New Books in Journalism

Helen Keller, Franz Kafka and Silent Cal Coolidge appear in this week’s Almanac, a blog to celebrate the 150thanniversary of The Nation, America’s oldest magazine. Nation archivist Richard Kreitner is featuring an event from every day of the year and how The Nation covered it.In this New Books Network interview, he discusses events from May 31 to June 6 including Watergate, political assassinations and the D-Day invasion of France.As you listen, you’ll hear the voices of Richard M. Nixon, Robert F. Kennedy and an excerpt from one of Kafka’s most famous stories. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism

When Star Wars opened in 1977, Robert Hatch, film reviewer for The Nation magazine, wrote that it “belongs in the sub-basement, or interstellar comic-strip school of science fiction, Terry and the Pirates with astro-drive.” Hatch concluded that all in all, Star Wars “is an outrageously successful…compilation of nonsense.” The Nation‘s archivist, Richard Kreitner chose Robert Hatch’s review for the May twenty-fifth entry on his daily blog The Almanac which the magazine is publishing to celebrate 150 years of publishing. In this New Books Network journalism podcast, Richard Kreitner discusses events that happened in the last week of May and how The Nation covered them. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism

The Nation magazine, a beacon of the cultural and political left, is celebrating 150 years of publishing. As part of its celebration, it’s publishing a daily blog called The Almanac that looks at events on each day of the year and how The Nation covered them. In this New Books Network journalism podcast, you’ll hear Richard Kreitner, the magazine’s archivist, discuss how The Nation covered the struggle for civil rights including the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark ruling against segregated public schools in 1954; the life and work of the slain African-American leader Malcolm X and poet Langston Hughes’s essay on black culture that The Nation published in 1926. You’ll also hear the voices of Martin Luther King, Malcolm X and Langston Hughes. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism

The Nation magazine is one of America’s most distinguished journalistic enterprises featuring the writing and work of such notable people as Calvin Trillin, Noam Chomsky, Jessica Mitford, James Baldwin and Naomi Klein. The Nation was founded 150 years ago this July. It’s America’s oldest weekly magazine. To mark its 150th anniversary, it’s publishing a daily blog called The Almanac compiled by the magazine’s archivist, Richard Kreitner. The Almanac looks at significant historical events that took place on each day of the year and how The Nation covered them. In this New Books Network podcast, you’ll hear Richard Kreitner talk about The Nation’s coverage of events from May 10 to May 16. Everything from The Nation’s strong backing for Israel’s declaration of independence in 1948 to the prowess of boxer Joe Louis and the death of Bob Marley. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism

The Nation magazine is one of America’s most distinguished journalistic enterprises featuring the writing and work of such notable people as Albert Einstein, Emma Goldman, Molly Ivins, I.F. Stone and Hunter S. Thompson. The Nation was founded 150 years ago this July. It’s America’s oldest weekly magazine. To mark its 15oth anniversary, it’s publishing a daily blog called The Almanac compiled by the magazine’s archivist, Richard Kreitner. The Almanac looks at significant historical events that took place on each day of the year and how The Nation covered them. In this New Books Network podcast, you’ll hear Richard Kreitner talk about The Nation’s critical coverage of events from April 26 to May 2. Everything from the nuclear disaster at Chernobyl to the death of J. Edgar Hoover. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism

Deana A. Rohlinger has just written Abortion Politics, Mass Media, and Social Movements in America (Cambridge University Press, 2015). Rohlinger is associate professor of sociology at Florida State University. In the last several weeks, the podcast has featured a variety of political scientists who study interest groups and social movements. This week, Deana Rohlinger brings her perspective as a sociologist to the subject. She examines the way four policy organizations with an interest in abortion policy (National Right to Life Committee, National Organization of Women, Planned Parenthood Federation, and Concerned Women for America) interact with the media. Rohlinger finds quite different strategies for how to court the media, but also in how each organization responds to crises. She uses interviews with organizational leaders to deepen what we know about how social movements and interest groups employ a media strategy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism

