital frontier, BuzzFeed editor Ben Smith told his staff that it’s OK to call Trump a “mendacious racist,” and we have a book on Local Journalism: The Decline of Newspapers and the Rise of Digital Media.
And in news from Britain, we hear of the demise of the “lad” magazines with their half-naked women, and we have the book Revolutions From Grub Street: A History of Magazine Publishing in Britain.
Finally, we have the release of the film Spotlight—which some are calling the best movie about journalism in a longtime—and we have two books: A Force for Good: How the American News Media Have Propelled Positive Change and From Jesus to the Internet: A History of Christianity and Media.
Please enjoy.