This biographical study focuses on Murrow's pre-war and wartime years heading the London bureau of CBS. Closely following the British debates on whether to engage in the growing conflict between the National Socialist regime in Germany and its victimized neighbors, Seib tracks Murrow's personal responses to events, and the access to powerful officials afforded by his status as a prominent American journalist. Seib's main interest is to examine Murrow's conviction that Britain – and later, the United States – should enter the war, and how that conviction colored his broadcasts from London. For Seib, Murrow's siding "with the angels" more than makes up for any lack of objectivity in his coverage. The study raises compelling questions about the proper role of ethics and advocacy for contemporary journalists, in a period in which many prominent journalists once again helped lead America into war. -jl

Media educator and activist Lynn Ziegler's first published work is a delightful tactical guide addressed to parents concerned about the effect of TV on their kids. Both sternly cynical about TV's potential as an educational tool and optimistic about young peoples' ability to critically engage with flawed media content, Spongeheadz offers moms, dads and kids creative and often fun tools for squeezing out the mental sponge. Targeted topics include deceptive advertising, racist stereotyping, and TV's often-corrosive effect on literacy. Ziegler also provides tools for engaging kids (and adults?) in critical thinking about the constructed nature of media programs by thinking about the policies and technology involved in contemporary media production. An added bonus: page after page of illustrations of fantasy TV remotes drawn by Ziegler's young students. -jl

Dahr Jamail's journalistic essays will stand as one of the most important documents of what war and occupation mean to Iraqis whose communities are suffering the short- and long-term effects. In this first collection, Jamail shares the voices of his Iraqi interviewees as well as those of fellow journalists, Iraqi drivers and fixers, and US soldiers – voices largely missing from US mainstream coverage of the war. It's Jamail's own voice which is the real find, however – interweaving his journalistic coverage with comments on the political and media forces that paved the way for war, and reflections on the haunted sense of connection and responsibility he gained from his travels to and from Iraq. -jl

Critical media scholar and activist Bob McChesney focuses his attention on his own academic field in his latest title, and Communication Revolution will be of primary interest to students (nonacademic as well as academic) of political communications. The book’s opening chapters offer an annotated historical bibliography of the American idea of a free press, leading to a description of the author’s own political education. McChesney describes becoming politicized around academia’s unwillingness to challenge, rather than simply observing or enabling, how powerful economic and political establishments have led media away from its traditional watchdog role. He argues that media scholars should embrace responsbility for helping encourage media norms and institutions that support civic engagement and democracy. -jl

In his latest work, Robert Jensen launches an unflinching and personal attack on the consumption of pornography and the porn-ization of mass entertainment media. Getting Off surveys how porn serves as a pervasive but rarely-examined cultural support for patriarchy, homophobia and racism. Jensen also attacks conventional definitions of masculinity based on conflict and emotional noncommunication, and implicates porn in its continued hold on modern men of all political stripes. -jl

Kids today are creating their own culture and counterculture in the midst of a manipulative media landscape wherein "alternative," "independent," and "underground" have lost their meaning, deployed over and over by corporations angling for a piece of the teen rebellion market. Punk Planet editor and DIY evangelist Anne Moore looks at this Orwellian phenomenon from many angles - the corporate cooptation of radical culture, the use of copyright law to prohibit rather than protect creativity, the shifting definitions of authenticity and integrity, the attractions of selling out, and the ever-present possibilities for cultural counterinsurgency. The results: easily the best, funniest and most memorable book on cultural resistance in a world where resistance to branding has itself become the basis for more branding. -jl

Zirin is probably the most thoughtful and politically savvy sports writer working today. Here offers his second fantastic collection of essays connecting sports, sports journalism and social/political issues, including racism and sexism in professional sports, doping and responses to doping, soccer and globalism, and the extreme contradictions between the high-dollar economics of professional sports and the popularity of sports as a social institution in many lower-income communities. Citing past examples such as Muhammad Ali, Toni Smith, Oscar de la Hoya and others, Zirin calls for politicized athletes to join forces and use their status as public figures to work for justice. He also calls for fans to recognize the struggles for justice both masked by and embodied within sports. Zirin's work offers a way of looking at sports as a principal site for such struggles, and not simply (to paraphrase Noam Chomsky) as "training in irrational jingoism." -jl

