New Books in Communications

From Pizzagate to Jeffrey Epstein, conspiracies seem to be more prominent than ever in American political discourse. What was once confined to the pages of supermarket tabloids is now all over our media landscape. Unlike the 9/11 truthers or those who questioned the moon landing, these conspiracies are designed solely to delegitimize a political opponent — rather than in service of finding the truth. As you might imagine, this is problematic for democracy.Democracy scholars Russell Muirhead and Nancy Rosenblum call it “conspiracy without the theory” and unpack the concept in their book A Lot of People Are Saying: The New Conspiracism and the Assault on Democracy(Princeton UP, 2019). Russell is the Robert Clements Professor of Democracy and Politics at Dartmouth. Nancy is the Senator Joseph Clark Research Professor of Ethics in Politics at Harvard.As you’ll hear, the new conspiricism is a symptom of a larger epistemic polarization that’s happening throughout the U.S. When people no longer agree on a shared set of facts, conspiracies run wild and knowledge-producing institutions like the government, universities, and the media are trusted less than ever.Democracy Works is created by the McCourtney Institute for Democracy at Penn State and recorded at WPSU Penn State, central Pennsylvania’s NPR station. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

Philip M. Napoli has been thinking about algorithmic news and social media feed curation for quite some time, as he acknowledges in his new book, Social Media and the Public Interest: Media Regulation in the Disinformation Age (Columbia University Press, 2019). Initially this topic was not as pressing as it now seems to be, but Napoli has been exploring this issue and and trying to figure out how it might work in terms of regulation – self, governmental, or otherwise – for a while. Social Media and the Public Interest approaches this complex and multi-layered issue from a host of perspectives, leading the reader into the broader discussion through a history of social media, but that history itself is positioned within a brief but important history of the internet and the world wide web. At the same time, the book covers a lot of important ground in thinking about the First Amendment, how journalism operates in the age of social media and an otherwise fluid and changing environment for traditional media. Napoli gets at questions that often lurk at the back of our considerations of social media, not only about what we experience in our use of these platforms, but also how we may, unconsciously, consume the information and news that is presented to us through these “not quite journalistic” entities. This is a fascinating book that opens up a lot of penetrating questions about our social media environment, how we think about journalism, what the role of regulation might be in terms of both technology and media, and how all these threads intersect within politics. This book will be of interest to a wide array of readers from a host of backgrounds, and, of course, to anyone who has an interest in understanding the media environment in which we all live.Lilly J. Goren is professor of Political Science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She co-edited the award-winning Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

With the advent of digital devices and software, self-tracking practices have gained new adherents and have spread into a wide array of social domains. The Quantified Self movement has emerged to promote 'self-knowledge through numbers'.In The Quantified Self (Polity, 2016), Deborah Lupton critically analyses the social, cultural and political dimensions of contemporary self-tracking and identifies the concepts of selfhood and human embodiment and the value of the data that underpin them.The book incorporates discussion of the consolations and frustrations of self-tracking, as well as about the proliferating ways in which people's personal data are now used beyond their private rationales. Lupton outlines how the information that is generated through self-tracking is taken up and repurposed for commercial, governmental, managerial and research purposes. In the relationship between personal data practices and big data politics, the implications of self-tracking are becoming ever more crucial.John Danaher is a lecturer the National University of Ireland, Galway. He is also the host of the wonderful podcast Philosophical Disquisitions. You can find it here on Apple Podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

Donna Guy’s 2016 book Creating Charismatic Bonds in Argentina: Letters to Juan and Eva Perón (University of New Mexico Press) is a history of Peronist populism that puts everyday people at the center of her exploration. Using letters written by Argentine citizens to the Perón couple between 1946 and 1955, Guy offers a nuanced approach to understand charisma, that ineffable quality said to bind popular actors to leadership. She shows that the bonds between popular groups and the Perón couple did more than turn out voters to elections. Ordinary Argentines, at the request of Juan Perón, shaped policies by making suggestions for Five-Year Plans, communicating their visions of national uplift directly to the president. Many letters discussed in her work come from impoverished Argentines living in the countryside or recent migrants to Buenos Aires, groups more marginalized than the members of organized labor and other sectors known for their Peronist loyalty. Guy makes clear that the charisma of Juan Perón is inextricable from the charisma of his wife Eva, bringing the insights of gender history to understand the couple as a dual political force.Many Argentines, especially women, directed their requests and suggestions to her, and her responses helped build the popularity both Juan and Eva Perón. Although writing letters to political leadership is a longstanding practice among popular groups in Latin America, Guy notes the particularities of correspondence to the president and First Lady in the mid-twentieth century. Citizens’ consumption of modern media, such as the radio, shaped the content of their written letters. Furthermore, given high levels of basic literacy throughout Argentina, most of the people sending letters were able to pen their own missives without the help of notaries or other intermediaries. This facilitated the sense that the Perón couple could be directly accessed by the people, making the emotional connection to their addressees all the more deeply felt. In the podcast, Guy discusses the archival sources that form the heart of this book, once assumed to be lost, and she provides context on inequality and modernization in Argentina. This book shows that charismatic bonds were shaped as much by the Argentine people as by their leadership, and her close reading of hundreds of letters offers a window into how ordinary Argentines built the charismatic reputation of the Perón couple that has long outlasted their lifetimes.Rachel Grace Newman is Lecturer in the History of the Global South at Smith College. She has a Ph.D. in History from Columbia University, and she writes about elite migration, education, transnationalism, and youth in twentieth-century Mexico. She is also the author of a book on a binational program for migrant children whose families divided their time between Michoacán, Mexico and Watsonville, California. She is on Twitter (@rachelgnew). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

