From a certain perspective, the biggest political story of 2016 was how the candidate who bought three-quarters of the political ads lost to the one whose every provocative Tweet set the agenda for the day's news coverage. With the arrival of bot farms, microtargeted Facebook ads, and Cambridge Analytica, isn't the age of political ads on local TV coming to a close? You might think. But you'd be wrong to the tune of $4.4 billion just in 2016. In U.S. elections, there's a lot more at stake than the presidency. TV spending has gone up dramatically since 2006, for both presidential and down-ballot races for congressional seats, governorships, and state legislatures-and the 2020 campaign shows no signs of bucking this trend. When candidates don't enjoy the name recognition and celebrity of the presidential contenders, it's very much business as usual. They rely on the local TV newscasts, watched by 30 million people every day-not Tweets-to convey their messages to an audience more fragmented than ever. At the same time, the nationalization of news and consolidation of local stations under juggernauts like Nexstar Media and Sinclair Broadcasting mean a decreasing share of time devoted to down-ballot politics-almost 90 percent of 2016's local political stories focused on the presidential race. Without coverage of local issues and races, ad buys are the only chance most candidates have to get their messages in front of a broadcast audience. On local TV news, political ads create the reality of local races-a reality that is not meant to inform voters but to persuade them. Voters are left to their own devices to fill in the space between what the ads say-the bought reality-and what political stories used to cover.

Joel Sartore has spent twenty years taking pictures for "National Geographic" magazine and has been a contributor to "CBS News Sunday Morning" since 2005, harmonizing words and images on topics ranging from mud to money, holiday trash to cancer. His fresh insights and engaging warmth and wit--accompanied by extraordinary photographs--provide a sensory experience that draws readers into one fascinatingly different world after another. "Let's Be Reasonable" collects Sartore's pieces--some aired on "Sunday Morning," some never before published--pairing each story with the award-winning photography for which he is known. Assignments from the Amazon to Alaska, from wildlife refuges to state fairs have given Sartore a remarkable breadth of experience that is captured for the first time in this irresistible book.

This collection marks the return to print of John Lardner, one of America's press box giants, a classic stylist whose wry humor and tireless reporting helped elevate sportswriting to art. The brilliant W. C. Heinz called Lardner "the best of us." This book shows why. Lardner applied his singular touch not only to his era's icons-Joe Louis, Ted Williams, Satchel Paige-but to the scamps, eccentrics, hustlers, and con men in the shadow of sports. Whether in snappy columns or leisurely magazine pieces, Lardner held sport of every description up to the light, forever changing the way people wrote, read, and thought about their heroes, from superstars to scrappers. These forty-nine pieces represent sportswriting at the top of its game. Purchase the audio edition.

Dr Maung Maung (1925-94) was a man of many parts: scholar, soldier, nationalist, internationalist, parliamentarian, and public servant. His life spanned seven decades of political, economic and social turbulence in the country he loved and served, Myanmar. A pioneer amongst post-colonial journalists in Southeast Asia, he was equally at home in the libraries and seminars of universities in the United States, Europe and Australia during the Cold War. As a jurist, Dr Maung Maung knew the law must remain relevant to changing societal requirements. As an author, he wrote weighty scholarly tomes and light-hearted accounts spiced with his wry observations on human foibles. He was a keen observer of human strengths and weaknesses. A loyal friend, he never maligned his critics or denied their merits. As a man of affairs, he was capable of understanding the weaknesses of the institutions that he served and that ultimately failed to live up to their ideals. This book collects together a number of his now obscure but important historical and journalistic essays with a full bibliography of his works.

Winner of the Victor Villasenor Best Latino Focused Nonfiction Book Award - English, from the 2022 International Latino Book Awards What defines the boundary between fact and fabrication, fiction and nonfiction, literature and journalism? Latin American Documentary Narratives unpacks the precarious testimonial relationship between author and subject, where the literary journalist, rather than the subject being interviewed, can become the hero of a narrative in its recording and retelling. Latin American Documentary Narratives covers a variety of nonfiction genres from the 1950s to the 2000s that address topics such as social protests, dictatorships, natural disasters, crime and migration in Latin America. This book analyzes - and includes an appendix of interviews with - authors who have not previously been critically read together, from the early and emblematic works of Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Elena Poniatowska to more recent authors, like Leila Guerriero and Juan Villoro, who are currently reshaping media and audiences in Latin America. In a world overwhelmed by data production and marked by violent acts against those considered 'others', Liliana Chavez Diaz argues that storytelling plays an essential role in communication among individuals, classes and cultures.

Lunch with the Financial Times has been a permanent fixture in the Financial Times for almost 25 years, featuring presidents, film stars, musical icons and business leaders from around the world. The column is now as well-established institution which has reinvigorated the art of conversation in the convivial, intimate environment of a long boozy lunch. On its 25th anniversary, Lunch with the Financial Times 2 will showcase the most entertaining, incisive and fascinating interviews from the past five years including those with Edward Snowden, Bernie Ecclestone, Hilary Mantel, Sheryl Sandberg, Richard Branson, Rebecca Solnit, Emmerson Mnangagwa, Jordan Peterson, Nigel Farage, Woody Harrelson, Sepp Blatter, (pre-election) Donald Trump and Zoella, illustrated in full colour with James Ferguson's famous portraits.

An enlightening anthology of George Orwell's journalism and non-fiction writing, showing his genius across a wide variety of genres. Selected by leading expert Peter Davison. Famous for his novels and essays, Orwell remains one of our very best journalists and commentators. Confronting social, political and moral dilemmas head-on, he was fearless in his writing: a champion of free speech, a defender against social injustice and a sharp-eyed chronicler of the age. But his work is also timeless, as pieces on immigration, Scottish independence and a Royal Commission on the Press attest. Seeing Things As They Are, compiled by renowned Orwell scholar Peter Davison, brings together in one volume many of Orwell's articles and essays for journals and newspapers, his broadcasts for the BBC, and his book, theatre and film reviews. Little escaped Orwell's attention: he writes about the Spanish Civil War, public schools and poltergeists, and reviews books from Brave New World to Mein Kampf. Almost half of his popular 'As I Please' weekly columns, written while literary editor of the Tribune during the 1940s, are collected here, ranging over topics as diverse as the purchase of rose bushes from Woolworth's to the Warsaw Uprising. Whether political, poetic, polemic or personal, this is surprising, witty and intelligent writing to delight in. A mix of well-known and intriguing, less familiar pieces, this engaging collection illuminates our understanding of Orwell's work as a whole.

Possibly the only drawback about the bestselling How To Be A Woman was that its author, Caitlin Moran, was limited to pretty much one subject: being a woman. In MORANTHOLOGY Caitlin 'gets quite chatty' about many subjects, including cultural, social and political issues which are usually left to hot-shot wonks and not a woman who sometimes keeps a falafel in her handbag. These other subjects include... Caffeine | Ghostbusters | Being Poor | Twitter | Caravans | Obama | Wales | Paul McCartney | The Welfare State | Sherlock | David Cameron Looking Like Ham | Amy Winehouse | 'The Big Society' | Big Hair | Nutter-letters | Michael Jackson's funeral | Failed Nicknames | Wolverhampton | Squirrels' Testicles | Sexy Tax | Binge-drinking | Chivalry | Rihanna's Cardigan | Party Bags | Hot People| Transsexuals | The Gay Moon Landings

In 2015, increasing numbers of refugees and migrants, most of them fleeing war-torn homelands, arrived by boat on the shores of Greece, setting off the greatest human displacement in Europe since WWII. As journalists reported horrific mass drownings, an ill-prepared and seemingly indifferent world looked on. Those who reached land needed food, clothing, medicine and shelter, but the international aid system broke down completely. In a way that no one could have anticipated, volunteers arrived to help. Dana Sachs's compelling eyewitness account weaves together the lives of seven individuals and their families - including a British coal miner's daughter, a Syrian mother of six, and a jill-of-all-trades from New Zealand - who became part of this extraordinary effort. The story of their successes, and failures, is unforgettable and inspiring, and a clarion call for resilience and hope in the face of despair. War had shattered people's lives. This is what happened next.

As journalist Sam Quinones convincingly demonstrates, much of Mexico was already changing before the July 2000 presidential elections which ousted the PRI and presented the world with President-elect Vincente Fox. Fox's victory marked the triumph of another Mexico, a vital, energetic, and creative Mexico tracked by Quinones for over six years.

"This side of Mexico gets very little press. . . . yet it is the best of the country. . . . people who have the spunk to imagine something else and instinctively flee the enfeebling embrace of PRI paternalism. . . . newly realistic telenovellas show the gray government censor that the country is too lively to abide his boss's dictates. . . . Some twelve million Mexicans reside year-round in the United States. . . . [so] the United States is now part of the Mexican reality and is where this other side of Mexico is often found, reinventing itself."--from the introduction.

Quinones merges keen observation with astute interviews and storytelling in his search for an authentic modern Mexico. He finds it in part in emigrants, people who use wits and imagination to strike out on their own. In poignant stories from north of the border--about Oaxacan basketball leagues in southern California and the late singing legend Chalino SAAA1/2nchez whose songs of drug smugglers spurred the popularity of the narcocorrido--Quinones shows how another Mexico is reinventing itself in America today. But most of his stories are from deep inside Mexico itself. There a dynamic sector exists. It is made up of those who instinctively shunned the enfeebling embrace of the PRI's paternalism, including scrappy entrepreneurs such as the Popsicle Kings of Tocumbo and Indianmigrant farmworkers who found a future in the desert of Baja California. Here, too, are true tales from ignored margins of society, including accounts of drag queens and lynchings. From the fringes of the country, Quinones suggests, emerge some of the most telling and central truths about modern Mexico and how it is changing.

"This book expands our knowledge of modern Mexico many times over. Quinones unearths a wealth of material that has in fact gone unnoticed or been hidden."--Professor Francisco Lomeli, University of California, Santa Barbara

In The Heart of Central New York: Stories of Historic Homer, NY Martin A. Sweeney makes the past come alive through this collection of articles from his column in The Homer News. Through his writing, Sweeney offers readers a glimpse of the excitement he brought to his classrooms by bringing to life the people, events, manners, and mores of the past in a community that is the heart of Central New York State. This compilation represents Sweeney's successful efforts as a public historian in using the press as a tool for generating interest in his community's unique historical identity.With annotations and a touch of humor, this book illustrates for current and emerging public historians how to successfully engage a community in acknowledging their history matters-that the fibers of "microhistory" contribute to the rich tapestry that is county, regional, state, and national history.

'This insightful and superb book takes you to World Cups, to conflicts in war-torn countries, to division in Trump's America... A terrific read.' - Gary Lineker For over thirty years, Mark Austin has covered the biggest stories in the world for ITN and Sky News. As a foreign correspondent and anchorman he has witnessed first-hand some of the most significant events of our times, including the Iraq War, the historic transition in South Africa from the brutality of apartheid to democracy, the horrors of the Rwandan genocide, and natural disasters such as the Haiti earthquake and the Mozambique floods. Full of high drama, raw emotion and the sometimes hilarious happenings from the life of a veteran reporter, Mark Austin's memoir gives startling insight into the stories behind the headlines. 'A must read.' - Sir Trevor McDonald

When the World Turned Upside Down is a collection of 65 essays and opinion columns written between 2019 and 2022, a period of momentous-some unimaginable-developments in the United States and across the world. This book stands at the intersection between opinion journalism and history, its individual components offering a dialogue between past and present (or present and past). They are, to use the often-quoted phrase, first drafts of history. Over the past five years, the world has witnessed several "unimaginables" about which the author felt compelled to write. Some of the book's essays identify, analyze and connect parallels between the U.S. Antebellum and Civil War and the contemporary increasingly polarized context that reached an explosive peak during the 2020 elections and the violent attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. Shrouded in a cloud of unprecedented global pestilence, the world has witnessed dramatic political and geopolitical change, mostly for the worse: China, Russia, Hungary, Belarus, Myanmar, Cuba, even Puerto Rico. Essays in this book discuss these transformations from a historical perspective as well as mass popular resistance, in places like Cuba, where they seemed unimaginable. The book's final section, entitled "Not Boring at all: Globalization and World Politics," explores the global ramifications of the COVID-19 pandemic, geopolitical rearrangements related to China's meteoric ascendance as world power, Russia's militaristic expansionism and related topics.

This comprehensive collection of fiction, poetry, and reportage by revolutionary women of the 1930s lays to rest the charge that feminism disappeared after 1920. Among the thirty-six writers are Muriel Rukeyser, Margaret Walker, Josephine Herbst, Tillie Olsen, Tess Slesinger, Agnes Smedley, and Meridel Le Sueur. Other voices may be new to readers, including many working-class Black and white women. Topics covered range from sexuality and family relationships, to race, class, and patriarchy, to party politics. Toni Morrison writes that the anthology is "peopled with questioning, caring, socially committed women writers."

'Revisiting this selection of diaries and essay-reviews from the London Review of Books is restorative, an extended spa treatment that stretches tired brains and unkinks the usual habitual responses where Hitchens is concerned.' James Wolcott in his introduction Christopher Hitchens was a star writer wherever he wrote, and the same was true of the London Review of Books, to which he contributed sixty pieces over two decades. Anthologised here for the first time, this selection of his finest LRB reviews, diaries and essays (along with a smattering of ferocious letters) finds Hitchens at his very best. Familiar betes noires - Kennedy, Nixon, Kissinger, Clinton - rub shoulders with lesser-known preoccupations: P.G. Wodehouse, Princess Margaret and, magisterially, Isaiah Berlin. Here is Hitchens on the (first) Gulf War and the 'Salman Rushdie Acid Test', on being spanked by Mrs Thatcher in the House of Lords and taking his son to the Oscars, on America's homegrown Nazis and 'Acts of Violence in Grosvenor Square' in 1968. Edited by the London Review of Books, with an introduction by James Wolcott, this collection recaptures, ten years after his death, 'a Hitch in time': barnstorming, cauterising, and ultimately uncontainable.

Barbed, witty, revealing and entertaining, Too Famous could be an instant classic.

Bestselling author of Fire and Fury, Siege and Landslide and chronicler of the Trump White House, Michael Wolff dissects more of the major monsters, media moguls and vainglorious figures of our time. His scalpel opens their lives, careers and always equivocal endgames with the same vividness and wit he brought to his evisceration of the former president. These brilliant and biting profiles form a mesmerising portrait of the hubris, overreach and periodic self-destruction of some of the most famous faces of the last twenty years.

This collection draws on new and unpublished work - recent reporting about Jared Kushner, Harvey Weinstein and Jeffrey Epstein - and decades of coverage of the most notable figures of the time - among them Hillary Clinton, Michael Bloomberg, Andrew Cuomo, Rudy Giuliani, Alan Rusbridger, Arianna Huffington, Piers Morgan, Boris Johnson and Rupert Murdoch - to create a lasting statement on the corrosive influence of being in the public eye.

Ultimately, Too Famous is an examination of how the quest for fame and power became the driving force of culture and politics and the drug that alters all public personalities. And how the need, the desperation, the ruthlessness demanded to fulfil that quest became the toxic grease that keeps the world spinning. You know the people here by name and reputation, but it's guaranteed that after this book you will never see them the same way again. Or fail to recognise the scorched earth the famous leave behind them.

This all began quite unexpectedly one rainy autumn evening a couple of years in a fairground near to the centre of Nottingham...`In amongst the bright lights and bumper cars,Nick Davies noticed two boys,no more than twelve years old,oddly detached from the fun of the scene.Davies discovered they were part of a network of chidren sellingthemselves on the streets of the city,running a nightly gaunlet of dangers-pimps,punters,the Vice Squad,disease,drugs. This propelled Davies into a journey of discovery through the slums and ghettoes of our cities. He found himself in crack houses and brothels,he be- friended street gangs and drug dealers Nick Davies`s journey into the hidden realm is powerful,disturbing and impressive,and is bound torouse controversy and demands for change. Davies unravels threads of Britain`s social fabric as he travels deeper and deeper into the country of poverty ,towards the dark heart of British society.

Lynching in American Literature and Journalism consists of twelve essays investigating the history and development of writing about lynching as an American tragedy and the ugliest element of national character. According to the Tuskegee Institute, 4,743 people were lynched between 1882 and 1968 in the United States, including 3,446 African Americans and 1,297 European Americans. More than 73 percent of the lynchings in the Civil War period occurred in the Southern states. The Lynchings increased dramatically in the aftermath of the Reconstruction, after slavery had been abolished and free men gained the right to vote. The peak of lynching occurred in 1882, after Southern white Democrats had regained control of the state legislators. This book is a collection of historical and critical discussions of lynching in America that reflects the shameful, unmoral policies, and explores the topic of lynching within American history, literature, and journalism.

In 1921, Ben Hecht wrote a column for the "Chicago Daily News" that his editor called "journalism extraordinary; journalism that invaded the realm of literature." Hecht's collection of sixty-four of these pieces, illustrated with striking pen drawings by Herman Rosse, is a timeless caricature of urban American life in the jazz age, updated with a new Introduction for the twenty-first century. From the glittering opulence of Michigan Avenue to the darkest ruminations of an escaped convict, from captains of industry to immigrant day laborers, Hecht captures 1920s Chicago in all its furor, intensity, and absurdity.

"The columns in "1,001 Afternoons in ""Chicago" are scruffy time capsules of an earlier Chicago, an era that is long gone but still recognizable to readers' imaginations. Michigan Avenue, Lake Michigan, street names such as Dearborn and Adams and LaSalle and Wabansia, places such as the Art Institute of Chicago--they're all here, sprinkled amid Hecht's nervous little haikus of urban life. He calls Chicago 'a razzle-dazzle of dreams, tragedies, fantasies, ' and his tales capture gorgeous scraps of it, vivid vignettes starring businessmen and hobos and cops and socialites and janitors. . . . Thanks to Hecht, the Chicago of 1922 and the Chicago of 2009 bump into each other, shake hands, exchange greetings. Then, this being Chicago, they go for a drink and talk about old times. New ones too."--Julia Keller, "Chicago"" Tribune"

"The hardboiled audacity and wit that became Hecht's signature as Hollywood's most celebrated screen-writer are conspicuous in these vignettes. Most of them are comic and sardonic, some strike muted tragic or somber atmospheric notes. . . . The best are timeless character sketches that have taken on an added interest as shards of social history."--L. S. Klepp, "Voice Literary Supplement"

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Why are journalists and politicians trusted to tell the truth as little as estate agents? How can democracy function when everybody just believes whatever they want? Will we ever return to "normal"? Written in an engaging and accessible style for a broad audience, After the Fact? examines how neoliberal and centrist ideologies, unaccountable technology corporations, corporate and governmental mendacity, and complacent, shoddy journalism have combined to produce the political crisis we find ourselves in, and what the challenges will be if we are to survive it. Using a wide array of issues and examples - from identity politics to conspiracy theories to corruption scandals - this book is an entertaining appraisal of our changing relationship to political truth, taking issue with standard discourses around "fake news" and "post-truth".