An invigorating polemic against tactics the news media use to manipulate and divide their audiences.
Rolling Stone contributing editor Taibbi (I Can’t Breathe: A Killing on Bay Street, 2017, etc.) spares neither right- nor left-leaning pundits as he inveighs against cable TV and other media that treat news as a form of entertainment.
After nearly three decades as a journalist, the author reconsiders the message of one of his earliest professional touchstones, Noam Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent, in which Chomsky argued that censorship in the United States wasn’t overt but covert—that news companies simply failed to promote people who opposed their aims. Taibbi saw the self-censorship in newscasts that courted the widest possible audiences with a bland approach he sums up as, “Good evening, I’m Dan Rather, and my frontal lobes have been removed. Today in Libya.…” The explosion of cable news channels helped to change that, but the author argues convincingly that many outlets have traded one sin for another. Media companies now shunt viewers into “demographic silos” and treat news like pro wrestling, fomenting conflict by encouraging people to take sides. Prime examples include the Sean Hannity Show on Fox News and the Rachel Maddow Show on MSNBC. “Maddow defenders will say she’s nowhere near as vicious and deceptive as Hannity and therefore doesn’t belong in the same category,” writes Taibbi. “But she builds her audience the same way,” by fostering an us vs. them mentality. This binary approach narrows debate, discourages the pursuit of complex stories, and leads journalists into blunders such as believing that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction or implying that the Mueller Report might topple the president by the next commercial break. First published in online installments, this book—which ends with a spirited interview with Chomsky—is less polished than recent works by Taibbi that arrived by a more traditional path. But his mordant wit is intact, and his message to journalists is apt and timely: Not everyone has to win a Pulitzer or Edward R. Murrow Award, but, please, have some pride.
An invigorating polemic against tactics the news media use to manipulate and divide their audiences.Pub Date: Oct. 8, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-949017-25-0
Page Count: 272
Publisher: OR Books
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2019
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
A forceful, necessarily provocative call to action for the preservation and protection of American Jewish freedom.
Known for her often contentious perspectives, New York Times opinion writer Weiss battles societal Jewish intolerance through lucid prose and a linear playbook of remedies.
While she was vividly aware of anti-Semitism throughout her life, the reality of the problem hit home when an active shooter stormed a Pittsburgh synagogue where her family regularly met for morning services and where she became a bat mitzvah years earlier. The massacre that ensued there further spurred her outrage and passionate activism. She writes that European Jews face a three-pronged threat in contemporary society, where physical, moral, and political fears of mounting violence are putting their general safety in jeopardy. She believes that Americans live in an era when “the lunatic fringe has gone mainstream” and Jews have been forced to become “a people apart.” With palpable frustration, she adroitly assesses the origins of anti-Semitism and how its prevalence is increasing through more discreet portals such as internet self-radicalization. Furthermore, the erosion of civility and tolerance and the demonization of minorities continue via the “casual racism” of political figures like Donald Trump. Following densely political discourses on Zionism and radical Islam, the author offers a list of bullet-point solutions focused on using behavioral and personal action items—individual accountability, active involvement, building community, loving neighbors, etc.—to help stem the tide of anti-Semitism. Weiss sounds a clarion call to Jewish readers who share her growing angst as well as non-Jewish Americans who wish to arm themselves with the knowledge and intellectual tools to combat marginalization and defuse and disavow trends of dehumanizing behavior. “Call it out,” she writes. “Especially when it’s hard.” At the core of the text is the author’s concern for the health and safety of American citizens, and she encourages anyone “who loves freedom and seeks to protect it” to join with her in vigorous activism.
A forceful, necessarily provocative call to action for the preservation and protection of American Jewish freedom.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-593-13605-8
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Aug. 22, 2019
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