Customer Reviews

When the Press Fails: Political Power and the News Media from Iraq to Katrina (Studies in Communication, Media, and Public Opinion)

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it's not about partisanship in the media - it's about the media in this country failing to be a watchdog and writing independently from government as they are well within their rights to do. the authors aren't implying in any way that the media leaned to the right when reporting on iraq but that they didn't do the work of journalists and present two sides to each story. they didn't investigate dissenting voices- which did not consist mainly of democrats. they were lazy and too busy chasing the dramatic, personalized, fragmentized and normalized stories that their readership would be interested in reading. news is a business. they don't care so much about taking sides as they do about increasing viewer/readership. only a hater would read this book and assume it's about partisanship.

Some of the previous reviews of this book are written clearly by those with a political axe to grind and an obsession with analyzing media from "liberal" vs. "conservative" perspective. This book's authors have no interest in such a clumsy "analysis." Their book is not arguing that the media was conservatively or liberally biased under Bush, or conservatively or liberally biased under Clinton, etc. It is an examination of how media operate using an OFFICIAL SOURCE bias, not a liberal or conservative bias. This finding has been very well documented over and over in sound empirical/scholarly analyses over the last twenty years, but these findings are apparently beyond the understanding of partisan hacks like Brett Bozell on the right and Eric Alterman on the left who prefer to frame media as biased in a partisan/liberal-conservative fashion.
I strongly recommend reading this book. As a teacher of political communication, I can say without hesistation that the empirical/data analysis in this book is as good as you will find in any book written on media. In the end I completely reject the authors' argument (which is implied throughout the book) that public debate in media should be limited to the views expressed by political officials in the Democratic and Republican party. But this is a normative problem I have with the book, not a quality of research problem. In terms of the authors' empirical analysis, it's spot on and definitely worth reading. I'd place this book, in terms of the quality of research, in the top ten of all scholarly books ever written on the mass media.

Freedom of the Press is one of the most fundamental freedoms in the American constitution. Then we have presidential scandals - and sadly watch as the media does exactly what the government intends for them to do. "When the Press Fails: Political Power and the News Media From Iraq to Katrina" is an examination of today's media and a criticism of their over-reliance on official sources. It also acts as a call to start questioning the mainstream press, and for the press itself to cover conflicting viewpoints against what the government's official sources want them to report. Failure to do so could lead to further disasters due to the blind spot of the public - who need this information to act as they should in our system of government. "When the Press Fails: Political Power and the News Media From Iraq to Katrina" has the highest recommendation to community library shelves, and for anyone who wants a harsh critique of today's press & media.

Diane C. Donovan
California Bookwatch

Upon reading this in the post Obama election and all that has come out reguarding the press and the Obama administration, one wonders if the authors are working on or even consider working on an updated edition to this work.

By itself there are not surprises here. Many of the points that are brought forward are typical of libral academic types who thought that if the press wasn't as critical of the Bush Administration then they weren't doing their jobs. I suppose that the mainstream media's failure to look at anything President Obama does with a critical eye must not worry these writers, because they agree with the presidents policies.

Bottom Line: The press should look at anything any administration does with a critical eye. Failure to do so has horrible implacations for this country.

The recent crop of books that criticize the media is overdue. Many of my friend and colleagues these days find themselves having to sort though several media outlets to find a complete picture of current events. Gone are the times when you can trust one outlet to give you a firm sense of the background and the different perspectives on a subject.

Although a solid work, one of the key limitations of this book is that it comes across as a bit politically myopic. It criticizes the media coverage of the Bush administration, but barely even hints at the improprieties of the media during the Clinton administration. As an independent voter, the press' almost complete lack of negative coverage of those eight years is disturbing and made the claims of the right-wingers during that period very supportable. And in these days of one of the most disastrous Congresses in living memory, the lack of coverage of the improprieties of this Democratically controlled Congress falls in line with the previous trend.

In the end, and unfortunately, this work comes across as exactly what it criticizes; as a work dictated by political operatives. The authors presented a quality, although one sided, look at their selected themes. If they want to redeem themselves, I would suggest they write another book, perhaps titled: When the Press Fails (the prequel): The Death of American Media from the Campaign of Bill Clinton to Sept 11 2001. That way they can show there analytic prowess dissecting the unethical ties between the Clinton apparatus and the media.

Yes it can be very well argued the consequences of a dysfunctional "fourth branch" of government are far worse under this administration. But failing to examine the media's failures in the past deprive the argument of critical background and balance. If you have read other works on issues with political manipulation of the media by the current administration, you probably will not gain any new insight out of this work.