Crystallizing Public Opinion is a groundbreaking book on public relations, written by Edward Bernays, the father of modern PR. Originally published in 1923, this influential work explores the psychology of mass communication, the power of propaganda, and the strategic methods used to shape public opinion. Bernays, drawing from psychology, sociology, and media influence, reveals how businesses, governments, and organizations can use public relations techniques to sway public perception and control narratives. This book is essential reading for marketing professionals, public relations experts, advertisers, political strategists, and media analysts. Bernays explains the role of group psychology, the herd instinct, and mass persuasion tactics, making it clear that effective public relations is both an art and a science. His insights into media manipulation, corporate branding, and political propaganda remain as relevant today as they were a century ago. Perfect for those interested in marketing strategies, psychological influence, corporate communication, and social influence, Crystallizing Public Opinion provides a historical foundation for the modern PR industry. Whether you are a communications student, business leader, journalist, or historian, this book offers invaluable lessons on the mechanics of shaping public thought and the responsibility of ethical persuasion in an increasingly media-driven world.

Greg Palast digs deep to unearth the ugly facts that few reporters working anywhere in the world today have the courage or ability to cover. From East Timor to Waco, Karachi to Santiago, he has exposed some of the most egregious cases of political corruption, corporate fraud, and financial manipulation, globally. His uncanny investigative skills as well as his acerbic wit and no-holds-barred style have made him an anathema among magnates on four continents and a living legend among his colleagues and his devoted readership, worldwide. This exciting new collection brings together some of Palast's most powerful and influential writing of the past decade. His columns in the Observer have a cult following and he made headline news when he went undercover for the Observer to break open the 'Lobbygate' scandal of corruption inside the Blair Cabinet. Included here are his reports on that story, which earned him the distinction of being the first journalist ever to be personally attacked on the floor of Parliament by a prime minister; his celebrated Washington Post exposé on Jeb Bush and Katherine Harris's stealing of the presidential election in Florida, which made him "a legend and a hero on the Internet" (Alan Colmes / Fox Radio) when it ran in Salon.com; and recent stories on George W. Bush's pay-offs to corporate cronies, and the business-created 'energy crisis.' Also included in this volume are new and previously unpublished material, television transcripts, photographs, and letters.

The number one New York Times bestselling author of Bias delivers another bombshell—this time aimed at . . . 100 People Who Are Screwing Up America No preaching. No pontificating. Just some uncommon sense about the things that have made this country great—and the culprits who are screwing it up. Bernard Goldberg takes dead aim at the America Bashers (the cultural elites who look down their snobby noses at "ordinary" Americans) . . . the Hollywood Blowhards (incredibly ditzy celebrities who think they're smart just because they're famous) . . . the TV Schlockmeisters (including the one whose show has been compared to a churning mass of maggots devouring rotten meat) . . . the Intellectual Thugs (bigwigs at some of our best colleges, whose views run the gamut from left wing to far left wing) . . . and many more. Goldberg names names, counting down the villains in his rogues' gallery from 100 all the way to 1—and, yes, you-know-who is number 37. Some supposedly "serious" journalists also made the list, including the journalist-diva who sold out her integrity and hosted one of the dumbest hours in the history of network television news. And there are those famous miscreants who have made America a nastier place than it ought to be—a far more selfish, vulgar, and cynical place. But Goldberg doesn't just round up the usual suspects we have come to know and detest. He also exposes some of the people who operate away from the limelight but still manage to pull a lot of strings and do all sorts of harm to our culture. Most of all, 100 People Who Are Screwing Up America is about a country where as long as anything goes, as one of the good guys in the book puts it, sooner or later everything will go. This is serious stuff for sure. But Goldberg will also make you laugh as he harpoons scoundrels like the congresswoman who thinks there aren't enough hurricanes named after black people, and the environmentalist to the stars who yells at total strangers driving SUVs—even though she tools around the country in a gas-guzzling private jet. With Bias, Bernard Goldberg took us behind the scenes and exposed the way Big Journalism distorts the news. Now he has written a book that goes even further. This time he casts his eye on American culture at large—and the result is a book that is sure to become the voice of all those Americans who feel that no one is speaking for them on perhaps the most vital issue of all: the kind of country in which we want to live.

