Students of modern American politics and the sociology of communication will find this provocative, worthy reading.
A scholarly but accessible account of how John F. Kennedy’s administration’s battle against right-wing critics paved a path for the likes of Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly, and their ilk.
Censorship is widely understood to be something that right-leaning institutions and corporations do to left-leaning critics. However, as Cato Institute staffer Matzko writes, in the case of radio bloviators such as Carl McIntire and Billy James Hargis, the roles were reversed. The story turns on the opening of the AM spectrum to syndicators at a time when formerly dominant networks such as CBS switched their attention to TV. Into the gap came right-wing commentators who set to work denouncing liberalism, Cold War accommodationism, and Kennedy’s Catholicism—all of which required payback. Matzko attributes the rise of these nationally syndicated programs, in part, to the ability to take local protests national: A Miami boycott of Polish (and therefore communist) ham went nationwide almost overnight thanks to relentless promotion by McIntire, a New Jersey–based fundamentalist preacher who, over several years in the 1960s, “averaged $2,040,000 in annual receipts”—about $16.8 million today, chump change compared to what his modern counterparts earn but still substantial. The Kennedy administration employed tools such as IRS audits and FCC regulations to crack down on right-wing dissent, guided by the Reuther Memorandum. The selective use of the since-abandoned Fairness Doctrine, which required stations broadcasting McIntire’s “20th Century Reformation Hour” to devote equal time to opposing viewpoints, helped bring down that syndicated program. (When it ended, McIntire attempted to broadcast offshore, which lasted a single day.) Apart from telling this little-known story, Matzko argues, reasonably, that the actions of the Kennedy administration helped reinforce grievances “about the perceived liberal domination of the mainstream media,” complaints about which are the bread and butter of the right even today.
Students of modern American politics and the sociology of communication will find this provocative, worthy reading.Pub Date: May 1, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-19-007322-0
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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