New Books in Journalism

McKenzie Wark’s new book offers 21 focused studies of thinkers working in a wide range of fields who are worth your attention. The chapters of General Intellects: Twenty-One Thinkers for the Twenty-First Century (Verso, 2017) introduce readers to important work in Anglophone cultural studies, psychoanalysis, political theory, media theory, speculative realism, science studies, Italian and French workerist and autonomist thought, two “imaginative readings of Marx,” and two “unique takes on the body politic.” There are significant implications of these ideas for how we live and work at the contemporary university, and we discussed some of those in our conversation. This is a great book to read and to teach with! Carla Nappi is the Andrew W. Mellon Chair in the Department of History at the University of Pittsburgh. You can learn more about her and her work here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism

In Networked Press Freedom: Creating Infrastructures For a Public Right to Hear (MIT Press, 2018), journalism professor Mike Ananny provides a new framework for thinking about the media at a time of significant change within the industry. Drawing on a variety of disciplines from journalism studies, political theory and technological studies, Ananny argues press freedom is a result of an interplay of duty, autonomy, social, and institutional forces. Focusing on the public right to hear, Ananny explores the competing values and publics journalists must negotiate to provide objective news and to build trust. Exploring the complexities of ‘doing journalism’ in the 21st century with competing technological platforms he attempts to answer the question: what is the role of journalism and freedom of the press in the modern era?   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism

In about 1978, I found myself in my high school library. I don’t know why I was there except to say I was probably on detention; I didn’t do a lot of reading in those days. In any event, I was wandering around the stacks and I found a book called My Lai 4. I knew a little about the My Lai massacre because I knew a little about the Vietnam War; my father had been in the army in the 1960s and my uncle had fought in Vietnam. I started reading. It’s not often that a book stays with you your whole life, but Seymour M. Hersh‘s My Lai 4: A Report on the Massacre and Its Aftermath (Random House, 1970) did. Hersh reported–that’s just the word–what happened: he did not embellish, he did not moralize, he did not speculate. He tirelessly interviewed the men who were there, the men who commanded them, and read everything he could get his hands on. Then he told a shocked American public: this happened. His reporting arguably changed the course of the Vietnam War. It changed the course of my life, as I went on to write a book about My Lai myself. He has told the story of how he broke My Lai countless times. The story made him famous, and his later reporting only added to that fame. So in this interview about his recently published, telling, and honest memoir Reporter: A Memoir (Knopf, 2018), I focus on Hersh’s life before My Lai. I was particularly interested to learn how he became “Sy Hersh, reporter.” Listen in.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism

“Appalachia was among the first places where the malaise of opioid pills hit the nation in the mid-1990s, ensnaring coal miners, loggers, furniture makers, and their kids.” This is how journalist Beth Macy premises her new book, Dopesick: Dealers, Doctors, and the Drug Company That Addicted America (Little, Brown, & Company, 2018). She then sets out to share a history of how and why this happened. Macy offers readers a familiar story of industrial exploitation and economic distress in central Appalachia, only, instead of focusing on the coal industry’s role in this history, Macy describes exploitation that resulted from big pharmaceutical companies selling large quantities of prescription opioids in central Appalachia. Building on the work of authors such as Sam Quinones (Dreamland), Anna Lembke (Drug Dealer, MD), and Keith Wailoo (Pain), Macy argues that the sale and use of prescription opioids increased in part after medical professionals began to push the idea that new standards for the assessment and treatment of pain were needed in the 1990s. The book looks critically not just at the over-prescription of opioids, but, paraphrasing Lembke, Macy also suggests that readers think critically about the “broader American narrative that promotes all pills as a quick fix” (136). As you’ll hear Macy say at the end of the podcast, she wants readers to think about “being better consumers and better listeners who are open to what’s happening on the ground.” Chelsea Jack is a PhD student in the Anthropology Department at Yale University. She focuses on sociocultural and medical anthropology. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism

How can we end the scourge of poverty? How we can sustain ourselves once robots eliminate the need for many jobs? Annie Lowrey offers an answer in the title of her book, Give People Money: How a Universal Basic Income Would End Poverty, Revolutionize Work, and Remake the World (Crown, 2018). She makes the case for the policy called “Universal Basic Income,” in which the government pays everyone a fixed amount of money whether or not they have a job. The book traces the history of the idea, which goes back centuries and has been embraced at various points by people on the left and the right. Lowrey also shares her travels to Kenya, to witness a pilot UBI program, and to India, to explore its high-tech program to bring banking to the poor and could lead to a UBI system. She talks with politician and philosophers, economists and subsistence farmers. And she addresses critics who fear UBI would be too expensive and discourage work. As UBI becomes a hot topic in policy work circles, Give People Money will help you fully understand the idea and consider its profound implications. Bill Scher is a Contributing Editor for POLITICO Magazine. He has provided political commentary on CNN, NPR and MSNBC. He has been published in The New York Times, The New Republic, and The New York Daily News among other publications. He is author of Wait! Don’t Move to Canada, published by Rodale in 2006. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism

