Media Studies Politics

We have reached a state of utter absurdity, where journalism schools teach students that their own personal truth or chosen narratives matter more than reality. In Slanted, Attkisson digs into the language of propagandists, the persistence of false media narratives, the driving forces behind today's dangerous blend of facts and opinion, the abandonment of journalism ethics, and the new, Orwellian definition of what it means to report the news.

“God isn’t really good.” "God doesn’t want the best for you.” “God could never forgive that sin." “God could never truly love you." These lies are as old as time, and yet how readily we still believe them to this day. Believing the lies of Satan leads to a life of defeat and despair. But it doesn’t have to be this way! In The Devil’s Newsroom, Pastor Jeff Schreve tackles Satan’s fake news head on.

When Rupert Murdoch enlisted Roger Ailes to launch a cable news network in 1996, American politics and media changed forever. With a remarkable level of detail and insight, Vanity Fair magazine reporter Gabriel Sherman puts Ailes’s unique genius on display, along with the outsize personalities - Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, Megyn Kelly, Sarah Palin, Karl Rove, Glenn Beck, Mike Huckabee, Gretchen Carlson, Bill Shine, and others - who have helped Fox News play a defining role in the great social and political controversies of the past two decades.

Astrophysicist J. Craig Wheeler, former president of the American Astronomical Society, takes a critical look at the technological advances shaping our future. From artificial intelligence to genetic engineering, Wheeler explores how these innovations are interconnected and the potential they hold for humanity's evolution. With thought-provoking insights into the ethical dilemmas we face, Wheeler stresses the importance of staying informed and proactive.

In this groundbreaking work, Sara Ahmed demonstrates how queer studies can put phenomenology to productive use. Focusing on the “orientation” aspect of “sexual orientation” and the “orient” in “orientalism,” Ahmed examines what it means for bodies to be situated in space and time. Bodies take shape as they move through the world directing themselves toward or away from objects and others. Being “orientated” means feeling at home, knowing where one stands, or having certain objects within reach. Orientations affect what is proximate to the body or what can be reached.

You know the type: the woman who won't shut up, who's too brazen, too opinionated - too much. She's the unruly woman, and she embodies one of the most provocative and powerful forms of womanhood today. In Too Fat, Too Slutty, Too Loud, Anne Helen Petersen uses the lens of "unruliness" to explore the ascension of pop culture powerhouses like Serena Williams, Hillary Clinton, Nicki Minaj, and Kim Kardashian, exploring why the public loves to love (and hate) these controversial figures.

Mississippi, 1955: 14-year-old Emmett Till was murdered by a white mob after making flirtatious remarks to a white woman, Carolyn Bryant. Till's attackers were never convicted, but his lynching became one of the most notorious hate crimes in American history. It launched protests across the country, helped the NAACP gain thousands of members, and inspired famous activists like Rosa Parks to stand up and fight for equal rights for the first time.

Este audiolibro es una investigación periodística y un recuento sobre una situación que, desde hace décadas, ha llevado a familias mexicanas enteras a abandonar sus hogares: la gentrificación o, como preferimos decirle, el blanqueamiento por despojo. Este fenómeno migratorio y socioeconómico rompe la identidad comunitaria y nos desarraiga del espacio que antes nos pertenecía.

Make Noise brings all the wisdom, advice, practical information, and big-picture thinking that any individual or business needs to make a successful podcast. He identifies core principles - such as create empathetically, i.e., think like the audience listens, and stay focused on what’s unique to you and what you have to say. He helps listeners come up with a “Ten Word Description” that will guide them throughout the creative process and then gets into how-tos - how to develop character, story, voice, and more.

Journalists today are inundated with data about which stories attract the most clicks, likes, comments, and shares. These metrics influence what stories are written, how news is promoted, and even which journalists get hired and fired. Do metrics make journalists more accountable to the public? Or are these data tools the contemporary equivalent of a stopwatch wielded by a factory boss, worsening newsroom working conditions and journalism quality?

