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James T Hamilton's Top Book Recommendations

Want to know what books James T Hamilton recommends on their reading list? We've researched interviews, social media posts, podcasts, and articles to build a comprehensive list of James T Hamilton's favorite book recommendations of all time.

1
In this sweeping, incisive post mortem, Dean Starkman exposes the critical shortcomings that softened coverage in the business press during the mortgage era and the years leading up to the financial collapse of 2008. He locates the roots of the problem in the origin of business news as a market messaging service for investors in the early twentieth century. This access-dependent strain of journalism was soon opposed by the grand, sweeping work of the muckrakers. Propelled by the innovations of Bernard Kilgore, the great postwar editor of the Wall Street Journal, these two genres merged... more
Recommended by James T Hamilton, and 1 others.

James T HamiltonHe focuses on the story of the financial collapse and asks why we didn’t see it coming. (Source)

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2
Did two reporters really change the course of history? And what impact did they actually have on American journalism and government? Jon Marshall explores different answers to those questions by charting the past and the possible future of the critical public service provided by investigative reporters. Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein symbolize an era when investigative reporters were seen as courageous fighters of corruption and injustice. Although many mainstream news outlets no longer have the resources to support expensive investigative reporters on staff, journalists have found other... more
Recommended by James T Hamilton, and 1 others.

James T HamiltonJon Marshall shows that the investigative impulse, the impulse to hold institutions accountable, has been present in every era of journalism. (Source)

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3

The Paper Route

As author Philip Meyer sat in a college class listening to a professor lecture about systematic tools for measuring things like trust in government, a thought struck him: a journalist could do this! He thought about the newsroom conversations he'd had about the possibility of reporting on some interesting social phenomena. The group always ended with a shrug and a lament that there was no way to measure it-but he began to wonder. It was an epiphany for Meyer, who went on to report on the 1967 racial riots in Detroit and write the groundbreaking book Precision Journalism . While others were... more
Recommended by James T Hamilton, and 1 others.

James T HamiltonThis autobiography traces the career of Phil Meyer, a reporter who helped bring the methods of social science into reporting. (Source)

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4
America's leading role in today's information revolution may seem simply to reflect its position as the world's dominant economy and most powerful state. But by the early nineteenth century, when the United States was neither a world power nor a primary center of scientific discovery, it was already a leader in communications-in postal service and newspaper publishing, then in development of the telegraph and telephone networks, later in the whole repertoire of mass communications.In this wide-ranging social history of American media, from the first printing press to the early days of radio,... more
Recommended by Todd Gitlin, James T Hamilton, and 2 others.

Todd GitlinThis book looks at the historical precedents through a different angle, not through sensibility, what brains are doing, but through institutions. And its main point is that the state has been intimately involved in the evolution of the media from the beginning. It looks in particular at the very homely institution of the post office, which is provided for at the beginning of the American... (Source)

James T HamiltonIt’s a wonderful book, in part because it shows that the founding fathers also confronted this problem of rational ignorance. (Source)

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5

An Economic Theory of Democracy

This book seeks to elucidate its subject - the governing of democratic state - by making intelligible the party politics of democracies. Downs treats this differently than do other students of politics. His explanations are systematically related to, and deductible from, precisely stated assumptions about the motivations that attend the decisions of voters and parties and the environment in which they act. He is consciously concerned with the economy in explanation, that is, with attempting to account for phenomena in terms of a very limited number of facts and postulates. He is concerned... more
Recommended by James T Hamilton, and 1 others.

James T HamiltonThe cost of becoming informed about politics swamps the likely benefits to the individual from seeking out information to cast an informed vote. (Source)

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