Dark Days in the Newsroom

Dark Days in the Newsroom PDF Author: Edward Alwood
Publisher: Temple University Press
ISBN: 1592133436
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 217

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Book Description
Dark Days in the Newsroom traces how journalists became radicalized during the Depression era, only to become targets of Senator Joseph McCarthy and like-minded anti-Communist crusaders during the 1950s. Edward Alwood, a former news correspondent describes this remarkable story of conflict, principle, and personal sacrifice with noticeable élan. He shows how McCarthy's minions pried inside newsrooms thought to be sacrosanct under the First Amendment, and details how journalists mounted a heroic defense of freedom of the press while others secretly enlisted in the government's anti-communist crusade. Relying on previously undisclosed documents from FBI files, along with personal interviews, Alwood provides a richly informed commentary on one of the most significant moments in the history of American journalism. Arguing that the experiences of the McCarthy years profoundly influenced the practice of journalism, he shows how many of the issues faced by journalists in the 1950s prefigure today's conflicts over the right of journalists to protect their sources.

CBS's Don Hollenbeck

CBS's Don Hollenbeck PDF Author: Loren Ghiglione
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231144970
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 354

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Book Description
Loren Ghiglione recounts the fascinating life and tragic suicide of Don Hollenbeck, the controversial newscaster who became a primary target of McCarthyism's smear tactics. Drawing on unsealed FBI records, private family correspondence, and interviews with Walter Cronkite, Mike Wallace, Charles Collingwood, Douglas Edwards, and more than one hundred other journalists, Ghiglione writes a balanced biography that cuts close to the bone of this complicated newsman and chronicles the stark consequences of the anti-Communist frenzy that seized America in the late 1940s and 1950s. Hollenbeck began his career at the Lincoln, Nebraska Journal (marrying the boss's daughter) before becoming an editor at William Randolph Hearst's rip-roaring Omaha Bee-News. He participated in the emerging field of photojournalism at the Associated Press; assisted in creating the innovative, ad-free PM newspaper in New York City; reported from the European theater for NBC radio during World War II; and anchored television newscasts at CBS during the era of Edward R. Murrow. Hollenbeck's pioneering, prize-winning radio program, CBS Views the Press (1947-1950), was a declaration of independence from a print medium that had dominated American newsmaking for close to 250 years. The program candidly criticized the prestigious New York Times, the Daily News (then the paper with the largest circulation in America), and Hearst's flagship Journal-American and popular morning tabloid Daily Mirror. For this honest work, Hollenbeck was attacked by conservative anti-Communists, especially Hearst columnist Jack O'Brian, and in 1954, plagued by depression, alcoholism, three failed marriages, and two network firings (and worried about a third), Hollenbeck took his own life. In his investigation of this amazing American character, Ghiglione reveals the workings of an industry that continues to fall victim to censorship and political manipulation. Separating myth from fact, CBS's Don Hollenbeck is the definitive portrait of a polarizing figure who became a symbol of America's tortured conscience.

Dollarocracy

Dollarocracy PDF Author: John Nichols
Publisher: Nation Books
ISBN: 1568587074
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 370

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Book Description
Argues that the infusion of more and more cash into election campaigns is leading to predictable results, reducing political elections to little more than a numbers game and allowing the powers that be to practically buy an election.

Anti-Communism in Twentieth-Century America

Anti-Communism in Twentieth-Century America PDF Author: Larry Ceplair
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 519

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Book Description
This compelling, critical analysis of anti-communism illustrates the variety of anti-Communist styles and agendas, thereby making a persuasive case that the "threat" of domestic communism in Cold War America was vastly overblown. In the United States today, communism is an ideology or political movement that barely registers in the consciousness of our nation. Yet merely half a century ago, "communist" was a buzzword that every citizen in our nation was aware of—a term that connoted "traitor" and almost certainly a characterization that most Americans were afraid of. Anti-Communism in Twentieth-Century America: A Critical History provides a panoramic perspective of the types of anti-communists in the United States between 1919 and the collapse of the Soviet Union. It explains the causes and exceptional nature of anti-communism in the United States, and divides it into eight discrete categories. This title then thoroughly examines the words and deeds of the various anti-Communists in each of these categories during the three "Red Scares" in the past century. The work concludes with an unapologetic assessment of domestic anti-communism. This book allows readers to more fully comprehend what the anti-communists meant with their rhetoric, and grasp their impact on the United States during the 20th century and beyond—for example, how anti-communism has reappeared as anti-terrorism.

Informing the News

Informing the News PDF Author: Thomas E. Patterson
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0345806611
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 258

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Book Description
As the journalist Walter Lippmann noted nearly a century ago, democracy falters “if there is no steady supply of trustworthy and relevant news.” Today’s journalists are not providing it. Too often, reporters give equal weight to facts and biased opinion, stir up small controversies, and substitute infotainment for real news. Even when they get the facts rights, they often misjudge the context in which they belong. Information is the lifeblood of a healthy democracy. Public opinion and debate suffer when citizens are misinformed about current affairs, as is increasingly the case. Though the failures of today’s communication system cannot be blamed solely on the news media, they are part of the problem, and the best hope for something better. Patterson proposes “knowledge-based journalism” as a corrective. Unless journalists are more deeply informed about the subjects they cover, they will continue to misinterpret them and to be vulnerable to manipulation by their sources. In this book, derived from a multi-year initiative of the Carnegie Corporation and the Knight Foundation, Patterson calls for nothing less than a major overhaul of journalism practice and education. The book speaks not only to journalists but to all who are concerned about the integrity of the information on which America’s democracy depends.

