Science Journalism

Local news is essential to democracy. Meaningful participation in civic life is impossible without it. However, local news is in crisis. According to one widely cited study, some 2,500 newspapers have closed over the last generation. And it is often marginalized communities of color who have been left without the day-to-day journalism they need to govern themselves in a democracy.

In his #1 New York Times best seller, Bias, Emmy Award-winning journalist Bernard Goldberg created a national firestorm when he exposed the liberal biases of the so-called mainstream media. Now, in his new blockbuster, Goldberg goes even further. He not only takes on Big Journalism, but offers a twelve-step program to help the media elites overcome their addiction to bias.

The "Fox Mole" delivers a funny, opinionated memoir of his eight years at the unfair, unbalanced Fox News Channel. An Atheist in the FOXhole has everything that liberals and Fox haters could desire: details about how Fox’s right-wing ideology is promoted throughout the channel; why specific angles and personalities are the only ones broadcasted; the bizarre stories Fox anchors actually believed (and passed on to the public); and tales of behind-the-scenes mayhem and mistakes, all part of reporting Fox’s version of the news.

Was the 2000 presidential campaign merely a contest between Pinocchio and Dumbo? And did Dumbo miraculously turn into Abraham Lincoln after the events of September 11? In fact, Kathleen Hall Jamieson and Paul Waldman argue in The Press Effect, these stereotypes, while containing some elements of the truth, represent the failure of the press and the citizenry to engage the most important part of our political process in a critical fashion.

Where do journalists find the guts to keep telling the truth in places where truth-telling will get them murdered? Organizations such as the Committee to Protect Journalists and Reporters sans frontières bring us the death toll from around the world, and that number is truly daunting: since 1992 more than 730 journalists have been killed - nearly three-quarters of them targeted and murdered. Over 85% of the fallen have been local journalists trying to unveil violence and corruption in their own back yards. Worse, 95% of the people who ordered their murder remain unpunished.

Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank takes a fair and balanced look at the unsettling rise of the silly Fox News host Glenn Beck. Thomas Jefferson famously wrote that the tree of Liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure. In America in 2010, Glenn Beck provides the very refreshment Jefferson had in mind: Whether he's the patriot or the tyrant, he's definitely full of manure.

When Wisconsin became the first state in the nation in 1959 to let public employees bargain with their employers, the legislation catalyzed changes to labor laws across the country. In March 2011, when newly elected governor Scott Walker repealed most of that labor law and subsequent ones - and then became the first governor in the nation to survive a recall election fifteen months later - it sent a different message. Both times, Wisconsin took the lead, first empowering public unions and then weakening them.

Whistlestop tells the human story of nervous gambits hatched in first-floor hotel rooms, failures of will before the microphone, and the cross-country crack-ups of long-planned stratagems. At the bar at the end of a campaign day, these are the stories reporters rehash for themselves and embellish for newcomers. In addition to the familiar tales, Whistlestop also remembers the forgotten stories about the bruising and reckless campaigns of the 19th century.

In Sit Down and Cheer, Martin Kelner traces the development of this relationship from its humble origins in the 1960 Olympics, by way of the first-ever Match of the Day in 1964, through to the financial impact of Sky, right up to the high-tech gadgetry of our present-day viewing. Insightful and very funny, this is an entertaining exploration of two major national pastimes and not to be missed.

This dramatic story of two men's efforts to save a small Wisconsin daily from obliteration at the hands of the nation's largest newspaper chain brings together startling case histories of the dubious tactics practiced by Gannett and unsparing insights into the newspaper industry.

When Norman Pearlstine - as editor in chief of Time Inc. - agreed to give prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald a reporter's notes of a conversation with a "confidential source", he was vilified for betraying the freedom of the press. But in this hard-hitting inside story, Pearlstine shows that "Plamegate" was not the clear case it seemed to be, and that confidentiality has become a weapon in the White House's war on the press - a war fought with the unwitting complicity of the press itself.

On May 7, 1945, journalist Edward Kennedy bypassed military censorship to be the first to break the news of the Nazi surrender executed in Reims, France. While, at the behest of Soviet leaders, Allied authorities prohibited release of the story, Kennedy stuck to his journalistic principles and refused to manage information he believed the world had a right to know. No action by an American correspondent during the war proved more controversial.

After decades of atheism and hard living, author Dan Wakefield experienced a profound religious awakening that led him back to the church. He describes his religious journey, fraught with peaks and pitfalls, and his hard-won realization that faith is not static. In a continuing quest to maintain his faith over the long-haul, Wakefield speaks plainly about the challenges of maintaining one's convictions in today's complex, secular world. Wakefield's acknowledgement that each day holds the promise of renewal will resonate with listeners who seek to keep their faith.

A volume in a series called The Library of Contemporary Thought—which provides top opinion makers a forum to explore the most provocative, fascinating, and relevant issues of the day—News Is a Verb focuses on contemporary journalism and its evolving readership.

What Can We Learn from the Great Depression? draws on the voices of individual working people to tell the stories left out of standard histories of that era, and helps us imagine how to address our own failed economy, and how to imagine and build movements challenging it that do not themselves replicate racism and patriarchy.

An esteemed activist invites us to consider the complex idea of abolition as much more than a strategy or a set of tactics—at a deeper level, abolition is an entire political framework, culture, and orientation.

Just after midnight on October 9, 2017, as one of the nation's deadliest firestorms swept over California's Wine Country, hundreds of elderly residents from two posh senior living facilities were caught in its path. The frailest were blind, in wheelchairs, or diagnosed with dementia, and their community quickly transformed from a palatial complex that pledged to care for them to one that threatened to entomb them. The rescue of the final 105 seniors left behind on an inflamed hillside depended not on employees, but strangers whose lives intersected in a riveting tale of terror and heroism.

Patrick S. Washburn and Chris Lamb tell the full story of the past, the present, and to a degree, the future of American sports journalism. Sports Journalism chronicles how and why technology, religion, social movements, immigration, racism, sexism, social media, athletes, and sportswriters and broadcasters changed sports as well as how sports are covered and how news about sports are presented and disseminated.

Dr. Tim Groseclose, a professor of political science and economics at UCLA, has spent years constructing precise quantitative measures of the slant of media outlets. He does this by measuring the political content of news, as a way to measure the PQ, or political quotient, of voters and politicians.

Las señales estaban a la vista, no solo en las calles sino en todos y cada uno de los informes de organismos internacionales. No verlas era un acto voluntarioso de ocultamiento de la realidad. Son más que simples dolores de crecimiento asociados a la modernización de Chile, tan exitosa en algunos aspectos, como el combate a la pobreza o la liberalización de la vida social.