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Media Matters with Bob McChesney

Sundays at 1 pm Central on AM580

Media Matters features host Bob McChesney in conversation with a variety of guests. Listeners may call with comments or questions.

Bob McChesney is a research professor in the Institute of Communications Research and the Graduate School of Information and Library Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. "The media are central to all our lives," he says. "Yet the media are the most frequently misunderstood parts of our lives. We want to help people understand the role of media in society."

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Sunday, November 27, 2011

News for All the People: The Epic Story of Race and the American Media

Bob's guests are Juan Gonzalez and Joseph Torres, authors of News for All the People: The Epic Story of Race and the American Media, a sweeping account of the class and racial conflicts in American news media, from the first colonial newspaper to the internet age. It chronicles key government decisions that created our nation’s system of news, major political battles over the role of the press, and the rise of media conglomerates and epoch-defining technologies. The book reveals how racial segregation in the media distorted the news and unearths numerous examples of how publishers and broadcasters actually fomented racial violence through their coverage. And it illuminates how Black, Latino, Asian, and Native American journalists fought to create a vibrant yet little-known alternative and democratic press and then, beginning in the 1970s, forced open the doors of the major media companies.

The writing is fast-paced, story-driven and replete with portraits of individual journalists and media executives, both famous and obscure, the heroes and the villains. It weaves back and forth between the corporate battles and government policies that built our segregated media system— as when Commerce Secretary Herbert Hoover gave a radio license to a notorious KKK organization in the nation’s capital—and those who rebelled against that system, such as Pittsburgh Courier publisher Robert L. Vann, who led a national campaign to get the black-face comedy Amos ’n’ Andy off the air.
http://www.VersoBooks.com