Sunday, June 19, 2011

'Influencing Machine': We Get the Media We Deserve

ABC news reporting:
"The Influencing Machine: Brooke Gladstone on the Media" (W.W. Norton), by Brooke Gladstone. It's easy to decry the current state of the news industry, and to long for the good ol' days when reporters were unbiased and news outlets cared more about the truth than about pushing a political agenda.
The only problem, as radio host Brooke Gladstone points out in her new book, is that the good ol' days were never as good as we like to believe.
In "The Influencing Machine: Brooke Gladstone on the Media," she traces the industry's history from ancient times to the colonial era to the present. Her conclusions: The media have always been imperfect, and we consumers are partly to blame because they're only giving us what we demand.
In other words, we get the media we deserve.
Her argument is compelling, the history enlightening. But what makes the book so notable is its style. It's presented almost entirely in drawings, like a textbook in comic-book or graphic-novel form. The drawings by Josh Neufeld are definitely good, but the question is whether they're so good they distract from the content of the book.
http://abcnews.go.com/Entertainment/wireStory?id=13780159

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