A well-researched study that will have limited appeal outside of the communications field.
A professor of journalism examines the ways in which private money co-opted American journalism in the name of profit.
At the end of 2017, the Federal Communications Commission voted to deregulate the newspaper and TV news system. Susca argues that this action, upheld by the Supreme Court in 2021, allowed for a small group of private equity firms and hedge funds to increase the rate at which they bought newspapers and consolidated them. The author pinpoints 2003 as the year when private investment firm involvement in the newspaper industry began in earnest, citing the 40% stake Blackstone Group and Providence Equity Partners bought in Freedom Communications, Inc., a then–publicly held news corporation. During the next two decades, more such investments followed, all driven by the desire to “squeeze out more profits” for shareholders by “cutting staff, consolidating beats…closing bureaus and selling off landmark buildings” in communities all over the U.S. The result—especially in small towns—has been the creation of print and digital newspapers that ignore the stories most important to readers, such as those focusing on “children’s schools, crime, local commissions and elected boards.” This, in turn, has led to what Susca sees as a diminishing of the informative, watchdogging role media has been entrusted to play in democracy. Another disturbing byproduct of the “quality crisis” in journalism has been lessening of audience engagement with the news process itself. “When newspaper companies treat [readers] as consumers only,” writes the author, “their function as citizens is limited.” Media scholars will appreciate Susca’s careful analysis of evidence derived from such sources as court documents, congressional reports, corporate records, and in-depth personal interviews. As timely and incisive as her conclusions are, however, general readers may find the book to be too academic.
A well-researched study that will have limited appeal outside of the communications field.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 2024
ISBN: 9780252087561
Page Count: 232
Publisher: Univ. of Illinois
Review Posted Online: Sept. 9, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2023
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
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