When Communication Became a Discipline (Lexington, 2021) argues that speech and journalism professors embraced the concept of communication between 1964 and 1982. They changed the names of their scholarly societies and journals and revised their academic curricula. Five “strands” of scholarship became and remain central to this transformation. Communication is not a traditional academic discipline, but its scholars convinced their colleagues to understand and embrace it. When Communication Becam...
May 02, 2022•42 min•Ep. 164
Internet-enabled mobilization begins long before there is a call for protest. In the book Internet Use and Protest in Malaysia and other Authoritarian Regimes (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021), Kris Ruijgrok examines the case of Bersih – an anti-corruption movement in Malaysia – to track the sequence of events that lead citizens to take part in protest action. Contrary to the impression that social media platforms like Twitter spontaneously spark protests around the world, the book takes a longer and w...
Apr 15, 2022•35 min•Ep. 99
In How Machines Came to Speak: Media Technologies and Freedom of Speech (Duke University Press, 2022), Jennifer Petersen constructs a genealogy of how legal conceptions of “speech” have transformed over the last century in response to new media technologies. Drawing on media and legal history, Petersen shows that the legal category of speech has varied considerably, evolving from a narrow category of oratory and print publication to a broad, abstract conception encompassing expressive nonverbal ...
Apr 14, 2022•44 min•Ep. 315
Jacob Mchangama, founder and director of the think tank Justitia, has written a one-volume history of freedom of thought, which ranges from the lone Demosthenes of 4th-century BCE Athens to the recent controversies regarding Donald Trump. In Free Speech: A History from Socrates to Social Media (Basic Books, 2022) , Mchangama argues that the history of freedom of thought has recurrent themes, such as a free speech entropy: the perception of rulers or governments that if speech is not restricted t...
Apr 06, 2022•37 min•Ep. 155
In this podcast Owen Bennett-Jones discusses the future of rational decision making with Professor Olivier Sibony who after 25 years with McKinsey & Company in France, is now at HEC Paris and the Saïd Business School in Oxford University. In 2021 he co-wrote the book Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment (Little, Brown Spark, 2021) with Cass R. Sunstein and Daniel Kahneman. For those trying to resist the illogicalities of the post truth world, the idea of rational decision-making is perhaps more i...
Mar 29, 2022•43 min•Ep. 6
As the United States moves on from the Trump era — and perhaps begins to contemplate what a second one might look like — conversations about journalism's relationship to Trump and his ideas are cropping up all over the place. Books like News After Trump address these questions through a scholarly lens, but Covering Politics in the Age of Trump (LSU Press, 2021) looks at coverage of Trump from the perspective of journalists who cover national politics. Edited by Jerry Ceppos, the book takes a wid...
Mar 23, 2022•53 min•Ep. 63
Ebony Magazine and Lerone Bennett Jr.: Popular Black History in Postwar America (University of Illinois Press, 2020) reveals the previously hidden impact of Ebony magazine as a major producer and disseminator of popular black history during the second half of the twentieth century. Far from dismissing Ebony as a consumer magazine with limited political or educational importance, E. James West highlights the value editors, readers, and advertisers placed upon Ebony's role as a "history book." Ben...
Mar 17, 2022•1 hr 9 min•Ep. 283
In A Strategic Nature: Public Relations and the Politics of American Environmentalism (Oxford UP, 2021), Melissa Aronczyk and Maria I. Espinoza examine public relations as a social and political force that shapes both our understanding of the environmental crises we now face and our responses to them. Drawing on in-depth interviews, ethnography, and archival research, Aronczyk and Espinoza document the evolution of PR techniques to control public perception of the environment since the beginning...
Mar 15, 2022•1 hr 19 min•Ep. 269
In the autumn of 2014, the Royal Air Force released blurry video of a missile blowing up a pick-up truck that may have had a weapon attached to its flatbed. This was a lethal form of gesture politics: to send a £9-million bomber from Cyprus to Iraq and back, burning £35,000 an hour in fuel, to launch a smart missile costing £100,000 to destroy a truck or, rather, to create a video that shows it being destroyed. Some lives are ended—it is impossible to tell whose—so that the government can preten...
Mar 04, 2022•1 hr 11 min•Ep. 90
White publishers and editors used their newspapers to build, nurture, and protect white supremacy across the South in the decades after the Civil War. At the same time, a vibrant Black press fought to disrupt these efforts and force the United States to live up to its democratic ideals. Journalism and Jim Crow: White Supremacy and the Black Struggle for a New America (U Illinois Press, 2021) centers the press as a crucial political actor shaping the rise of the Jim Crow South. In this interview ...