Despite its extraordinary diversity, life in the People’s Republic of China is all too often viewed mainly through the lens of politics, with dynamics of top-down coercion and bottom-up resistance seen to predominate. Such a binary framing is particularly often applied to analyses of the country’s media which is understood in terms of mouthpieces of the party-state or vanishingly rare dissident voices. Yet as Maria Repnikova lucidly shows in her book Media Politics in China: Improvising Power under Authoritarianism (Cambridge University Press, 2017) there may be much more at play here than a straightforward cleavage between collaboration and resistance. Through discussion of the work of ‘critical journalists’ and their interactions with officialdom, Repnikova paints a rich and provocative picture of the flexible, creative, if nevertheless precarious, nature of state-media interactions whose implications go far beyond the media sphere. Repnikova suggests that journalistic ‘change-makers within the system’ (to whom the book is dedicated) delicately tread the “fringes of the permissible” (p. 11), pursuing a collaborative mode of investigative work in an environment which remains saturated with Party-state power. Conversely, the authorities benefit from an ability to learn from the media’s investigations, or use media as a propaganda channel, even as they frequently step in to restrict reporting work. Repnikova’s multi-perspectival consideration of various key actors in this system, carried out through multilingual textual research and in-depth interviews, adds vital insight to our understanding of media, and state-society dynamics more generally, in non-Western and authoritarian contexts. Further enhancing this late in the book is a particularly compelling comparison with Soviet and Russian cases. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism

Personal health information often seems locked-down: protected by patient privacy laws, encased in electronic record systems (EHRs) and difficult to share or transport by and between physicians and hospitals. But as Adam Tanner argues in his latest book, Our Bodies, Our Data: How Companies Make Billions Selling Our Medical Records (Beacon Press, 2017), our medical information is anything but static. He describes a vast and growing industry of trade in patient data, emanating from EHRs to pharmacy and drug company sales records. These data – ostensibly stripped of identifying information – are sold and bought largely to help medical and pharmaceutical companies better market their products (as well as for some research). Tanner asks, are these data completely safe? Could they be re-identified and threaten patient privacy? How might this trade in data impact patient care and physician practice? While consumer data breaches plague other industries, Tanner urges us as consumers, medical practitioners and society to have a much-needed and informed conversation about this largely hidden circulation of health information. His book is a great start. Adam Tanner is a journalist, former foreign correspondent and leading expert on privacy and commercialization of personal data. His first book is entitled What Stays in Vegas: the World of Personal Data – Lifeblood of Big Businesses – and the End of Privacy as We Know It (Public Affairs, 2014). Currently, he is an associate at the Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard University. Learn more about his work on his website Adamtanner.news and follow him on Twitter @DataCurtain Dana Greenfield, MD PhD is a resident physician in Pediatrics at the University of California, San Francisco. She completed her PhD in Medical Anthropology from UCSF/UC Berkeley in 2015 and MD at UCSF in 2018. Reach her at dana.greenfield@ucsf.edu or on Twitter @DanaGfield.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism

Today Irvin S. Cobb is remembered primarily as an author of humorous tales about life in Kentucky. Yet as William E. Ellis describes in his book Irvin S. Cobb: The Rise and Fall of an American Humorist (University Press of Kentucky, 2017), these stories reflected only a portion of his considerable literary output. Born in Paducah, Cobb got his start as a journalist working for the local papers. After moving to New York in 1904 he was hired at the New York World, for which he wrote a steady output of articles and humorous columns. The need for money contributed to Cobb’s move into short story writing, resulting in a number of works that are regarded as classics of their type. By the 1920s Cobb was one of the leading literary figures in America, though as Ellis explains his involvement with movie-making and radio dissipated his energies and contributed to the decline in the quality of his work in his later years. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism

Investigative journalist and Northwest correspondent for the Southern Poverty Law Center, David Neiwert has been covering the radical right-wing for decades. In Alt-America: The Rise of the Radical Right in the Age of Trump (Verso, 2017), Neiwert takes his years of experience to chronicle the rise of what is now known as the “Alt Right,” and how it contributed to the election of Donald Trump to the White House. Neiwert shows how the militia movement of the 1990s, the anti-immigrant Minutemen of the 2000s and the Tea Party that surged in 2010 all led to the “Alt Right.” Neiwert also discusses the Alt Right’s relationship with domestic terrorism, from the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing to the 2015 Charleston church massacre. The book also explores the far right’s attraction to conspiracy theories, going back to Henry Ford’s promotion of the “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.” Neiwert considers radical right is fundamentally authoritarian and anti-democratic, and considers the question often asked about fascism in America: Can it happen here? Bill Scher is a Contributing Editor for POLITICO Magazine. He has provided political commentary on CNN, NPR and MSNBC. He has been published in The New York Times, The New Republic, and The New York Daily News among other publications. He is author of Wait! Don’t Move to Canada, published by Rodale in 2006. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism

For all the American media coverage of President Donald Trump’s possible ties to Russia, what’s rarely heard are the voices of Russians themselves. Russians on Trump: Coverage and Commentary (East View Press, 2018), edited by Laurence Bogoslaw, surveys the range of opinions about Trump that have appeared in the Russian press from the late 1990s to today. Before 2015, Trump’s sporadic appearances in Russian news outlets mostly centered on his efforts to hawk real estate. During the presidential campaign, some Russian commentators were intrigued by the idea that Trump might reduce American commitments abroad; focusing on policy rather than personality, they arguably took him seriously as a political player before domestic pundits did. Nevertheless, Trump’s election came as a shock to Russian analysts, many of whom had predicted a Clinton victory. While flamboyant ultranationalist politician Vladimir Zhirinovsky popped champagne, others (such as Moscow Times editor Mikhail Fishman) despaired. “The hope for change in Russia has just been buried in the voting booths of Florida, Michigan and North Carolina,” he wrote on November 10. In the following months, most Russian commentators did not deny the plausibility of Russian cyber-espionage and media influence, though they placed such efforts within the realm of normal statecraft and shrugged off the notion that they influenced the election’s outcome. Even as Trump reneged on his campaign rhetoric about NATO and other key issues, Russian media forecasts for bilateral relations remained largely sunny—until he signed off on a new round of sanctions in August 2017, leading to widespread disillusionment and more negative coverage. Joy Neumeyer is a journalist and PhD candidate in History at the University of California, Berkeley. Her dissertation project explores the role of death in Soviet culture.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism