Cultural Chaos: Journalism and Power in a Globalised World Review

Average Reviews:

(More customer reviews)Are you looking to buy Cultural Chaos: Journalism and Power in a Globalised World? Here is the right place to find the great deals. we can offer discounts of up to 90% on Cultural Chaos: Journalism and Power in a Globalised World. Check out the link below:

>> Click Here to See Compare Prices and Get the Best Offers

Cultural Chaos: Journalism and Power in a Globalised World ReviewAlthough McNair has some grasp of geopolitics, he often equates what he sees as effect with a set of universal trends (e.g. press scrutiny of the Clinton/Lewinsky scandal as evidence of good, adversarial journalism that demonstrates dissenting voices, rather than an example of right-wing influenced media using a sex scandal to neuter an occasionally progressive administration). More importantly, he attacks a "control" paradigm of critical theory by attempting to refute arguments from early political economy theory (i.e. Marx) and, occasionally, a contemporary example (although this almost always means Chomsky) without engaging 95% of critical authors that have shaped the field and directly refute the lines of reasoning from which he draws.
This text is more in the line of Fukuyama than any progressive writer, although without the interesting lines of argument and moments of brilliance that make Fukuyama so dangerously influential. McNair's basic argument is that the news media are not biased, and that the blogosphere is creating a new world order of late-capitalist, idyllic, public sphere discourse (drawing explicitly on Habermas throughout). His attacks on authors that critique the mass media, particularly those that engage its conservative or reactionary bent and its consolidation into 5 transnational companies, stand it for any arguments he himself might make or seek to prove (I myself, for the record, take issue with many of these writers' ideas, although not for the same reasons as McNair). Interestingly enough, the works he attacks (but rarely cites or deals with extensively in terms of the depth of their arguments) are often extremely detailed analyses filled with statistical evidence, textual evidence, and content analysis across decades of journalism in the U.S. and abroad. McNair, on the other hand, uses sparse "analysis" of a few events (e.g. coverage of Abu Ghraib as evidence of an even-handed approach in U.S. and U.K. media treatment of the Iraq War!), anecdotal evidence, and citations from conservative or reactionary (oven neo-con) thinktanks for his arguments, without doing any sustained or deep analysis.
This is a perfect example of a neocon writer masquerading as a leftist cultural critic, in the vein of Friedman and many of the "centrist" columnists for The Washington Post or the New York Times and without their flare for interesting rhetoric or the occasional kernel of truth. Cultural Chaos is painful to read, as a scholar and as a journalist. It is full of mistruths, flaws, and very misleading arguments, and is perhaps evidence of a last-ditch effort to save the reputation of mainstream journalism in the context of the massive failures of the past decade.Cultural Chaos: Journalism and Power in a Globalised World Overview

Want to learn more information about Cultural Chaos: Journalism and Power in a Globalised World?

>> Click Here to See All Customer Reviews & Ratings Now