Feb 24, 2022•57 min•Ep. 62
Stanislav Aseyev is a Ukrainian journalist and writer born in Donetsk, which at present remains occupied by Russia-backed militants. Sometime after the beginning of the occupation, he was captured for his political views by the militants of the occupied parts of the Donbas and sentenced to 15 years. On the eve of 2020, Aseyev was released in a prisoner exchange. Currently Stanislav Aseyev lives in Kyiv. Aseyev received a number of awards recognizing his active social and political position (incl...
Feb 22, 2022•44 min•Ep. 2
Americans are deeply polarized on many issues, including science and medicine. Where once was widespread agreement, today the differences are sharp: on one hand, posters announce, “I believe in science!” and on the other hand, dramatic videos show ICU patients affirming their anti-vax beliefs with their final breaths. What is going on? Science is supposed to be based on reason, not faith. We get into a pile of metal – our cars – every day without fear because we trust the engineers, who built ca...
Feb 15, 2022•47 min•Ep. 68
How is power enacted in everyday broadcast practices? National Public Radio has a “rhetoric of impartiality” but this obscures the ideological work done by the network.” In The Sound of Exclusion: NPR and the Latinx Public (U Arizona Press, 2021), Dr. Christopher Chávez interrogates how NPR determines what it means to be American and what is deemed American news. NPR’s original mandate included engaging listeners in civic discourses and representing the diversity of the nation. Yet Chavez argues...
Feb 15, 2022•56 min•Ep. 581
In the midst of the disruptions and distrust that have plagued traditional media in recent years, and a degree of polarization rarely seen in American history, a new style of journalism is emerging. Dozens of news organizations, from corporate powerhouses to home-office startups, are reviving a classic role of American journalism: inspiring and enabling Americans to do the difficult, authentic, and ultimately rewarding work of citizenship in a democratic society. News for US: Citizen-Centered Jo...
Feb 07, 2022•39 min•Ep. 61
The common-sense way of thinking about what representatives should do in democracies tends to revolve around the concept of responsiveness: representatives should respond to the interests and demands of their constituents. However, this account of representation does not tell us much about how citizens form preferences. If political representatives and other actors have the ability to shape the interests and preferences of actors, this raises the specters of manipulation, voter incompetence, and...
Feb 04, 2022•1 hr 19 min•Ep. 53
Political scientists have argued that Donald Trump exacerbated long-simmering changes in polarization, populism, and other aspects of politics. In their book News After Trump: Journalism's Crisis of Relevance in a Changed Media Culture (Oxford University Press, 2021), Matt Carlson, Seth C. Lewis, and Sue Robinson, argue that Trump's candidacy and presidency did the same in journalism. The question now is, how do news organizations move forward and continue to deliver informational value to the p...
Jan 19, 2022•53 min•Ep. 60
This interview was recorded and first published in early 2020 when the NBN had about a million downloads a month. Since then the downloads have increased more than four-fold to just below 5 million monthly downloads at the end of 2021 and the number of hosts has increased greatly as well. On the New Books Network authors to talk about their books with a specialist host. Founded in 2007 by Marshall Poe, formerly a Russian history professor from the US. The NBN has grown to be the most downloaded ...
Jan 17, 2022•1 hr 24 min•Ep. 47
Elena Poniatowska is a legendary Mexican journalist who has chronicled popular celebrities, politicians as well as important social movements in Mexico since the 1968 Tlatelolco students massacre. Today I talked to Lynn Stephen, a professor of anthropology at the University of Oregon who has described in her book Stories That Make History: Mexico through Elena Poniatowska’s Crónicas (Duke UP, 2021) how Poniatowska’s personal and political trajectory intertwined with Mexico’s growing critical pub...
Dec 29, 2021•33 min•Ep. 145
Eric Berkowitz has written a short history of a censorship, a large topic that has been a phenomenon since the advent of recorded history. In Dangerous Ideas: A Brief History of Censorship in the West from the Ancients to Fake News (Beacon Press, 2021), Berkowitz reviews the motives and methods of governments, religious authorities, and private citizens to quell freedom of thought and expression. One theme Berkowitz reveals is how ineffective many censorship efforts have been. For example, after...
Nov 29, 2021•34 min•Ep. 144
How do we narrate history, both the troubling past and what we chose to remember? Clint Smith sets out to wrestle with this question and its relationship to enslavement in his first nonfiction book, How the Word is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America (Little, Brown and Company, 2021). From Monticello plantation to Angola Prison to Galveston Island, Smith guides the reader on a journey as he visits domestic and abroad landmarks. In his exploration, he includes the react...
