"America's news media has moved farther away from the people than ever before. The fourth estate is supposed to be a conduit to the people and a check on power. Instead, we have a bunch of geographically isolated, introspection-free, cozy-with-power, egomaniacal journalists thirsty for elite approval. This is a major problem. And no one articulates these problems better than Steve Krakauer, one of America's sharpest media critics. In Uncovered, Krakauer...

"A sociotechnical society must consider how data-driven and algorithmic systems impact decision-making at both the macro-level, such as policy and culture, and the micro-level, such as voting and purchasing. Tripodi applies social theory to her empirical research on how communities make meaning and engage with data-driven and algorithmic systems in everyday life. Her data reveal that conservative elites use media platforms in unintended or unanticipated...

"Caroline Jack reveals how specifically American capitalism has been created and made to seem inevitable through the propagation of its rhetoric and values in the most ephemeral of materials: public service announcements, pamphlets, educational films, and games-what she calls collectively "economic education media." These items, which found their ways into classrooms and onto the airwaves, promoted a distinctive conservatism under the cloaks of public...

"According to the media, Donald Trump could never become president. Now many are on a mission to prove he shouldn't be president. The Trump administration and the press are at war -- and as in any war, the first casualty has been truth. Bestselling author Howard Kurtz, host of Fox News's Media Buzz and former Washington Post columnist, offers a stunning exposé of how supposedly objective journalists, alarmed by Trump's success, have moved into the...

"An award-winning presidential historian offers an authoritative account of American presidents' attacks on our freedom of the press. "The FAKE NEWS media," Donald Trump has tweeted, "is not my enemy. It is the enemy of the American people." Never has our free press faced so great a threat. Yet the tension between presidents and journalists is as old as the republic itself. From George Washington to Trump, presidents have quarreled with, attacked,...

"Bad News is a response to Thomas Frank's 2004 book "What's the Matter with Kansas." I ask the same question he asked about the right, but about the left: Why is the media obsessed with racism, even though it's getting objectively better by every measure we have? I argue that the liberal media is mainstreaming a woke culture war based on ideas that were relegated to the academic fringe as recently as a decade ago because it's in their economic interests...

"Heather Hendershot argues that a moment long understood as sitting at the crux of American political history-the chaos of the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago-is also crucial to understanding the country's media history. By scrutinizing those events and broadcasts in precise detail, Hendershot documents the emergence of the idea that the media are inherently liberal. As she shows, the public was unwilling to accept what was happening, and when...