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Lorraine Adams's Top Book Recommendations

Want to know what books Lorraine Adams recommends on their reading list? We've researched interviews, social media posts, podcasts, and articles to build a comprehensive list of Lorraine Adams's favorite book recommendations of all time.

1

Now They Tell Us

Michael Massing describes the American press coverage of the war in Iraq as "the unseen war," an ironic reference given the number of reporters in Iraq and in Doha, Qatar, the location of the Coalition Media Center with its $250,000 stage set. He argues that a combination of self-censorship, lack of real information given by the military at briefings, boosterism, and a small number of reporters familiar with Iraq and fluent in Arabic deprived the American public of reliable information while the war was going on.

 

Massing also is highly critical of American press...
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Recommended by Lorraine Adams, and 1 others.

Lorraine AdamsNot entirely. The book is about how not only Judith Miller, but the whole American press, The Washington Post and The New York Times were complicit in promulgating the ideas of those policy makers who were making very undereducated guesses about WMDs in Iraq. The book champions the work of Knight Ridder, the media organisation whose reports about the dubiousness of the Bush administration’s... (Source)

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2

The Journalist and the Murderer

In two previous books, Janet Malcolm explored the hidden sides of, respectively, institutional psychoanalysis and Freudian biography. In this book, she examines the psychopathology of journalism. Using a strange and unprecedented lawsuit as her larger-than-life example -- the lawsuit of Jeffrey MacDonald, a convicted murderer, against Joe McGinniss, the author of Fatal Vision, a book about the crime -- she delves into the always uneasy, sometimes tragic relationship that exists between journalist and subject. In Malcolm's view, neither journalist nor subject can avoid the moral impasse that... more
Recommended by Lorraine Adams, and 1 others.

Lorraine AdamsThis is Janet Malcolm’s account of the writing of Joe McGinniss’s non-fiction book, Fatal Vision. Basically, Fatal Vision was written using the immersion technique of spending a great deal of time with the subject to get to the ‘truth’ of the subject. There is a bias in our culture towards the non-fiction dramatic narrative, as we think it is closer to the truth than fiction because the books... (Source)

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3
From the Iranian hostage crisis through the Gulf War and the bombing of the World Trade Center, the American news media have portrayed "Islam" as a monolithic entity, synonymous with terrorism and religious hysteria. In this classic work, now updated, the author of Culture and Imperialism reveals the hidden agendas and distortions of fact that underlie even the most "objective" coverage of the Islamic world. less
Recommended by Lorraine Adams, Issandr El Amrani, and 2 others.

Lorraine AdamsHe insisted that news is partial and dependent on official interpretation that may serve a private interest rather than a national interest. (Source)

Issandr El AmraniThis book, although less intellectually challenging than Orientalism, is very important as well. In a sense it is even more important. (Source)

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4

Public Opinion

In what is widely considered the most influential book ever written by Walter Lippmann, the late journalist and social critic provides a fundamental treatise on the nature of human information and communication. As Michael Curtis indicates in his introduction to this edition. Public Opinion qualifies as a classic by virtue of its systematic brilliance and literary grace. The work is divided into eight parts, covering such varied issues as stereotypes, image making, and organized intelligence. The study begins with an analysis of "the world outside and the pictures in our heads, " a leitmotif... more
Recommended by Lorraine Adams, David Greenberg, and 2 others.

Lorraine AdamsIt was written in 1922 and is an insider’s view of how news is made. That is, news is a made thing. News is not facts. (Source)

David GreenbergWhen Lippmann wrote this book he had become disillusioned with aspects of democratic theory that assumed citizens could be fully rational and knowledgeable in making up their minds about public issues. (Source)

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5

Buried by the Times

An in-depth look at how The New York Times failed in its coverage of the fate of European Jews from 1939-45. It examines how the decisions that were made at The Times ultimately resulted in the minimizing and misunderstanding of modern history's worst genocide. Laurel Leff, a veteran journalist and professor of journalism, recounts how personal relationships at the newspaper, the assimilationist tendencies of The Times' Jewish owner, and the ethos of mid-century America, all led The Times to consistently downplay news of the Holocaust. It recalls how news of Hitler's 'final solution' was... more
Recommended by Lorraine Adams, and 1 others.

Lorraine AdamsYes. This is a study that Lauren Leff did, looking at The New York Times and how it handled its coverage of the Holocaust, and what she found is that, by and large, the newspaper did write about it but more often than not they placed the articles inside rather than on the front page and when the piece could have been longer it was shorter, and when it could have been authoritative it was less... (Source)

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