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NB Media & Communications New Books in Media & Communications is an author-interview podcast channel showcasing new books in media and communications studies (broadly conceived).

The channel has a library of over 150 podcast episodes. New Books in Media & Communications is part of the New Books Network author-interview podcast consortium. http://www.newbooksnetwork.com/

Long before the current preoccupation with “fake news,” American newspapers routinely ran stories that were not quite, s...
13/06/2022

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. We see this play in pink slime local news sites and in the proliferation of truthers claiming to do their own research because of a deep distrust in the mainstream media.

In NOT EXACTLY LYING: Fake News and Fake Journalism in American History (Columbia University Press), Tucher argues that the creation of outward forms of factuality unleashed new opportunities for falsehood: News doesn’t have to be true as long as it looks true. Propaganda, disinformation, and advocacy—whether in print, on the radio, on television, or online—could be crafted to resemble the real thing. Dressed up in legitimate journalistic conventions, this “fake journalism” became inextricably bound up with right-wing politics, to the point where it has become an essential driver of political polarization.

In the book and in this conversation, Tucher explores how American audiences have argued over what’s real and what’s not—and why that matters for democracy. PODCAST LINK ⤵️

https://newbooksnetwork.com/not-exactly-lying

A new generation of Afro-Brazilian media producers has emerged to challenge a mainstream that frequently excludes them. ...
07/06/2022

A new generation of Afro-Brazilian media producers has emerged to challenge a mainstream that frequently excludes them. Reighan Gillam delves into the dynamic alternative media landscape developed by Afro-Brazilians in the 21st century. With works that confront racism and focus on Black characters, these artists and the visual media they create identify, challenge, or break with entrenched racist practices, ideologies, and structures. Gillam looks at a cross-section of media to show the ways Afro-Brazilians assert control over various means of representation in order to present a complex Black humanity. These images--so at odds with the mainstream--contribute to an anti-racist visual politics fighting to change how Brazilian media depicts Black people while highlighting the importance of media in the movement for Black inclusion.

An eye-opening union of analysis and fieldwork, VISUALIZING BLACK LIVES: Ownership and Control in Afro-Brazilian Media (University of Illinois Press) examines the alternative and activist Black media and the people creating it in today's Brazil. Check out the podcast 👇

https://newbooksnetwork.com/visualizing-black-lives

It was the Golden Age of Radio and powerful men were making millions in advertising dollars reaching thousands of listen...
01/06/2022

It was the Golden Age of Radio and powerful men were making millions in advertising dollars reaching thousands of listeners every day. When television arrived, few radio moguls were interested in the upstart industry and its tiny production budgets, and expensive television sets were out of reach for most families. But four women--each an independent visionary-- saw an opportunity and carved their own paths, and in so doing invented the way we watch tv today.

Irna Phillips turned real-life tragedy into daytime serials featuring female dominated casts. Gertrude Berg turned her radio show into a Jewish family comedy that spawned a play, a musical, an advice column, a line of house dresses, and other products. Hazel Scott, already a renowned musician, was the first African American to host a national evening variety program. Betty White became a daytime talk show fan favorite and one of the first women to produce, write, and star in her own show. Together, their stories chronicle a forgotten chapter in the history of television and popular culture.

But as the medium became more popular--and lucrative--in the wake of World War II, the House Un-American Activities Committee arose to threaten entertainers, blacklisting many as communist sympathizers. As politics, sexism, racism, anti-Semitism, and money collided, the women who invented television found themselves fighting from the margins, as men took control. But these women were true survivors who never gave up--and thus their legacies remain with us in our television-dominated era. It's time we reclaimed their forgotten histories and the work they did to pioneer the medium that now rules our lives.

Jennifer Keishin Armstrong's WHEN WOMEN INVENTED TELEVISION: The Untold Story of the Female Powerhouses Who Pioneered the Way We Watch Today (Harper Books) is an amazing and heartbreaking history, illustrated with photos, tells it all for the first time. Learn more on the author-interview podcast 👇

https://newbooksnetwork.com/when-women-invented-television

Eve Ng’s new book, CANCEL CULTURE: A Critical Analysis (Palgrave Macmillan), examines the phenomenon of "cancel culture"...
11/05/2022

