Showing results by publisher "Tantor Audio" in Media Studies

With the rise of Jimmy Carter, the 1976 presidential election proved a transformative moment in US history, heralding a change in terms of how candidates run for public office and how the news media cover their campaigns.

Long before the current preoccupation with "fake news", American newspapers routinely ran stories that were not quite, strictly speaking, true. Today, a firm boundary between fact and fakery is a hallmark of journalistic practice, yet for many readers and publishers across more than three centuries, this distinction has seemed slippery or even irrelevant.

One of the basic structures of everyday life, money is at its core a communication media. Payment systems - cash, card, app, or Bitcoin - are informational and symbolic tools that integrate us into, or exclude us from, the society that surrounds us. Examining the social politics of financial technologies, Lana Swartz reveals what's at stake when we pay.

Our media environment is in crisis. Polarization is rampant. Polluted information floods social media. Even our best efforts to help clean up can backfire, sending toxins roaring across the landscape. In You Are Here, Whitney Phillips and Ryan Milner offer strategies for navigating increasingly treacherous information flows. Using ecological metaphors, they emphasize how our individual me is entwined within a much larger we, and how everyone fits within an ever-shifting network map.

This audiobook asks us to reconsider "whose global village" we are shaping with the digital technology revolution today. Sharing stories of collaboration with Native Americans in California and New Mexico, revolutionaries in Egypt, communities in rural India, and others across the world, Ramesh Srinivasan urges us to reimagine what the Internet, mobile phones, or social media platforms may look like when considered from the perspective of diverse cultures.

While quackery—loosely defined as the spread of false "knowledge," often accompanied by various versions of "snake oil"—is not a novel phenomenon, it has never posed as great a threat to public health as today. In Quack Quack, Dr. Joe Schwarcz focuses on the deluge of anecdotes, cherry-picked data, pseudoscientific nonsense, and seductive baseless health claims that undermine efforts to educate the public about evidence-based science. The wide scope of the topics drawn from past and present aims to cast a life preserver to people drowning in a sea of misinformation.

In this book in praise of wait times, award-winning author Jason Farman passionately argues that the delay between call and answer has always been an important part of the message. Traveling backward from our current era of Twitter and texts, Farman describes how societies have worked to eliminate waiting in communication and how they have interpreted those times' meanings. And in a rebuttal to the demand for instant communication, Farman makes a powerful case for why good things can come to those who wait.

Journalists hate the term fake news, but there's a troubling reality: spin doctors routinely try to dupe them into reporting misleading and distorted stories. Award-winning journalist Cecil Rosner insists there is something we can do about this. We can pressure news organizations to stop blindly regurgitating the firehose of press releases and focus instead on determining what is actually true. Rosner empowers listeners by sharing his techniques for detecting misinformation and disinformation.

Renyi Hong theorizes the notion of being "passionate about your work" as an affective project that encourages people to endure trying situations like unemployment, job change, repetitive and menial labor, and freelancing. Not simply a subject of aspiration, passion has been deployed as a means to build resilience and mend disappointments with our experiences of work. Tracking the rise of passion in nineteenth-century management to trends like gamification, coworking, and unemployment insurance, Hong argues that the ideal of passionate work sustains a condition of cruel optimism.

In 2010—long before the release of Lemonade—Professor Kevin Allred created the university course "Politicizing Beyonce" to both wide acclaim and controversy. He outlines his pedagogical philosophy in Ain't I a Diva?, exploring the process of teaching Beyonce and what it means to use a superstar to blow up the canon. Allred brings his syllabus to life by pairing music videos and songs with historical and academic texts, and combines analysis with classroom anecdotes.

Bloody Crossroads 2020 takes a deep dive into the role that mass-appeal movies, television, videos, and music played in America's political culture in the year of Donald Trump's failed reelection campaign. The book also explores the impact of entertainment celebrities in communications, fundraising, and campaigning to support the election of Joe Biden.

In Abundance, Pablo J. Boczkowski builds upon what we know about the historical and contemporary scholarship to develop a novel framework on the experience of living in a society that has more information available to the public than ever before, focusing on the interpretations, emotions, and practices of dealing with this abundance in everyday life.

Is Twitter a place for sociability and conversation, a platform for public broadcasting, or a network for discussion? Digital platforms have become influential in every sphere of communication, from the intimate and everyday to the public, professional, and political. Since the scrappy start-up days of social media in the mid-2000s, not only has the worldwide importance of platforms grown exponentially, but also their cultures have shifted dramatically, in a variety of directions.

Following the fatal shooting in broad daylight of unarmed African American Michael Brown by a white cop in August 2014, Ferguson, Missouri, became the scene of protests that pitted law enforcement against locals and Black Lives matter activists. The media firestorm has not waned, and, in fact, has grown stronger in light of all the recent violence by and against police officers nationwide. According to Ferguson's former police chief Tom Jackson, the uninformed media actually fans the flames of unrest and exploits the situation.

From noted conservative leader Ken Blackwell and Washington, D.C-;based constitutional attorney and journalist Ken Klukowski comes an urgently needed book about President Barack Obama's blueprint to centralize power in the White House, subvert the Constitution, and transform the United States of America into a militant, secular welfare state dominated by an overbearing central government.

From the start of Barack Obama's presidency in 2009, conservative populist groups began fomenting political fractiousness, dissent, and surprising electoral success. The Tea Party was one of the major characters driving this story. But, as Khadijah Costley White argues in this book, the Tea Party's ascent to major political phenomenon can be attributed to the way in which partisan and non-partisan news outlets "branded" the Party as a pot-stirrer in political conflicts over race, class, and gender.

The television industry is changing, and with it, the small screen's potential to engage in debate and present valuable representations of American history. Founded in 1972, HBO has been at the forefront of these changes, leading the way for many network, cable, and streaming services into the "post-network" era. Despite this, most scholarship has been dedicated to analyzing historical feature films and documentary films, leaving TV and the long-form drama hungry for coverage. Rebecca Weeks fills the gap in this area and defends the historiographic power of long-form dramas.

Despite the high number of programs and their evident popularity, paranormal reality television has to date received little critical attention. Ghost Channels provides an overview of the paranormal reality television genre, its development, and its place in television history. Conducting in-depth analyses of over thirty paranormal television series, author Amy Lawrence suggests these programs reveal much about Americans' contemporary fears.

In Finding Truth in Fiction, two media psychologists reveal that there's much more to our desire to seek out stories in film, TV, and books than simple diversion - fiction can help us find truth in our real lives. Whether you consider yourself a fan of popular media or whether you find yourself thinking of a particular fictional scene for inspiration, you are not alone. Though some assume that interest in a fictional world is a sign of psychological trouble, the authors enthusiastically disagree.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt organized an extraordinary partnership between the US government and America's media outlets to communicate to the reluctant and isolationist American public the nature of the threat that World War II posed to the nation and the world. The coalition's aim was to promote the concept of American exceptionalism and use it to galvanize the public for the government's cause.