In his most provocative and caustically funny book yet, Greg Palast, author of the national bestseller The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, once again gives us the straight scoop on the stories that Big Media won?t report. Digging up reams of documents marked ?secret? and ?confidential,? Palast provides the latest lowdown on Bush?s secret plans to seize Iraq?s oil, the fix planned for the 2008 election, who drowned New Orleans, and the horror and the humor of the War on Terror. With diligent detective work, moral outrage, and a keen sense of the absurd, Palast takes on the ?armed and dangerous clowns that rule us? as only he can.

A deep dive into the emergence and success of independent filmmaking in America A Los Angeles Times Bestseller The most important development in American culture of the last two decades is the emergence of independent cinema as a viable alternative to Hollywood. Indeed, while Hollywood's studios devote much of their time and energy to churning out big-budget, star-studded event movies, a renegade independent cinema that challenges mainstream fare continues to flourish with strong critical support and loyal audiences. Cinema of Outsiders is the first and only comprehensive chronicle of contemporary independent movies from the late 1970s up to the present. From the hip, audacious early works of maverick David Lynch, Jim Jarmusch, and Spike Lee, to the contemporary Oscar-winning success of indie dynamos, such as the Coen brothers ( Fargo ), Quentin Tarentino ( Pulp Fiction ), and Billy Bob Thornton ( Sling Blade ), Levy describes in a lucid and accessible manner the innovation and diversity of American indies in theme, sensibility, and style. Documenting the socio-economic, political and artistic forces that led to the rise of American independent film, Cinema of Outsiders depicts the pivotal role of indie guru Robert Redford and his Sundance Film Festival in creating a showcase for indies, the function of film schools in supplying talent, and the continuous tension between indies and Hollywood as two distinct industries with their own structure, finance, talent and audience. Levy describes the major cycles in the indie film movement: regional cinema, the New York school of film, African-American, Asian American, gay and lesbian, and movies made by women. Based on exhaustive research of over 1,000 movies made between 1977 and 1999, Levy evaluates some 200 quintessential indies, including Choose Me , Stranger Than Paradise , Blood Simple , Blue Velvet , Desperately Seeking Susan , Slacker , Poison , Reservoir Dogs , Gas Food Lodging , Menace II Society , Clerks , In the Company of Men , Chasing Amy , The Apostle , The Opposite of Sex , and Happiness . Cinema of Outsiders reveals the artistic and political impact of bold and provocative independent movies in displaying the cinema of "outsiders"-the cinema of the "other America."

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A fascinating portrait of journalism and the people who make it, told through pieces collected from the incomparable six-decade career of bestselling author and longtime New Yorker writer Calvin Trillin “ The Lede contains profiles . . . that are acknowledged classics of the form and will be studied until A.I. makes hash out of all of us.”—Dwight Garner, The New York Times LONGLISTED FOR THE PEN/DIAMONSTEIN-SPIELVOGEL AWARD I’ve been writing about the press almost as long as I’ve been in the game. At some point, it occurred to me that disparate pieces from various places in various styles amounted to a picture from multiple angles of what the press has been like over the years since I became a practitioner and an observer. Calvin Trillin has reported serious pieces across America for The New Yorker, covered the civil rights movement in the South for Time, and written comic verse for The Nation . But one of his favorite subjects over the years—a superb fit for his unique combination of reportage and humor—has been his own professional environment: the American press. In The Lede, Trillin gathers his incisive, often hilarious writing on reporting, reporters, and the media world that is their orbit. He writes about a legendary crime reporter in Miami, a swashbuckling New York Times reporter, and an erudite film critic in Dallas who once a week transformed himself from an appreciator of the French nouvelle vague into a crude connoisseur of movies like Mother Riley Meets the Vampire . There are pieces on the House of Lords aspirations of a North American press baron, the paucity of gossip columns in Russia, the embroilment of a weekly newspaper in a missing person case, and the founding of a publication called Beautiful Spot: A Magazine of Parking . Uniting all of this is Trillin’s signature combination of empathy, humor, and graceful prose. The Lede is an unparalleled portrait of one of our fundamental American institutions from a master journalist.

The story of a journalist's life in the midst of important world events

Michael Wolff knows Rupert Murdoch, Barry Diller, Jean-Marie Messier, Steve Ross and Ted Turner. He knows what they want, what fuels their appetites and what they can and can't see when they look in the mirror (or the financial pages). And he tells us all he knows in this report.

