Race Baiter How The Media Wields Dangerous Words To Divide A Nation

Gone is the era of Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite, when news programs fought to gain the trust and respect of a wide spectrum of American viewers. Today, the fastest-growing news programs and media platforms are fighting hard for increasingly narrow segments of the public and playing on old prejudices and deep-rooted fears, coloring the conversation in the blogosphere and the cable news chatter to distract from the true issues at stake. Using the same tactics once used to mobilize political parties and committed voters, they send their fans coded messages and demonize opposing groups, in the process securing valuable audience share and website traffic. Race-baiter is a term born out of this tumultuous climate, coined by the conservative media to describe a person who uses racial tensions to arouse the passion and ire of a particular demographic. Even as the election of the first black president forces us all to reevaluate how we think about race, gender, culture, and class lines, some areas of modern media are working hard to push the same old buttons of conflict and division for new purposes. In Race-Baiter, veteran journalist and media critic Eric Deggans dissects the powerful ways modern media feeds fears, prejudices, and hate, while also tracing the history of the word and its consequences, intended or otherwise.

Featuring a new code of ethics for journalists and essays by 14 journalism thought leaders and practitioners, The New Ethics of Journalism: Principles for the 21st Century, by Kelly McBride and Tom Rosenstiel, examines the new pressures brought to bear on journalism by technology and changing audience habits. It offers a new framework for making critical moral choices, as well as case studies that reinforce the concepts and principles rising to prominence in 21st century communication. The book addresses the unique problems facing journalism today, including how we arrive at truth in an era of abundant and unverified information; the evolution of new business models and partnerships; the presence of journalists on independent social media platforms; the role of diversity; the meaning of stories; the value of images; and the role of community in the production of journalism.

Media Control: News as an Institution of Power and Social Control challenges traditional (and even some radical) perceptions of how the news works. While it's clear that journalists don't operate objectively – reporters don't just cover news, but they make it – Media Control goes a step further by arguing that the cultural institution of news approaches and presents everyday information from particular and dominant cultural positions that benefit the power elite. From analysing how the press operate as police agents by conducting surveillance and instituting social order through its coverage of crime and police action to bolstering private business and neoliberal principles by covering the news through notions of boosterism, Media Control presents the news through a cultural lens. Robert E. Gutsche, Jr. introduces or advances readers' applications of critical race theory and cultural studies scholarship to explore cultural meanings within news coverage of police action, the criminal justice system, and embedding into the news democratic values that are later used by the power elite to oppress and repress portions of the citizenry. Media Control helps the reader explicate how the power elite use the press and the veil of the Fourth Estate to further white ideologies and American Imperialism.

Conservative radio host and syndicated columnist Dennis Prager provides a bold, sweeping look at the future of civilization with Still the Best Hope, and offers a strong, cogent argument for why basic American values must triumph in a dangerously uncertain world. Humanity stands at a crossroads, and the only alternatives to the “American Trinity” of liberty, natural rights, and the melting-pot ideal of national unity are Islamic totalitarianism, European democratic socialism, capitalist dictatorship, or global chaos if we should fail. America is Still the Best Hope, as this eminently sensible, profoundly inspiring volume so powerfully proves.

Doing Ethics in Media: Theories and Practical Applications is an accessible, comprehensive introduction to media ethics. Its theoretical framework and grounded discussions engage students to think clearly and systematically about dilemmas in the rapidly changing media environment. The 13-chapter text is organized around six decision-making questions— the "5Ws and H" of media ethics. The questions encourage students to articulate the issues; apply codes, policies or laws; consider the needs of stakeholders; sift and sort through conflicting values; integrate philosophic principles; and pose a "test of publicity." Specifically, the questions ask: • What’s your problem? • Why not follow the rules? • Who wins, who loses? • What’s it worth? • Who’s whispering in your ear? • How’s your decision going to look? As they progress through the text, students are encouraged to resolve dozens of practical applications and increasingly complex case studies relating to journalism, new media, advertising, public relations, and entertainment. Other distinctive features include: • Comprehensive materials on classic moral theory and current issues such as truth telling and deception, values, persuasion and propaganda, privacy, diversity, and loyalty. • A user-friendly approach that challenges students to think for themselves rather than imposing answers on them. • Consistent connections between theories and the decision-making challenges posed in the practical applications and case studies. • A companion website with online resources for students, including additional readings and chapter overviews, as well as instructor materials with a test bank, instructor’s manual, sample syllabi and more. www.routledge.com/textbooks/black • A second website with continuously updated examples, case studies, and student writing – www.doingmediaethics.com. Doing Ethics in Media is aimed at undergraduates and graduate students studying media ethics in mass media, journalism, and media studies. It also serves students in rhetoric, popular culture, communication studies, and interdisciplinary social sciences.

The global financial crisis has had a seismic impact upon the wealth of nations. But we have little sense of how it affects one of the most fundamental issues of all: our physical and mental health. This highly significant new book, based on the authors' own groundbreaking research, looks at the daily lives of people affected by financial crisis, from the Great Depression of the 1930s, to post-communist Russia, to the US foreclosure crisis of the late 2000s. Why, it asks, did Sweden experience a fall in suicides during its banking crisis? What triggered a mosquito-borne epidemic in California in 2007? What caused 10 million Russian men to 'disappear' in the 1990s? Why is Greece experiencing rocketing HIV rates? And how did the health of Americans actually improve during the catastrophic crisis of the 1930s? The conclusions it draws are both surprising and compelling: remarkably, when faced with similar crises, the health of some societies - like Iceland - improves, while that of others, such as Greece, deteriorates. Even amid the worst economic disasters, negative public health effects are not inevitable: it's how communities respond to challenges of debt and market turmoil that counts. The Body Economic puts forward a radical proposition. Austerity, it argues, is seriously bad for your health. We can prevent financial crises from becoming epidemics, but to do so, we must acknowledge what the hard data tells us: that, throughout history, there is a causal link between the strength of a community's health and its social protection systems. Now and for generations to come, our commitment to the building of fairer, more equal societies will determine the health of our body economic.

African American Republican Ron Christie argues that black leadership is working against equality by advancing an extremist agenda of separatism and special rights.

“Analyzes how ideas about economics and political philosophy find their way into everything from Star Trek to Malcolm in the Middle.” —Wall Street Journal Popular culture often champions freedom as the fundamentally American way of life and celebrates the virtues of independence and self-reliance. But film and television have also explored the tension between freedom and other core values, such as order and political stability. What may look like healthy, productive, and creative freedom from one point of view may look like chaos, anarchy, and a source of destructive conflict from another. Film and television continually pose the question: Can Americans deal with their problems on their own, or must they rely on political elites to manage their lives? In this groundbreaking work, Paul A. Cantor—whose previous book, Gilligan Unbound, was named one of the best nonfiction books of the year by the Los Angeles Times—explores the ways in which television shows such as Star Trek, The X-Files, South Park, and Deadwood and films such as The Aviator and Mars Attacks! have portrayed both top-down and bottom-up models of order. Drawing on the works of John Locke, Adam Smith, Alexis de Tocqueville, and other proponents of freedom, Cantor contrasts the classical liberal vision of America?particularly its emphasis on the virtues of spontaneous order?with the Marxist understanding of the “culture industry” and the Hobbesian model of absolute state control. The Invisible Hand in Popular Culture concludes with a discussion of the impact of 9/11 on film and television, and the new anxieties emerging in contemporary alien-invasion narratives: the fear of a global technocracy that seeks to destroy the nuclear family, religious faith, local government, and other traditional bulwarks against the absolute state.