Eve Ng’s new book, CANCEL CULTURE: A Critical Analysis (Palgrave Macmillan), examines the phenomenon of "cancel culture" from a critical media studies perspective, as both cancel practices (what people and institutional actors do) and cancel discourses (commentary about cancelling). Ng traces multiple lines of origins for cancel practices and discourses, in the domains of Black communicative practices (e.g. cancelling relationship to "dissing"), celebrity and fan cultures, consumer culture (especially around consumer nationalist cancellings), and national politics (U.S. conservative criticisms of cancelling, and nationalist cancelling events in mainland China). Her analysis moves beyond popular press accounts about the latest targets of cancelling or familiar free speech debates, and underscores the different configurations of power associated with “cancel culture” in specific cultural and political contexts. Learn more on the podcast ↙️

https://newbooksnetwork.com/cancel-culture

Digital connections permeate our lives, and so do data breaches. Given that we must be online for basic communication, f...
02/05/2022

Digital connections permeate our lives, and so do data breaches. Given that we must be online for basic communication, finance, healthcare, and more, it is alarming how difficult it is to create rules for securing our personal information. Despite the passage of many data security laws, data breaches are increasing at a record pace. In BREACHED!: Why Data Security Law Fails and How to Improve It (Oxford UP), Daniel Solove and Woodrow Hartzog, two of the world's leading experts on privacy and data security, argue that the law fails because, ironically, it focuses too much on the breach itself.

Drawing insights from many fascinating stories about data breaches, Solove and Hartzog show how major breaches could have been prevented or mitigated through a different approach to data security rules. Learn more on the podcast ↙️

https://newbooksnetwork.com/breached

WHEN COMMUNICATIONS BECAME A DISCIPLINE (Lexington Books) argues that speech and journalism professors embraced the conc...
02/05/2022

WHEN COMMUNICATIONS BECAME A DISCIPLINE (Lexington Books) 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. Learn how on the podcast 👇

https://newbooksnetwork.com/when-communication-became-a-discipline

Has the internet really been the main culprit behind the upheaval of the contemporary media industries? In MEDIA DISRUPT...
27/04/2022

Has the internet really been the main culprit behind the upheaval of the contemporary media industries?

In MEDIA DISRUPTED: Surviving Pirates, Cannibals, and Streaming Wars (MIT Press), Amanda Lotz provides a rebuttal to persistent myths about disruption across the mediascape of the late 20th and early 21st Centuries. Through a granular reading of four media industries – newspapers, recorded music, film and television – Lotz demonstrates that the internet has had diffuse and divergent effects in each, none of which are adequately explained through simplistic narratives of piracy or cannibalism. Lotz suggests that the speed and scale of reconfiguration in these industries has stemmed more from built up consumer demand and business (mal)practices, often with deep historical roots, which have only then been catalysed by the advent of the internet. Learn more on the podcast 👇

https://newbooksnetwork.com/media-disrupted

When the dust settled after World War II, the United States stood as the world’s unquestionably pre-eminent military and...
22/04/2022

When the dust settled after World War II, the United States stood as the world’s unquestionably pre-eminent military and economic power. In the decades that followed, the country exerted its dominant force in less visible but equally powerful ways, too, spreading its trade protocols, its media, and—perhaps most importantly—its alleged values.

Sam Lebovic’s A RIGHTEOUS SMOKESCREEN: Postwar America and the Politics of Cultural Globalization (University of Chicago Press) is an examination of how the postwar United States twisted its ideal of “the free flow of information” into a one-sided export of values and a tool with global consequences. Give the author's NBN interview a listen 👇

https://newbooksnetwork.com/a-righteous-smokescreen

In THE WORLD COMPUTER: Derivative Conditions of Racial Capitalism (Duke University Press), Jonathan Beller forcefully de...
15/04/2022

In THE WORLD COMPUTER: Derivative Conditions of Racial Capitalism (Duke University Press), Jonathan Beller forcefully demonstrates that the history of commodification generates information itself. Out of the omnipresent calculus imposed by commodification, information emerges historically as a new money form. Investigating its subsequent financialization of daily life and colonization of semiotics, Beller situates the development of myriad systems for quantifying the value of people, objects, and affects as endemic to racial capitalism and computation. Built on oppression and genocide, capital and its technical result as computation manifest as racial formations, as do the machines and software of social mediation that feed racial capitalism and run on social difference. PODCAST LINK ↙️

https://newbooksnetwork.com/the-world-computer

25/06/2021

Why is the term “openly gay” so widely used but “openly straight” is not? What are the unspoken assumptions behind terms like “male nurse,” “working mom,” and “white trash”?

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