News As Culture

"More than just a fascinating description of newsmaking and practice in an Indian city, this book has implications for theories of news and communication that make it a timely and significant contribution to the literature on journalism and newsmaking in the changing global environment.'--Mark Peterson, Miami University --

Modernity and Postmodern Culture is a critical introduction to claims concerning the postmodernization of culture and society. Contemporary culture may be 'postmodern' in the sense of fluidity of meaning, changing power relations and commodification in art, entertainment and everyday life, but modernity persists in the dynamics of capitalist civilization, albeit in an increasingly reflexive mode characterized by widespread uncertainty about social existence, progress and rationality. The theories of Baudrillard, Beck, Castells, Giddens, Habermas, Haraway, Jameson, Lyotard and others on the contemporary scene are discussed, and specific issues concerning architecture, theme parks, screen culture, science, technology and the environment are examined. Jim McGuigan argues that there have been tensions between instrumental and critical reason throughout the history of modernity that are still being played out.

What is news? Why does news turn out like it does? What factors influence the creation, production, and dissemination of news? Cultural Meanings of News takes on these deceptively simple questions through an essential collection of seminal and contemporary studies by leaders in the fields of mass communication and media studies. Similar in format and purpose to editor Dan Berkowitz's award-winning Social Meanings of News, this new volume represents a conceptual update, a continuation of the discourse about the nature of news and how it comes to be, moving ideas ahead from the earlier tradition of sociological approaches to the more pervasive cultural perspectives that inform understandings about news. Cultural Meanings of News provides a carefully selected set of readings, organized into thematic areas that each probe a dimension of the literature: from sociological roots to cultural perspectives; news as narrative and cultural text; newswork as cultural ritual; news as cultural myth; news and its interpretive communities; news as a source and reflection of collective memory; toward the future of news research. This text-reader provides students and scholars with first-hand exposure to cultural approaches to the study of news, while also providing an organizing framework for understanding the commonalties and differences between threads in the research. The goals are to engage readers through guided immersion in the material.

Paul H. Weaver's News and the Culture of Lying uses hard evidence to expose the "culture of lying," a propensity of news organizations to obscure the true meanings of news events and distort the public's conception of reality. News and Culture of Lying examines the relationship between journalists and the sources of their stories, argues that the media create an artificial sense of permanent emergency, and describes what must be done to restore credibility.

'News Culture' discusses the changing forms, practices and audiences of journalism. It provides an historical consideration of the rise of objective reporting in the media, and explores the presentation of the news and the cultural dynamics.

Weaver maintains that news organizations regularly foster a haze of untruth that obscures the meanings of events and distorts our perception of reality. A revealing look at how news stories are assigned, reported, edited, published, and more.

The first volume to answer definitively and for the first time the question: what is a news picture and how does it work?

With examples from media coverage of the war on terror, the invasion of Iraq, Hurricane Katrina and the London underground bombings, McNair studies the changing relationship between journalism and power in an increasingly globalized news culture.

This book looks at the roots of a global visual news culture: the trade in illustrations of the news between European illustrated newspapers in the mid-nineteenth century. In the age of nationalism, we might suspect these publications to be filled with nationally produced content, supporting a national imagined community. However, the large-scale transnational trade in illustrations, which this book uncovers, points out that nineteenth-century news consumers already looked at the same world. By exchanging images, European illustrated newspapers provided them with a shared, transnational, experience.

We take our news for granted: that it will inform us about the significant people and cite the authoritative ones, reflect the world the way it is, and tell us why something happens as it does. Now, six working journalists, press critics, and scholars at the leading edge of media criticism have been specially commissioned to make the familiar act of reading the news into a fresh and revealing event. Taking the famous "five W's and an H" (Who, What, When, Where, Why, and How), the authors turn these questions back on journalism for the first time to show us exactly what to make of the press. Leon V. Sigal Who? Sources Make the News Carlin Romano What? Grisly Truth about Bare Facts Michael Schudson When? Deadlines, Datelines, and History Where? Cartography, Community, and the Cold War James W. Carey Why And How? The Dark Continent of American Journalism Robert Karl Manoff Writing the News (By Telling the "Story") For everyone who reads the newspaper, for the journalist, and for the media critic alike, these essays offer fresh, provocative insights into a centerpiece of American culture, the news.