Surveillance in America

Surveillance in America PDF Author: Ivan Greenberg
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 0739172484
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 399

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Book Description
Surveillance in America provides a historical exploration of FBI surveillance practices and policies since 1920 based on recently declassified FBI files. Using the new information available through these documents, Ivan Greenberg sheds light on the activities and beliefs of top FBI officials as they develop and implement surveillance practices. Paying particular attention to the uses of the media, Greenberg provides a thorough reconsideration of the Watergate scandal and the role of W. Mark Felt as “Deep Throat.” He exposes new evidence which suggests that Felt led a faction at the FBI that worked together to bring down President Nixon. The book concludes with an in-depth treatment of surveillance practices since the year 2000. He considers the question of “surveillance as harassment” and looks at the further erosion of privacy. stemming from Obama’s counter-terror policies which extend those of the Bush Administration’s second term. The startling increase in surveillance since the events of September 11th, reveal the extent to which America is losing the battle for civil liberties.

Cold War Correspondents

Cold War Correspondents PDF Author: Dina Fainberg
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 1421438453
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 373

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Book Description
Foreign correspondents played a crucial role in promoting the ideas and values of the Cold War. As they brought the foreign world to their Soviet and American readers, these journalists projected their own ideologies onto their reporting. In an age of mutual acrimony and closed borders, journalists were among the few individuals who crossed the Iron Curtain. Their reporting strongly influenced the ways that policy makers, pundits, and ordinary people came to understand the American or the Soviet "other." In Cold War Correspondents, Dina Fainberg examines how Soviet and American journalists covered the rival superpower and how two distinctive sets of truth systems, professional practices, and political cultures shaped international reporting. Fainberg explores private and public interactions among multiple groups that shaped coverage of the Cold War adversary, including journalists and their sources, editors, news media executives, government officials, diplomats, American pundits, Soviet censors, and audiences on both sides. Foreign correspondents, Fainberg argues, were keen analytical observers who aspired to understand their host country and probe its depths. At the same time, they were fundamentally shaped by their cultural and institutional backgrounds—to the point that their views of the rival superpower were refracted through values of their own culture. International reporting grounded and personalized the differences between the two nations, describing the other side in readily recognizable, self-referential terms. Fundamentally, Fainberg demonstrates, Americans and Soviets during the Cold War came to understand themselves through the creation of images of each other. Drawing on interviews with veteran journalists and Soviet dissidents, Cold War Correspondents also uses previously unexamined Soviet and US government records, newspaper and news agency archives, rare Soviet cartoons, and individual correspondents' personal papers, letters, diaries, books, and articles. Striking black-and-white photos depict foreign correspondents in action. Taken together, these sources illuminate a rich history of private and professional lives at the heart of the superpower conflict.

The SAGE International Encyclopedia of Mass Media and Society

The SAGE International Encyclopedia of Mass Media and Society PDF Author: Debra L. Merskin
Publisher: SAGE Publications
ISBN: 1483375528
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 2169

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Book Description
The reference will discuss mass media around the world in their varied forms—newspapers, magazines, radio, television, film, books, music, websites, and social media—and will describe the role of each in both mirroring and shaping society.

Journalism

Journalism PDF Author: Tim P. Vos
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 1501500104
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 648

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Book Description
This volume sets out the state-of-the-art in the discipline of journalism at a time in which the practice and profession of journalism is in serious flux. While journalism is still anchored to its history, change is infecting the field. The profession, and the scholars who study it, are reconceptualizing what journalism is in a time when journalists no longer monopolize the means for spreading the news. Here, journalism is explored as a social practice, as an institution, and as memory. The roles, epistemologies, and ethics of the field are evolving. With this in mind, the volume revisits classic theories of journalism, such as gatekeeping and agenda-setting, but also opens up new avenues of theorizing by broadening the scope of inquiry into an expanded journalism ecology, which now includes citizen journalism, documentaries, and lifestyle journalism, and by tapping the insights of other disciplines, such as geography, economics, and psychology. The volume is a go-to map of the field for students and scholars—highlighting emerging issues, enduring themes, revitalized theories, and fresh conceptualizations of journalism.

City of Newsmen

City of Newsmen PDF Author: Kathryn J. McGarr
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022666404X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 322

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Book Description
"Kathryn McGarr reveals how the Cold War consensus was deliberately created, shaped, maintained, and protected by a coterie of influential journalists in Washington, DC, who calculated what they would do (or not do) for sustained access to information. The compact among journalists, elected officials, and other government operatives constrained knowledge for everyone in a time when political insight was centrally controlled and defined. Yet these reporters, many of them outsiders from the Midwest, did this not out of malfeasance but for social and political benefit, ever conscious of the need to cultivate, placate, and blend with their sources"--