We’ve all heard that a picture is worth a thousand words, but what if we don’t understand what we’re looking at? Social media has made charts, infographics, and diagrams ubiquitous―and easier to share than ever. We associate charts with science and reason; the flashy visuals are both appealing and persuasive. Pie charts, maps, bar and line graphs, and scatter plots (to name a few) can better inform us, revealing patterns and trends hidden behind the numbers we encounter in our lives. In short, good charts make us smarter―if we know how to read them.However, they can also lead us astray. Charts lie in a variety of ways―displaying incomplete or inaccurate data, suggesting misleading patterns, and concealing uncertainty―or are frequently misunderstood, such as the confusing cone of uncertainty maps shown on TV every hurricane season. To make matters worse, many of us are ill-equipped to interpret the visuals that politicians, journalists, advertisers, and even our employers present each day, enabling bad actors to easily manipulate them to promote their own agendas.In How Charts Lie: Getting Smarter about Visual Information (W. W. Norton, 2019), data visualization expert Alberto Cairo teaches us to not only spot the lies in deceptive visuals, but also to take advantage of good ones to understand complex stories. Public conversations are increasingly propelled by numbers, and to make sense of them we must be able to decode and use visual information. By examining contemporary examples ranging from election-result infographics to global GDP maps and box-office record charts, How Charts Lie demystifies an essential new literacy, one that will make us better equipped to navigate our data-driven world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

In the arc of Soviet history, few government programs were as tenacious as the anti-religious campaign, which systematically set out to debunk organized religion as "the opium of the people." This political storm of heaven lasted from the earliest days of Bolshevik power up until the early eighties, when it simply ran out of steam, as did the Soviet State. But while it lasted, the anti-religious campaign was a sustained and virulent attack on the centuries-old bedrock of Russian culture and left a wave of violence and destruction in its wake.Faced with an almost feudal society and a population of predominantly illiterate peasants, the State cannily deployed one of its most potent propaganda weapons: the vibrant graphic art illustration in posters and atheist magazines that were distributed throughout the USSR. For a superstitious peasant, the images of an idealized Soviet worker smashing the idols of Orthodox Christianity must have been as horrific as they were ultimately compelling.The iconography of the anti-religious campaign is front and center of Godless Utopia: Soviet Anti-Religious Propaganda, a fascinating new book by Roland Elliot Brown, published by FUEL Media. In it, Brown examines the anti-religious campaign through a unique collection of illustrations, posters, and the cover art of two prominent atheist magazines gathered for the first time in an English-language publication with full translations of the illustrations, as well as a very cogent overview of the history of the anti-religious campaign.Brown begins with the violent beginning of Christianity in Russia, when Grand Prince Vladimir baptized Russia at the point of a sword, then ordered the pagan idols to be burnt in Kyiv. He traces the rise in significance of the Church during the crucial 250-year Tatar Mongol Yoke and its subsequent relegation by Tsar Peter the Great to the status of the Government Department until 1917.The decades just after the Russian Revolution were the most violent and active of the anti-religious campaign when the Government sanctioned the widespread destruction of church property, the imprisonment of priests and nuns, and the closure of all religious-affiliated schools and charities. World War II offers the Church a brief respite and the opportunity to show its loyalty to the Soviet State during the critical years 1941-1945.Many of the later illustrations highlight Soviet success in space exploration to underscore the tenants of atheism, but all too soon, the Soviet Union and the anti-religious campaign limp towards their own demise in the 1980s.Brown is a London-based journalist and arts writer. He has written articles for The Guardian, The Spectator, Foreign Policy and The Moscow Times. He has also worked as a regular contributor and editor for the London-based news site IranWire, where he wrote about politics and human rights in the Islamic Republic of Iran. Follow Roland on Twitter (@rolandebrown) or visit the book’s Facebook Page: https://www.facebook.com/godlessutopia/Jennifer Eremeeva is an American expatriate food, travel, and culture writer and photographer currently based in Riga, Latvia, and Massachusetts. Jennifer is the award-winning author of Lenin Lives Next Door: Marriage, Martinis, and Mayhem in Moscow and Have Personality Disorder, Will Rule Russia: A Concise History.  She contributes regular feature articles and photos to The Moscow Times, Fodor’s, Russian Life, and Reuters and is the in-house travel blogger for Alexander + Roberts, a leading American tour operator. Follow Jennifer on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook or visit jennifereremeeva.com for more information.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