How those within the Brussels Beltway in the EU institutions must pine for the simple days of the past. Not only was the European project in itself far less contested, but the nature of the journalism surrounding the EU was also far more accommodating. One of the main lessons of John Lloyd and Cristina Marconi‘s fascinating book Reporting the EU: News, Media and the European Institutions (I. B. Tauris, 2014) is how much it has mirrored the evolution of the European project itself. In the first couple of decades the journalists were as likely to be true believers as the Eurocrats in the corridors of power, even if their reports tended to reflect the concerns and interests of the individual countries that they served. That started to change as the EU (under various names) grew and changed. In the 1980s the British press developed a real streak of Euroscepticism, and journalists in general began to ask more questions than the Eurocrats were used to. Big developments such as the Maastricht Treaty and the expansion into the poorer corners of the former Soviet Empire begged bigger questions. And then there was the euro crisis, and the current wave of popular Euroscepticism that has found a home in almost every corner of the continent. All the while Eurocrats and EU boosters charged that Euroscepticism was something contrived through the practicing of hostile journalism by spiteful editors in thrall to shadowy media tycoons. If only the people of Europe had a fair picture of what they did, they’d say: then they’d fall in behind the European project once again. At least the euro crisis has led to the EU finding its way to the front pages of newspapers, along with a widespread realisation that what goes on within that Brussels Beltway (and in places like Berlin) matters to all its citizens far more than they’d realised. The authors of the book hope that recognition will continue to give the EU, for all its complexity, a legitimate place in Europe’s popular media, worthy of this peculiar set of institutions that has grown to have such an impact in so many parts of daily life. I hope you enjoy the interview! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism

The media system in the United States could have developed into something very different than what it is today. In fact, there was an era in which significant media reform was considered. This was a time when media consumers were tired of constant advertising, bias, and control by corporate entities, and instead wanted more “public-oriented” content. Sound at all familiar? In his new book, America’s Battle for Media Democracy: The Triumph of Corporate Libertarianism and the Future of Media Reform (Cambridge University Press, 2014), Victor Pickard, an assistant professor of communication at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, examines the debates on media reform and policy from the early 20th century, focusing, in particular, on radio. Pickard revisits the significant media policy conflicts to analyze why the American media is the way it is, and how it could have been. In so doing, he considers what the current American media system means for the Web and other new media. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism

It’s been 100 years since the start of the First World War, a conflict that cost millions of lives. In his recently revised book, Propaganda and the Ethics of Persuasion (2013), Randal Marlin writes that Britain pioneered propaganda techniques to sell that war that have been imitated ever since. He tells how the British spread a false story about Germans boiling the bodies of their dead soldiers in corpse factories. It was designed to paint Germany as a uncivilized, ghoulish nation that had to be fought. Marlin also tells how American propaganda during the First World War helped foster the modern public relations and advertising industries. Marlin, who studied with the French propaganda theorist Jacques Ellul, sees propaganda as a manipulative exercise of power and he argues that in order to defend ourselves against it, we need to recognize its methods and techniques. His revised second edition analyzes how the Bush administration used fear to persuade Americans to support the invasion of Iraq. The book traces the history of propaganda from ancient times to its present, post 9/11 forms Randal Marlin is a professor of philosophy at Carleton University in Ottawa. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism

The Canadian author and scholar, Heather Menzies, has written a book about the journey she took to the highlands of Scotland in search of her ancestral roots. In Reclaiming the Commons for the Common Good: A Memoir and Manifesto (New Society Publishers, 2014), Menzies outlines her discovery of a vanished way of life and argues that restoring it would help North Americans recover a deeper sense of self as well as more satisfying social relations with the people around them. It could also help them gain more control over political decisions that affect them in their communities, states and provinces and at the national level. “Commoning–cultivating community and livelihood together on the common land of the Earth,” Menzies writes, “was a way of life for my ancestors and for many other newcomers to North America too. It was a way of understanding and pursuing economics as embedded in life and the labor, human and non-human, that is necessary to sustain it.” She maintains that reclaiming the commons could also help us to heal an overheating planet and reconcile with the native peoples displaced by European settlers. Heather Menzies is an adjunct professor at Carleton University in Ottawa. She is the author of 10 books and has been awarded the Order of Canada for her contributions to public discourse. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism