Staging West German Democracy examines how political "founding discourses" of the nascent Federal Republic (FRG) were reflected, reinforced, and actively manufactured by the Federal government in conjunction with the West German, state-controlled newsreel system, the Deutsche Wochenschau. By looking at the institutional history of the Deutsche Wochenschau and its close relationship to the Federal Press Office, Jan Uelzmann traces the Adenauer administration's project of maintaining a "government channel" in an increasingly diverse, de-centralized, and democratic West German media landscape. Staging West German Democracy reconstructs the company's integral role in the planning, production, and dissemination of pro-government PR, and through detailed analyses reveals the films to celebrate the FRG as an economically successful and internationally connected democracy under Adenauer's leadership. Apart from providing election propaganda for Adenauer's CDU party, these films provided an important stabilizing factor for the FRG's project of explaining and promoting democracy to its citizens, and of defining its public image against the backdrops of the Third Reich past and a competing, contemporary incarnation of German nationhood, the German Democratic Republic (GDR). In this regard, Staging West German Democracy adds in important ways to our understanding of the media's role in the West German nation building process.

Selling Hate is a fascinating and powerful story about the power of a southern PR firm to further the Ku Klux Klan's agenda. Dale W. Laackman's uncovered never-before-published archival material, census records, and obscure books and letters to tell the story of an emerging communications industry-an industry filled with potential and fraught with peril. The brilliant, amoral, and spectacularly bold Bessie Tyler and Edward Young Clarke-together, the Southern Publicity Association-met the fervent William Joseph Simmons (founder of the second KKK), saw an opportunity, and played on his many weaknesses. It was the volatile, precarious terrain of post-World War I America. Tyler and Clarke took Simmons's dying and broke KKK, with its two thousand to three thousand associates in Georgia and Alabama, and in a few short years swelled its membership to nearly five million. Chapters were established in every state of the union, and the Klan began influencing American political and social life. Between one-third and one-half of the eligible men in the country belonged to the organization. Even to modern sensibilities, the extent of Tyler and Clarke's scheme is shocking: the limitlessness of their audacity; the full-scale and ongoing con of Simmons; the size of the personal fortunes they earned, amassed, and stole in the process; and just how easily and expertly they exploited the particular fears and prejudices of every corner of America. You will recognize in this pair a very American sense of showmanship and an accepted, even celebrated, brash entrepreneurial hustle. And as their story winds down, you will recognize the tainted and ultimately ineffectual congressional hearings into the Klan's monumental growth.