At the turn of the millennium, digital technologies seemed to have immense promise for transforming our society. With these powerful new tools, the thinking went, we would be free to live our best lives, connected to our communities in ways full of infinite potential. A quarter of a century on, this form of utopianism seems like a cruel mirage. So what happened? In Against Platforms, technologist and creator Mike Pepi lays out an explanation of what went wrong—and a manifesto for putting it right.

For as long as queer women have existed, they’ve created gathering grounds where they can be themselves. From the intimate darkness of the lesbian bar to the sweaty camaraderie of the softball field, these spaces aren’t a luxury—they’re a necessity for queer women defining their identities. In A Place of Our Own, journalist June Thomas invites listeners into six iconic lesbian spaces over the course of the last sixty years, including the rural commune, the sex toy boutique, the vacation spot, and the feminist bookstore.

To his successful examinations of some of the most powerful forces in modern life - envy, ambition, snobbery, friendship - the keen observer and critic Joseph Epstein now adds Gossip. No trivial matter, despite its reputation, gossip, he argues, is an eternal and necessary human enterprise. Proving that he himself is a master of the art, Epstein serves up delightful mini-biographies of the Great Gossips of the Western World along with many choice bits from his own experience. He also makes a powerful case that gossip has morphed into a corrosive new-school version.

Counter-Cola charts the history of one of the world's most influential and widely known corporations, the Coca-Cola Company. It tells the story of how, over the past 130 years, the corporation has tried to make its products and brands physically and culturally a central part of global daily life in over 200 countries. Through this story of Coca-Cola, Amanda Ciafone reveals the pursuit of corporate power within the key economic transformations-liberal, developmentalist, neoliberal - of the 20th and 21st centuries. A story of global capitalism, it is not without contest.

Joshua Myers considers the work of thinkers who broke with the racial and colonial logic of academic disciplinarity and how the ideas of Black intellectuals created different ways of thinking and knowing in their pursuit of conceptual and epistemological freedom. Bookended by meditations with June Jordan and Toni Cade Bambara, Of Black Study focuses on how W.E.B. Du Bois, Sylvia Wynter, Jacob Carruthers, and Cedric Robinson contributed to Black Studies approaches to knowledge production within and beyond Western structures of knowledge.

Ever since its initial publication in 2008, The Transgender Child has been lauded as the most trusted source of information for families wanting to understand and affirm their transgender, gender-expansive, or nonbinary child. Utilized around the world and translated into multiple languages, The Transgender Child has won accolades from medical and mental health professionals, teachers, and, most especially, from parents. Authors Stephanie Brill and Rachel Pepper have now thoroughly revised and updated their ground-breaking classic.

The legendary creator of iconic television programs All in the Family, Sanford and Son, Maude, Good Times, The Jeffersons, and Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman, Norman Lear remade our television culture - while leading a life of unparalleled political, civic, and social involvement. Sharing the wealth of Lear's 90 years, Even This I Get to Experience is a memoir as touching and remarkable as the life he has led.

As the nation recovers from the Trump presidency, many questions remain: Why was the COVID-19 pandemic so grossly mishandled? How did we get so politically polarized? What caused White nationalist groups to come out of the shadows, and are they here to stay? The answers lie the twisted story of the relationship between Donald Trump and Fox News. Through firsthand accounts from over 250 current and former Fox insiders, CNN anchor and chief media correspondent Brian Stelter unlocks the inner workings of Rupert Murdoch’s multibillion-dollar media empire.

According to the author of this book, we are currently living through the rise of a phenomenon known as "commercial democracy," in which public relations, promotional culture, and the media play a new and vital role. By providing the public with the promise of representation, voice, and agency, commercial democracy results in the formation of new types of social contracts.

Lewis Howes grew up as an athlete. He was a two-sport All-American and went on to play football professionally. Howes then transferred his competitive nature from sports to business, building his podcast, The School of Greatness, into a global phenomenon. But his whole identity was built on misguided beliefs about what "masculinity" was: dangerous, false ideas learned from teammates and coaches in locker rooms and stereotypes in the media. Like so many men, Howes grew up to be angry, frustrated, and always chasing something that was never enough.