How America Gets the News - (American Ways) by Ford Risley & Ashley Walter (Hardcover)

About the Book

This concise history of American journalism introduces readers to the news media from the first colonial newspapers to today's news conglomerates and the rise of the digital media. Authors Ford Risley and Ashley Walters examine historical trends, discuss significant individual...

Book Synopsis

This concise history of American journalism--including newspapers, magazines, radio, television, and digital--introduces readers to the news media from the first colonial newspapers to today's news conglomerates and the rise of the digital media.

Authors Ford Risley and Ashley Walter examine historical trends, including advocacy journalism, yellow journalism, investigative journalism, tabloid journalism, and digital journalism. They discuss significant individuals, from Benjamin Franklin and Joseph Pulitzer to Ida Wells and Nellie Bly, and they examine noteworthy news organizations, from the New York Times and Life to CBS and Fox News. They also discuss the role of new technologies, developing professional standards, and the impact of corporate business practices.

At a time when many doubt the trustworthiness of the media, How America Gets the News provides a fascinating historical perspective that will be of interest to all consumers of news.

Review Quotes

"Risley and Walter deliver a taut, clear overview of American journalism. Their book chronologically presents what the authors call the founding, public, commercial, expanding, alternative, and digital presses. Licensing, literacy, newspapers, censorship, prior restraint, Benjamin Franklin, and the Zenger trial impacted Colonial journalism. Revolutionary and early republican publications led to the party press. From the early 1830s through the Civil War, the penny press, telegraph, Associated Press, and magazines flourished, along with the abolitionist and Black presses. Highly successful commercial newspapers, including yellow journalism and the muckraking stripe, followed. American journalism expanded through 1950 via tabloids and suffrage, Black, and foreign-language presses. Henry Luce's media empire thrived, as did leading newspaper columnists. Radio, television, and, eventually, digital news coverage became powerful media forces, both in peacetime and during conflagrations. An interesting section on the alternative press covers McCarthyism, the Civil Rights Movement, Vietnam, Watergate, feminism, PBS, and CNN.... Recommended. General readers." --Choice Reviews

About the Author

Ford Risley is a distinguished professor in the Bellisario College of Communications at Penn State University. He is the author or editor of four books, including Civil War Journalism (Praeger, 2012) and Abolition and the Press: The Moral Struggle Against Slavery (Northwestern, 2008).
Ashley Walter is an assistant professor of journalism and media at Saint Louis University. She is an expert in women's media history. Her work has been published in Journalism History, American Journalism, and The Women's Media Center.