This book is part memoir, tracing Josh Rushing's path from military spokesman during the Iraq war - a role most famously documented in Jehane Noujaim's documentary Control Room - to on-air producer for Al Jazeera's English-language broadcast service. As such, it provides a fascinating insider perspective on that network's possible role in the US (the network has hardly any carriage on US cable systems). While light on deep analysis of the US media or the war, the book does provides Rushing some opportunity to critique the US military's press relations during the war, and he compares Jazeera's coverage of the war favorably to the largely uncritical US network coverage. Rushing also provides many interesting anecdotes on press-military interactions at CentCom in Kuwait. -jl

Cohen and Fraser's book is at its core an extended sermon condemning the Bush Administration's many excesses and abuses of power, and arguing that the concentrated power of corporate media has been actively complicit in the country's shift towards authoritarianism. The authors' political analysis is designed to rile up those who already agree with them, rather than to change new minds; Cohen and Fraser are at their best when they're adding new information to the debate, which unfortunately is not very often. Still, a useful compendium of connections between a range of media/communications issues and progressive critiques of Bush policies. -jl

In this timely and much-needed volume, Kolhatkar and Ingalls fill in some of the appalling gaps in American popular understanding about Afghanistan, attacking our collective amnesia about the history of US intervention, the right wing’s cynical use of women’s liberation language, and media coverage typified by deep racism. At the book’s center is a highly insightful chapter analyzing the structural biases and omissions of US establishment media coverage of Afghanistan since the 1980s. -jl

This book examines "the tendency of the [American] press to record rather than critically examine the official pronouncements of government" during the post-9/11 Bush administration. Despairing at this lack of press independence, the authors argue that the most important remedy for this trend is to revive public debates over the importance of public-interest journalism. Focusing deep analysis on several particular large stories - the Iraq War, Abu Ghraib and Katrina, the book argues that effective public-sphere standards of press accountability could have produced more analytical news coverage, giving people the knowlege and the will to have a greater influence on governmental action. -jl

A very insightful look at the recent rise of media activist organizations and networks in the US, Canada and the UK. Drawing upon extensive personal interviews with on-the-ground activist leaders, the authors provide a map of the current media democracy field, including successe, challenges, blind spots and potential vectors for development. The book’s transnational perspective allows for useful comparisons; highlights include chapters on San Francisco’s Media Alliance (US) and the Campaign for Press and Broadcast Freedom (UK). -jl

With her first book, blogger Marcy Wheeler exemplifies the very best contributions to civil discourse being made by nonprofessional commentators and researchers on the web. The book's task is at once simple and complex – narrating and deconstructing how the Bush Administration used cooked-up intelligence and the willing help of a few prominent DC journalists to mislead the country into the Iraq War. News coverage of the story turned some of its key players (Scooter Libby, Judith Miller, Joseph Wilson, Valerie Plame, Patrick Fitzgerald) into household names. But as happens too often in today's DC insider-beat journalism, reporters and networks lost sight of the truly big stories – how Federal Government officials pursued a policy of grand-scale public deception – and how some of the same officials cynically snuffed out the career of an undercover intelligence agent, as part of a political hit job. Instead, press coverage tended to repeat White House messages and frames, or treat the investigation into Plame's outing as an inconsequential game of tit-for-tat. In this environment, it was often progressive bloggers like Wheeler who regrounded the story in democratic values, including the very basic work of simply creating a narrative that ordinary folks can follow. By doing so, Wheeler has performed a valuable act of journalism – at the same time demonstrating how rare that can be in Washington DC these days. -jl

[30] [31]These titles are the first in what is evidently a planned "Informed Citizen" series of easily digestible little volumes compiling (and perhaps preserving) some particularly insightful commentary from political blogs and Internet sites over the last few years. The twenty blog entries which make up most of the Feith volume demonstrate that reasonably intelligent people both could and did notice all along that the Bush administration used 9/11 as a pretext to lie its way into an extensively preconceived conflict with Iraq.

Project Rewire focuses more broadly on new Internet media and its engagement with political news coverage. Editor Daubenmier argues that the "wired media" are often outdoing traditional broadcast and print media in helping readers understand what's going on in the world, largely by providing critical commentary on the establishment press itself. Contributing essayists include critical journalists Robert Parry and Greg Palast, as well as media-critical bloggers such as Jay Rosen, David Sirota and Josh Marshall. The book's overall viewpoint is unabashedly partisan and progressive, and as such it covers conservative blogger media interventions only through the eyes of progressive critics, and radical perspectives are also absent. This was an unfortunate choice - a politically broader treatment of this topic is certainly needed. -jl