"Global Sex is the first major work to take the issues of globalization and sexuality head on. Dennis Altman looks at how pleasures of the body are framed, shaped, commercialized, and even commodified in our new global economy, exploring the impact of globalization on gender relations, political power, public health, migration, and the ways in which we imagine our own sense of self and place. Ranging from U.N. debates over abortion, to the advent of cybersex, to the rapid spread of AIDS in Africa, to the sex scandals that rocked both Malaysian Deputy Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim and President Bill Clinton, Global Sex sheds new light on how the personal and the political are now, more than ever, indistinguishable."--BOOK JACKET.

Why do smart people fall for political lies? Why do facts often fail to change minds? And how has disinformation become the most powerful tool in modern American politics? In an era flooded with information, ignorance isn't just a lack of knowledge - it's a weapon. Weaponization of Ignorance: How Lies and Misinformation Divided America is a timely and piercing examination of how disinformation campaigns, partisan media, and psychological bias have created a parallel reality for millions of Americans. From Fox News propaganda to social media echo chambers , from confirmation bias to conspiracy thinking , this book reveals how political actors - particularly on the far right - manipulate truth to gain power, distort public perception, and erode democratic norms. Drawing from research in political psychology, media studies, and cognitive science, author Stephen M. Fry, Ph.D. uncovers the inner workings of belief systems built on emotion, identity, and fear - not facts. Inside, you'll discover: Why intelligent, well-educated people believe lies How Trump and right-wing media weaponize misinformation What makes people susceptible to political cults and extremist ideologies How social and partisan media create self-reinforcing bubbles Why many conservatives distrust science, journalism, and institutions How to talk to Trump supporters - and when it's futile How ignorance is strategically used to suppress truth and sabotage democracy What we can do - through critical thinking, media literacy, and education - to reclaim reality Far from a partisan rant, Weaponization of Ignorance offers a clear-eyed and deeply researched framework for understanding how political misinformation works, who benefits from it, and why it has proven so stubbornly resilient - even in the face of overwhelming evidence. Whether you're trying to make sense of friends or family who've fallen down the rabbit hole, or seeking to understand the psychological roots of political extremism , this book will give you the tools to interpret, engage with, and resist a world awash in distortion. Insightful, urgent, and empowering, Weaponization of Ignorance is essential reading for anyone concerned about truth, democracy, and the restoration of our shared reality.

Further essays of opinion on television.

When FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover reported to the Nixon White House in 1972 about the Bureau's surveillance of John Lennon, he began by explaining that Lennon was a "former member of the Beatles singing group." When a copy of this letter arrived in response to Jon Wiener's 1981 Freedom of Information request, the entire text was withheld—along with almost 200 other pages—on the grounds that releasing it would endanger national security. This book tells the story of the author's remarkable fourteen-year court battle to win release of the Lennon files under the Freedom of Information Act in a case that went all the way to the Supreme Court. With the publication of Gimme Some Truth , 100 key pages of the Lennon FBI file are available—complete and unexpurgated, fully annotated and presented in a "before and after" format. Lennon's file was compiled in 1972, when the war in Vietnam was at its peak, when Nixon was facing reelection, and when the "clever Beatle" was living in New York and joining up with the New Left and the anti-war movement. The Nixon administration's efforts to "neutralize" Lennon are the subject of Lennon's file. The documents are reproduced in facsimile so that readers can see all the classification stamps, marginal notes, blacked out passages and—in some cases—the initials of J. Edgar Hoover. The file includes lengthy reports by confidential informants detailing the daily lives of anti-war activists, memos to the White House, transcripts of TV shows on which Lennon appeared, and a proposal that Lennon be arrested by local police on drug charges. Fascinating, engrossing, at points hilarious and absurd, Gimme Some Truth documents an era when rock music seemed to have real political force and when youth culture challenged the status quo in Washington. It also delineates the ways the Reagan, Bush, and Clinton administrations fought to preserve government secrecy, and highlights the legal strategies adopted by those who have challenged it.

A Long Row of Candles Memoirs and Diaries (1934-1954) by C.L. Sulzberger, published in 1969. Signed by the author. Hardcover with original jacket with light shelfwear.

