Movies and television series are excellent tools for teaching political science and international relations. Understanding how stories in various film and television genres illustrate political ideas can better assist students and fans understand and appreciate the political subtext of these media products. This book will examine five genres and their variants. The first is gangster movies, focusing on American and other organized crime, which reached its zenith in the films of Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese. Second are political thriller and action movies and television series. Superhero films and TV deal more with modern characters who seek to serve society as they deal with personal struggles and their individual identities. Fourth are war movies, which tend to promote positive images of wars when wars are perceived as successful, but can include antiwar messages when wars turn badly. Fifth are Western movies, which fell out of favor in the 1970s and 1980s, but have undergone a renaissance since the 1990s. Westerns can be taken as either political parables, or as meditations on policing, anarchy, community organization and informal leadership. These genres all offer escape, but can also offer political lessons.

Broudy and Pollick critically examine the programs of four radio pundits (Limbaugh, Schultz, Colmes and Hannity) and two TV pundits (O'Reilly and Olbermann), comparatively assessing their argumentative styles, call screening processes, use of 'teasers', guest diversity (how ideologically balanced the guest list is), and the ratio of time devoted to callers vs. host soliloquies. Authors also fit the genre into an historical context, tracing its roots back to Father Coughlin from the 1930s. In addition, the authors examine how propagandistic each show is and how such propaganda might affect civic (and civilized) participation, public discourse and the perception of political issues. The writing style ranges from scholarly to more conversational and cheeky (especially when obviously fallacious reasoning appears in hosts' arguments). Finally, the authors critically discuss the concept of American Exceptionalism and how it underlies the premises of many of the hosts.