Nov 26, 2021•1 hr 29 min•Ep. 264
Media is usually seen as a feature of the modern world enabled by the latest technologies. Scholars, educators, parents, and politicians often talk about media as something people should be wary of due to its potential negative impact on their lives. But do we really understand what media is? In Media Is Us: Understanding Communication and Moving Beyond Blame (Rowman and Littlefield, 2021), Elizaveta Friesem argues that instead of being worried about media or blaming it for what’s going wrong in...
Oct 27, 2021•59 min•Ep. 77
In the Qing dynasty (1644-1911), China experienced far greater access to political information than suggested by the blunt measures of control and censorship employed by modern Chinese regimes. A tenuous partnership between the court and the dynamic commercial publishing enterprises of late imperial China enabled the publication of gazettes in a wide range of print and manuscript formats. For both domestic and foreign readers these official gazettes offered vital information about the Qing state...
Oct 20, 2021•1 hr 2 min•Ep. 419
Matthew Ricketson joins to discuss how newsrooms, the engine rooms of reporting, have shrunk. A generation of journalists has borne witness to seismic changes in the media and this book shares their stories as essays and narrative interviews. Names include from more than 50 Australian journalists – including Amanda Meade, David Marr and Flip Prior – Upheaval: The Great Digital Disruption in Journalism and Its Aftermath (NewSouth, 2021) reveals the highs and the lows of those who were there to se...
Oct 19, 2021•1 hr 3 min•Ep. 70
The story of the American newsroom is that of modern American journalism. In The American Newsroom: A History, 1920-1960 (University of Missouri Press, 2021), Will Mari documents a time of great change and controversy in the field, one in which journalism was produced in "news factories" by news workers with dozens of different roles, and not just once a day, but hourly, using the latest technology and setting the stage for the emergence later in the century of the information economy. While new...
Oct 15, 2021•37 min•Ep. 59
Perspectives on Mass Communication is based on an in-depth filmed conversation between Howard Burton and Denis McQuail (1935-2017), who was Emeritus Professor at the University of Amsterdam and Visiting Professor at the University of Southampton. He is widely considered to be one of the most influential scholars in the history of mass communication studies. This wide-ranging conversation provides detailed insights into how examining the media, and in particular mass media, necessarily involves a...
Oct 05, 2021•1 hr 52 min•Ep. 62
Mark Baker is an American journalist and travel writer. In the 1980s, he lived in Vienna and reported on the former Eastern bloc for Business International and The Economist Group. In 1991, he moved to Prague, where he worked as an editor for The Prague Post and co-founded The Globe Bookstore & Coffeehouse. He’s written 30 travel guidebooks for publishers like Lonely Planet and Fodor's on countries in Central and Eastern Europe, including the Czech Republic. Čas Proměn (Time of Changes) is h...
Sep 24, 2021•57 min•Ep. 124
What's it like to cover Donald Trump? In this episode, veteran American journalist Allen Salkin explains. For over three decades, Salkin has written about many things for many high-profile publications, including The New York Post, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Atlantic and others. He is also the author of a number of well-received books: Festivus: The Holiday for the Rest of Us (2008); From Scratch: The Uncensored History of the Food Network (2014); and most recently The Method...
Sep 14, 2021•1 hr•Ep. 13
In The Life and Times of Louis Lomax: The Art of Deliberate Disunity (Duke University Press, 2021), Thomas Aiello traces the complicated and fascinating life of a pioneering Black journalist and media personality. A witness to some of the most iconic moments of the 1960s, Lomax remains an important yet overlooked civil rights figure, who emerged as one of the most influential voices of the movement despite his past as an ex-con, serial liar, and publicity-seeking provocateur. Thomas Aiello is a ...
Sep 10, 2021•44 min•Ep. 254
Over the past 15 years, journalism has experienced a rapid proliferation of data about online reader behavior in the form of web metrics. These newsroom metrics influence which stories are written, how news is promoted, and which journalists get hired and fired. Some argue that metrics help journalists better serve their audiences. Others worry that metrics are the contemporary equivalent of a stopwatch-wielding factory manager. In All the News That's Fit to Click: How Metrics Are Transforming t...
Sep 10, 2021•52 min•Ep. 58
Until the recent political shift pushed workers back into the media spotlight, the mainstream media had largely ignored this significant part of American society in favor of the moneyed upscale consumer for more than four decades. Christopher R. Martin now reveals why and how the media lost sight of the American working class and the effects of it doing so. The damning indictment of the mainstream media that flows through No Longer Newsworthy: How the Mainstream Media Abandoned the Working Class...
Sep 03, 2021•49 min•Ep. 142