A comprehensive introduction to the study of argument which presents theory and develops skills in argument identification, evaluation, preparation, and presentation. Argument evaluation is presented systematically as a series of ten steps. A useful feature is the complimentary Instructor's Manual which includes camera-ready pages for preparing overhead acetates of solutions to exercises in the text. The manual should be ordered directly from Professor Barrie A. Wilson, Atkinson College, York University, 4700 Keele Street, North York, Ontario, Canada M3J 2R7.

This is an inspiring and thought-provoking inside story of a foreign correspondent's two adventurous careers, marked by personal crises, battles for principles and brushes with danger. It is also a candid observer's compassionate account of his role in war and peace, in the sweep of history, and is a thoughtful commentary on the urgent problems of journalism and communication today. Contents: PART I: Foundations: Born with a Caul; The Education of a Journalist; Oaths of Devotion; Round Trip to War; Present at the Creation; Peron and Evita; PART II: Milestones: Scoundrel Time; A Movable Feast; The Human Radar; Nothing But the Truffe; PART III: Encounters: Reverence for Life; Swords and Ploughshares; Future Indicative: The Vietnam Peace Story; the Unknown DeGaulle; Mission to Moscow; A Hero of Our Time: Sakharov; Links and Chains; PART IV: Homecomings: Return to America; Vermont: A State of Mind; Academic Adventures; Afghanistan and Academia; PART V: Foreign Correspondent: Endangered Species?; Why Do They Hate Us?; Cherchez la Femme; The Spiritual Dimension.

How the negotiation between poetic and media discourses takes place is the subject of Marjorie Perloff's groundbreaking study. Radical Artifice considers what happens when the "natural speech" model inherited from the great Modernist poets comes up against the "natural speech" of the Donahue "talk show," or again, how visual poetics and verse forms are responding to the languages of billboards and sound bytes. Among the many poets whose works are discussed are John Ashbery, George Oppen, Susan Howe, Clark Coolidge, Lyn Hejinian, Leslie Scalapino, Charles Bernstein, Johanna Drucker, and Steve McCaffery. But the strongest presence in Perloff's book is John Cage, a "poet" better known as a composer, a philosopher, a printmaker, and one who understood, almost half a century ago, that from now on no word, musical note, painted surface, or theoretical statement could ever again escape "contamination" from the media landscape in which we live. It is under his sign that Radical Artifice was composed.

"In the 1990s when I was watching reruns of The Fugitive on the Arts and Entertainment Network twice a day, I couldn't take my eyes off it. . . . No one in The Fugitive ever relaxes as you watch and you can't relax either, even though for long stretches absolutely nothing happens. It was the combination of nonstop tension with the (relative) absence of slam-bang action that attracted me, and as I now reflect on it, the same combination characterizes the literary works I have been reading and writing about for more than forty-five years."—Stanley Fish, from the Introduction In the stark television drama The Fugitive , Dr. Richard Kimble, an innocent man convicted of murder, is on the run from the police and in pursuit of the real killer. The award-winning show, which aired on ABC from 1963 to 1967 and inspired a 1993 blockbuster movie, still has many devoted fans, none more passionate than literary and legal theorist and intellectual provocateur Stanley Fish. In The Fugitive in Flight , Fish examines the moral structure of the long-running series and explains why he thinks this may well be the greatest show ever aired on American network television. Analyzing key episodes, The Fugitive in Flight goes beyond plot summaries and behind-the-scenes stories. For Fish, the real action of The Fugitive takes place in confined spaces where the men and women Richard Kimble encounters are forced to choose what kind of person they will be for the rest of their lives. Kimble is the catalyst of such choices and changes, but he himself never changes. Breaking free from the political and social problems of his time, he is always the bearer and exemplar of the very middle-class values informing the system that has misjudged him. Kimble is the perfect representative of a mid-twentieth-century liberalism that values above all independence, personal integrity, and the refusal to surrender oneself to obsessions or causes. He is so consistently faithful to his liberal vision of life that he displays both its virtues and its dark side, the side that flees attachments, entanglements, responsibilities, and human connections. Stanley Fish's Richard Kimble is the ultimate man in a gray flannel suit, even when he is wearing a windbreaker and walking down a dark, lonely road.