Full Description
While the huge impact of the mass media on everyday social life is acknowledged, it has generally been assigned a peripheral role in the historical process. This intriguing book demonstrates that, far from being a footnote, media discourse has been a critical factor in recent European history, and indeed one that distinguishes the twentieth century from all previous ones. John Theobald looks back to the First World War, analyzing the use and abuse of journalistic discourse in the portrayal of events to the public and to decision-makers. He goes on to present a series of case studies demonstrating the active mass media role in a selection of key events from the twentieth century including: the Cold War, the collapse of Communism in the GDR and German unification, debates over the European Union and the impact of September 11, 2001. He sets these studies within the context of traditions of radical mass media criticism from early analysts such as Kraus, Tönnies and Tarde through to contemporaries such as Chomsky, Bourdieu and Pilger.
Contents
Contents: Moments of untruth; Radical media critics. The four generations; The great discursive illusion - 1914-1918; No word that fits. Media discourse and the rise of fascism; Comics and communism. Tintin fights the Cold War; Consuming reality. Mutually assured destruction and routines of embedded deception; Acting as if... resistance to dominant discourses of anti-communism and nuclear escalation in the 1980s; A collapse of hegemonic discourse. Resistance in Eastern Europe; Cold War victory and the selling of German unification; The longevity of wartime discourses and identities. The case of Britain and Europe; The Balkans revisited; Twin Towers of Babel. 'War on Terrorism' and 'anticipatory pre-emption'; Conclusion - for an active audience; Bibliography; Index.
