Bonnie Brennen

What the Hacks Say: The Ideological Prism of US Journalism Texts

A review of United States journalism textbooks, published during the 1980s and 1990s, suggests that authors focus on essential new information and highlight a cutting edge understanding of new technologies, visual literacy, and/or cultural diversity in an effort to justify publishing new books on the practice of journalism. This review also suggests that while the vast majority of these texts clearly cover the field in a competent and thorough manner, there is a considerable amount of overlapping, repetitive information and that all of these books address the practice of journalism from an identical ideological perspective.

From Religiosity to Consumerism: Press Coverage of Thanksgiving, 1905-2005

This research looks at the coverage of Thanksgiving during the past 100 years on 11 daily urban newspapers published in the United States in an effort to assess journalistic practices related to the coverage of routine news stories and to understand how through its coverage newspapers represent and interpret social, political, and economic change. The Thanksgiving holiday was chosen because it has been a traditional news story consistently covered each year in the press and an analysis of the coverage provides insights into the basic routines of journalism including news conventions, journalistic values, and norms over the past 100 years.

Book Review: Sweat not melodrama Reading the structure of feeling in All the President’s Men

Thirty years after the initial break-in, Watergate holds a mythic status within the history of American journalism. Whether individuals consider Watergate the beginning of modern investigative jour...Thirty years after the initial break-in, Watergate holds a mythic status within the history of American journalism. Whether individuals consider Watergate the beginning of modern investigative journalism or maintain that The Washington Post’s reportage helped destroy the legitimacy of the American political process, the press’s role in this political scandal continues to inspire journalists and provide justification for First Amendment protection of the press. Quite apart from the actual experience of Watergate, this essay suggests that the most famous chronicle of this political scandal, All the President’s Men, codifies an ideology of journalism which has framed an understanding of the role of the press in the United States and Western Europe since the 1970s. All the President’s Men can be read as an ur-text - a seminal text that illustrates a specific structure of feeling regarding the construction of contemporary journalistic practices.

Persecuting Alex Rodriguez

This qualitative textual analysis considers the US press coverage of Alex Rodriguez for his alleged use of performance-enhancing drugs. It evaluates nearly 500 newspaper, magazine and broadcast reports from 2007 to 2014 on Rodriguez, as well as reader and journalistic responses, and finds issues of overt and inferential racism, stereotyping and symbolic impurity, and a crude emphasis on money in the coverage. This research considers the ethics of the press coverage through a framework of Critical Race Theory and suggests an approach rooted in communitarian ethics to foster greater social justice and balance in sports media coverage.

Essays on Culture As a Practice: An Introduction

Most media research analyzes cultural practices such as novels, comics, poems, newspapers, films, television shows, advertisements, buildings, and political speeches, as artifacts separate from the actual means and conditions of their production within society. In contrast, this theme issue of the Journal of Communication Inquiry draws on cultural materialism, Raymond Williams’ theory of the &dquo;specificities of material cultural and literary production within historical materialism,&dquo; to encourage research that addresses cultural practices as part of an ongoing social process. Cultural materialism insists that all cultural practices produce meaning and value; they are part of an ongoing social process, produced by a specific society, in a particular historical time, under distinct political and economic conditions.