Descripciones mejoradas de Syndetics:

In non-technical language, this book argues that the myth of the news is its supposed objectivity and that the very forms which presumably guarantee veracity ultimately lead to consistently incomplete and misleading news reports.

Tabla de contenidos provista por Syndetics

• Introduction
• The News as Story The News as Social Context
• The News as Rule The News as Attribution
• The News as Form The Myth of the News
• Afterword
• Selected Bibliography
• Index

Reseñas proporcionadas por Syndetics

CHOICE Review

Although this book revisits common themes in journalism criticism, the author provides a well-focused critique of contemporary newspaper reporting. Koch, a veteran reporter, describes how basic conventions to approach a story (answering, "who, what, when, why, where and how") result in a contrived account of news events. Koch goes through each step of the reportorial process (e.g., deciding whom to interview, when to start, when to stop, and what to emphasize in an approach similar to that set forth in Reading the News, ed. by R.K. Manoff and M. Schudson (CH, Jun'87). Koch's thesis that journalism's form dictates news content has been advanced before, notably by David L. Altheide in Media Power (CH, Sep'85). But this book is distinguished by its analysis of how reporters approach routine "police blotter" events, such as the death of a Canadian boy during dental surgery in 1987 and the arrest of a Hawaiian judge in 1981. Koch effectively argues that reporters rarely investigate original incidents of crimes and over-rely on questionable explanations by police and other official sources. He applies semiology, a literary criticism technique originally proposed by Roland Barthes, to analyze news reporting. But the book is less a work about semiology than it is a sincere attempt to help reporters ask more probing questions. It is well written and features interesting notes at the end of each chapter. There are annoying inconsistencies in spacing between words throughout the text. The book is recommended for news media collections in graduate library settings. -R. A. Logan, University of Missouri--Columbia