San Antonio College Library

From the opening decades of the republic when political parties sponsored newspapers to current governmental practices that actively subsidize the collection and dissemination of the news, the press and the government have been far from independent. Unlike those earlier days, however, the news is no longer produced by a diverse range of individual outlets but is instead the result of a collective institution that exercises collective power. In explaining...

" ... exposes how presidential administrations of both parties have relied on a combination of deception and media complicity to sell one war after another to the American people. Narrated by actor Sean Penn, and based on the acclaimed book by Norman Solomon, the film exhumes five decades of remarkable archival footage to reveal in stunning detail how the American news media have uncritically disseminated, and glamorized, the pro-war messages of successive...

No Questions Asked takes an overarching view of media coverage from the day of the 9/11 attacks through the war in Iraq. It also compares and contrasts the U.S. versus international media coverage of key events during this period. Fact-based rather than polemic, the book explains why journalists responded the way they did during wartime and explores the ramifications for democracy of a weak press.

A major priority of the national security bureaucracy is to manipulate or obstruct the new media, thereby thwarting critical coverage of military and foreign policy initiatives. The government's restrictions on the press during the Persian Gulf War, and the outright exclusion of journalists during the most important stages of the Grenada and Panama invasions, are especially flagrant examples. In The Captive Press, Ted Galen Carpenter argues that such...

Investigative reporting generates new information about important issues that someone is trying to keep secret. Impacts of this journalism can be high. Yet the costs of discovering and telling these stories may also be significant. This book uses economic theories of information to explain both how institutions breakdown in predictable ways and how journalists find and reveal which programs, products, and people go astray. The book analyzes the market...

Throughout its history, the Supreme Court has had a contentious relationship with the press. Yet, as Joe Mathewson shows, the Court and the Press provide crucial services for each other as well: the press educates the public about the Court's actions, and the court is charged withe protecting the freedoms on which the press relies. In The Supreme Court and the press, Mathewson charts the history of this complex dynamic, from the court's early neglect...