When you think of the word “demagogue,” what comes to mind? Probably someone like Hitler or another bombastic leader, right? Patricia Roberts-Miller is a rhetoric scholar and has spent years tracing the term and its uses. She joins us this week to explain a new way of thinking about demagoguery and how that view relates to democracy. She also explains what she’s learned from what she describes as years of “crawling around the Internet with extremists.”Patricia is a Professor of Rhetoric and Writing and Director of the University Writing Center at the University of Texas at Austin. She is the author of two new books on demagoguery. Demagoguery and Democracy (The Experiment, 2017) is a short book in the style of On Tyranny that covers the basics of her argument in about 100 small ages. Rhetoric and Demagoguery is a longer, more academic book for those looking for more on the rhetorical roots of demagoguery and its relationship to democratic deliberation.Democracy Works is created by the McCourtney Institute for Democracy at Penn State and recorded at WPSU Penn State, central Pennsylvania’s NPR station. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

The First Amendment and a strong Fourth Estate are essential to a healthy democracy. David McCraw spends his days making sure that journalists can do their work in the United States and around the world. This includes responding to libel suits and legal threats, reviewing stories that are likely to be the subject of a lawsuit, helping reporters who run into trouble abroad, filing Freedom of Information Act requests, and much more. Today we talk to McCraw, the Deputy General Counsel of the New York Times and author of Truth in Our Times: Inside the Fight for Press Freedom in the Age of Alternative Facts (All Points Books, 2019).Democracy Works is created by the McCourtney Institute for Democracy at Penn State and recorded at WPSU Penn State, central Pennsylvania’s NPR station. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

On this episode of the New Books Network, Dr. Lee Pierce (she/they)--Asst. Prof. of Rhetoric and Communication at the State University of New York at Geneseo--interviews Dr. Dave Tell (he/him/his)--Professor of Communication at The University of Kansas--on the insightful Remembering Emmett Till (University of Chicago Press, 2019). The book takes a rhetorical approach on the commemoration of Emmett Till by looking at acts of remembering Emmett following his brutal murder in the 1960s until the present day. Tell persuasively demonstrates the way in which the act of commemorating has saturated the physical landscape of the Mississippi Delta. In addition to a fascinating discussion of Till’s legacy and the current commemoration of racial tragedy in the American South, Dave also introduces listeners to the Emmett Till Memory Project (ETMP), which, among other things, offers a free app through which all of us can calibrate our relationship to Emmett to civil rights as an ongoing collective project. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

9/11 was an inside job. The Holocaust is a myth promoted to serve Jewish interests. The shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary School were a false flag operation. Climate change is a hoax perpetrated by the Chinese government.These are all conspiracy theories. A glance online or at bestseller lists reveals how popular some of them are. Even if there is plenty of evidence to disprove them, people persist in propagating them. Why? In his new book Conspiracy Theories (Polity, 2019), philosopher Quassim Cassam explains how conspiracy theories are different from ordinary theories about conspiracies. He argues that conspiracy theories are forms of propaganda and their function is to promote a political agenda. Although conspiracy theories are sometimes defended on the grounds that they uncover evidence of bad behaviour by political leaders, they do much more harm than good, with some resulting in the deaths of large numbers of people.There can be no clearer indication that something has gone wrong with our intellectual and political culture than the fact that conspiracy theories have become mainstream. When they are dangerous, we cannot afford to ignore them. At the same time, refuting them by rational argument is difficult because conspiracy theorists discount or reject evidence that disproves their theories. As conspiracy theories are so often smokescreens for political ends, we need to come up with political as well as intellectual responses if we are to have any hope of defeating them.Marshall Poe is the editor of the New Books Network. He can be reached at marshallpoe@gmail.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications