In a unique, and at times highly polemical way, the author demonstrates how the media generally influences thinking and what kind of content they put into peoples' heads. He aims to encourage a better understanding of oneself, one's environment, and the world but above all, a better understanding of freedom, the condition of democracy - or dictatorship. This is probably the first book in the media and communication studies which, through scientific provocation, makes the readers delve deeply into their intelligence, teaches them how to use it, and allows them to decide whether they have a weak, average, or insightful mind. The book sets one of the most important trends: it tells how the media think and how they shape their audiences.

The book is a scholarly and creative consideration of audiovisual broadcasting and what makes a TV performance professional. It combines an academic approach to TV News with a practical understanding of production and the new pressures bearing down on the industry. Combining a real-world understanding with a scholarly approach, it offers valuable new insights for aspiring journalists, students, researchers and lecturers into what is still the most powerful medium for news and information in the world. "This book is an exciting and challenging look at how we can understand the way we regard people and how we create and make public our views of them in and through television. The author provides a critically engaging and detailed analysis of the practical aspects of television journalism and the ethical values replete within it as well as how it is complicit in the construction of the manifold mediated identities of those caught up in the increasingly two-way relationship between broadcaster and audience. This is a wide ranging and well researched account of the dynamics of the significance and impact of television journalism in all its richness and ambiguity." (Prof. Jackie Harrison, Chair, Centre for Freedom of the Media (CFOM), Joint Head of Department and Director of Research Department of Journalism Studies, University of Sheffield, UK)

Mystery and Suspense in Creative Writing presents a systematic analysis of a very important aspect of writing by integrating it with journalistic, media, and communication studies. The book examines the specific rules for creating intrigue and suspense, and confronts their universal features with selected literary texts. The individual texts emphasize the importance of understanding the emotions through transformation of various archetypes. The rules postulated by creative writing for building drama and tension in such texts often deal with this profound issue. They are thus not an end in themselves, but actually lead to more mature writing. Therefore, they essentially contribute to developing one's creative talent and communication skills. The paradigm of creative writing serves to shape the creativity of students of various disciplines, including not only literary studies and journalism, but also such diverse areas as medicine and information technology. (Series: International Studies in Hermeneutics and Phenomenology - Vol. 7)