Promotions - Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles 2017 -

Walter Lippmann once characterized a journalist's job as "to tell the truth and shame the devil." Lippmann, however, knew that "the truth" was difficult to discern for even the "objective" journalist. Hemmer's account of the evolution of conservative media--from its origins in the 1940s and 1950s in such periodicals as Human Events and National Review and such radio programs as The Manion Forum of Opinion to its contemporary incarnation in The Rush Limbaugh Show and Fox News--highlights the through-line of efforts by conservative media outlets to "attack ... the legitimacy of objectivity and substitute for it ideological integrity." Hemmer (Univ. of Virginia) never contorts her historical analysis to fit her thesis (e.g., the polemical publication Human Events claimed at its founding that it was objective, because "since its ideological world view was correct ... it did not need to sacrifice accuracy in order to be ideologically consistent"). Hemmer deftly exposes currents from the past that explain why the modern conservative media clings to its outsider status even as it has become part of the Republican Party establishment. This is top-drawer media history.Summing Up: Essential. All readership levels.

Richardson (Kutztown Univ. of Pennsylvania) has compiled a timely collection examining changes in the political landscape wrought by social media. The topics range from memes to activism to policy in a volume that investigates a central social dynamic of our time--the increasingly symbiotic relationship between new media and politics. Collectively, the authors highlight the multifaceted interactions among producers and consumers of information for education, activism, and policy making purposes. What is fascinating about this collection is that it provides a window into how much political communication has changed in the 21st century and the present and latent consequences of those changes for political discourses and processes. The collection also offers a broad scope of topics and offers readers access and opportunities to consider some major dynamics at the intersection of politics and social media today. What they reveal is a changed and changing political landscape that leaves the public with at least two options: adapt to the changes or be left behind and thus civically excluded. Social Media and Politics is a must read for scholars and students in communication, media studies, journalism, political science, and sociology.Summing Up: Essential. Upper-division undergraduates through professionals.

In this edited volume, the authors explore the growing practice in rhetorical studies of supplementing text-based inquiries with field-based practices. In ten chapters, a variety of essays explore the relationship between text and the field practices of observation, ethnographic interviews, and performance. The first half of the book explores topics such as behavior in public spaces, democratic modes of writing, and interdisciplinary frameworks for rhetorical methods. The second half offers demonstrations of field observation criticisms. The book is unique and cohesive in that each essay offers new insights into the intersections between rhetorical texts and field observations in communication studies. The volume reinforces an interdisciplinary, synergistic approach to the field that allows critical ethnographic research and gives greater attention to bodies, nonhuman elements, and everyday technologies to deeply inform rhetorical theory. This book is an essential read for courses in ethnography as well as a useful supplemental text for undergraduate and graduate-level courses in rhetoric.Summing Up: Essential. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.