"This international survey of literature on women an mass communications focuses on the 1990s and continues where the first volume (1991) left off. Some pre-1990 works that were omitted in the first volume are included here as well. The work is organized by continents and regions. The first chapter
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provides a global perspective, and the following chapters are divided topically. All genres of publications, such as books, periodicals, dissertations, and conference papers, are examined." (Catalogue Greenwood Publishing 2000)
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"From outbreaks of the flesh eating viruses Ebola and Strep A, to death camps in Bosnia and massacres in Rwanda, the media seem to careen from one trauma to another, in a breathless tour of poverty, disease and death. First we're horrified, but each time they turn up the pitch, show us one image mor
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e hideous than the next, it gets harder and harder to feel. Meet compassion fatigue--a modern syndrome, Susan Moeller argues, that results from formulaic media coverage, sensationalized language and overly Americanized metaphors. In her impassioned new book, Compassion Fatigue, Moeller warns that the American media threatens our ability to understand the world around us. Why do the media cover the world in the way that they do? Are they simply following the marketplace demand for tabloid-style international news? Or are they creating an audience that as seen too much--or too little--to care? Through a series of case studies of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse--disease, famine, death and war--Moeller investigates how newspapers, newsmagazines and television have covered international crises over the last two decades, identifying the ruts into which the media have fallen and revealing why. Throughout, we hear from industry insiders who tell of the chilling effect of the mega- media mergers, the tyranny of the bottom-line hunt for profits, and the decline of the American attention span as they struggle to both tell and sell a story. But Moeller is insistent that the media need not, and should not, be run like any other business. The media have a special responsibility to the public, and when they abdicate this responsibility and the public lapses into a compassion fatigue stupor, we become a public at great danger to ourselves." (Publisher description)
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"Christopher Owen Lynch's biography of Fulton Sheen is a bit like the effusive bishop himself: best when ecumenical and problematic when stretching metaphors. Lynch's premises are sound. He argues that Sheen's "Life is Worth Living" TV series helped bring Catholicism into the American mainstream. Sh
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een's homilies aired between 1952 and 1957, a crucial period in American life marked by Cold War fears and pressures for conformity. By linking the church of Rome to Cold War anti-communism, Sheen equated Catholicism with Americanism. This helped reverse an historical association between Catholicism and immigrants and repaired reputational damage by Father Charles Coughlin in the 1930s. Lynch is also on target when identifying Sheen as the prototype of modern televangelists. In many respects Sheen was the heir to Bruce Barton, taking full advantage of TV's still-limited commercial possibilities. Sheen played to the camera, used dramatic lighting, didactic props, and pithy sound bites to convey his messages. Like Ronald Reagan in the 1980s, Sheen used the prestige of his office to spin teleological but apocryphal tales. His insistence on wearing his cassock on-camera lent authority to a telegenic performance. Lynch deftly contrasts Sheen with his main competition: Billy Graham and Norman Vincent Peale. As a Catholic rooted in Thomist scholasticism, Sheen rejected the Calvinist predestination of Graham and the soothing nostrums of Peale. Lynch demonstrates how Sheen appealed to the medieval past to strike a balance between materialism and spirituality. The effect was a theology that was more redemptive than Graham's, but imbued with a stronger sense of sin than Peale's [...] Overall, Lynch offers a provocative but insufficiently analytical look at a neglected pioneer of the electronic pulpit. Selling Catholicism is worthwhile for what it reveals about how Sheen sold the Church of Rome as an American commodity. It is less successful when the author feels compelled to continue the sales pitch." (https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=3221, July 1999)
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"This is the first in-depth study of how television viewers around the world respond to the ever increasing mass of information available from news programmes. It describes and interprets the type of news available and how it is understood in the context of everyday life. The study is based on news
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analysis, individual interviews and household interviews in seven countries: the United States, India, Mexico, Italy, Denmark, Israel and Belarus. Contributors include Michael Gurevitch, Klaus Bruhn Jensen, Tamar Liebes, Paolo Mancini and Guillermo Orozco-Gomez." (Publisher description)
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