Social Sciences Media Studies

Propaganda has become an inescapable part of modern American society. On a daily basis, news outlets, politicians, and the entertainment industry - with motives both dubious and well-intentioned - launch propagandistic appeals. In Propaganda and American Democracy, eight writers explore various aspects of modern propaganda and its impact. Contributors include leading scholars in the field of propaganda studies.

In this most original examination of America's post-9/11 culture, Susan Faludi shines a light on the country's psychological response to the attacks on that terrible day. Turning her observational powers on the media, popular culture, and political life, Faludi unearths a barely acknowledged but bedrock societal drama shot through with baffling contradictions. Why, she asks, did our culture respond to an assault against American global dominance with a frenzied summons to restore "traditional" manhood, marriage, and maternity?

Life-long liberal Kirsten Powers blasts the Left's forced march towards conformity in an exposé of the illiberal war on free speech. No longer champions of tolerance and free speech, the "illiberal Left" now viciously attacks and silences anyone with alternative points of view. Powers asks, "Whatever happened to free speech in America?"

Devouring Cultures brings together contributors from a wide range of disciplines including media studies, rhetoric, gender studies, philosophy, anthropology, literary criticism, film criticism, race theory, history, and linguistics to examine the ways food signifies both culture and identity. The essays in Devouring Cultures show how our choices about what we eat, where we eat, and with whom we eat are linked to identity and meaning.

This extraordinary book explains the engine that has catapulted the Internet from backwater to ubiquity—and reveals that it is sputtering precisely because of its runaway success. With the unwitting help of its users, the generative Internet is on a path to a lockdown, ending its cycle of innovation—and facilitating unsettling new kinds of control.

Best-selling author John Gibson shows that George W. Bush was the victim of a concentrated effort by Democrats and their allies in the press to discredit and distort virtually everything he did. That effort was amazingly successful. Was George W. Bush really the worst president in American history? Was the Iraq War really the biggest foreign policy blunder of all recorded time? Did Bush really steal the 2000 election, make war on civil rights, torture innocent goatherds, and prove America's racism during Hurricane Katrina?

The term 'blog' is short for 'Web log', an online site with time-dated postings, maintained by one or more posters, that features links and commentary. That's the most basic definition, but it is like saying a car is a means of transportation featuring four wheels. In Blog, syndicated radio talk show host and best-selling author Hugh Hewitt helps you catch up with and get ahead of this phenomenon.

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.

In The Obama Hate Machine, Bill Press returns to show how the Right has taken rhetoric to slanderous new levels in attacking the nation’s forty-fourth president. But presidents have always been attacked like this, right? Wrong. As the author shows, while presidents and presidential candidates have routinely been subject to personal attacks, the outright disdain Obama’s extremist opponents have for the facts has inspired an insidious brand of character assassination unique in contemporary politics.

From Benjamin Franklin's newspaper hoax that faked the death of his rival to Abbie Hoffman's attempt to levitate the Pentagon - pranksters, hoaxers, and con artists have caused confusion, disorder, and laughter in Western society for centuries. Profiling the most notorious mischief-makers from the 1600s to the present day, Pranksters explores how "pranks" are part of a long tradition of speaking truth to power and social critique.

Wissenschaftlich geprüfter Stoff für alle Serienjunkies: Wie reagiert man nach neusten wissenschaftlichen Erkenntnissen am besten auf eine Zombie-Epidemie à la Walking Dead? Könnte jeder Chemielehrer einfach so Crystal Meth produzieren wie Walter White in Breaking Bad? Wann ermöglicht die Wissenschaft das Teleportieren wie in Star Trek? Und was für eigentümliche klimatische Bedingungen herrschen eigentlich in Game of Thrones?

Alle über Star Trek: Wie schnell ist die Warp-Geschwindigkeit? Wann erfinden wir endlich die Teleportation? Wie funktioniert ein Traktorstrahl? 10 Dinge, die man über Star Trek wissen sollte.

Alles über True Detective: Sind LSD-Flashbacks nur ein Ammenmärchen? Ist die Zeit ein flacher Kreis? 10 Dinge, die man über True Detective wissen sollte.

Alles über The Big Bang Theory: das Echo der Ausdehnung. Das Cooper-Hofstadter-Paradoxon. Die Asperger-Hypothese. 10 Dinge, die man über The Big Bang Theory wissen sollte.

When the world's biggest and most moving events took place - World War II, the Moon landing, the death of Princess Diana, and many more - Time magazine was there to tell the story with passion and clarity. This book features pieces by Barbara Ehrenreich, Henry Anatole Grunwald, Maureen Dowd, Walter Isaacson, Bono and many other famous writers, and will provide listeners with a uniquely entertaining view of 85 years of Time's history.

Alles über Doctor Who: Kann man durch die Zeit reisen? Die Gesetze der Zeit. Die Physiologie des Doktors. 10 Dinge, die man über Doctor Who wissen sollte.

How did the newspaper, music, and film industries go from raking in big bucks to scooping up digital dimes? Their customers were lured away by the free ride of technology. Now, business journalist Robert Levine shows how they can get back on track. On the Internet, “information wants to be free.” This memorable phrase shaped the online business model, but it is now driving the media companies on whom the digital industry feeds out of business. Today, newspaper stocks have fallen to all-time lows as papers are pressured to give away content, music sales have fallen by more than half....

Labor Day, 1969: Two recent college graduates move to New York to edit a new magazine called the National Lampoon. Over the next decade, Henry Beard and Doug Kenney, along with a loose amalgamation of fellow satirists such as Michael O’Donoghue and P. J. O’Rourke, popularized a smart, caustic, ironic brand of humor that has become the dominant voice of American comedy. Ranging from sophisticated political satire to broad raunchy jokes, the National Lampoon introduced iconoclasm to the mainstream, selling millions of copies to an audience both large and devoted.

Alles über Fringe: Wie viele Paralleluniversen gibt es? Telepathie, Telekinese und andere merkwürdige Phänomene. 10 Dinge, die man über Fringe wissen sollte.

Alles über The Walking Dead: Was tun bei einer Zombie-Epidemie? Was spielt sich im Gehirn eines Zombies ab? Gibt es Zombies wirklich? 10 Dinge, die man über The Walking Dead wissen sollte.