Media Madness: The Corruption of Our Political Culture | 
 enlarge | Author: James Bowman
Publisher: Encounter Books
Category: Book
List Price: $20.00
Buy New: $6.24
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Avg. Customer Rating:  7 reviews
Sales Rank: 459871
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 1
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 130
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.7
Dimensions (in): 8.6 x 5.7 x 0.8
ISBN: 1594032122
Dewey Decimal Number: 302.230973
EAN: 9781594032127
ASIN: 1594032122
Publication Date: April 25, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Condition: Brand New!
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Product Description
James Bowman provides a scintillating and fast-paced anatomy of the mainstream media self-generated demise. The Mind of the Media looks behind the headlines to examine mainstream media's governing myths. Writing with acerbic wit, Bowman shows how the mainstream media's embrace of a spurious notion of objectivity, combined with its addiction to scandal, and an unshakable conviction of its own moral superiority have done irreparable damage to the media's public authority.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 2 more reviews...
 Lucid and True May 25, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Watch Video Here: http://www.amazon.com/review/RPBXRGI8U5B0K Bernard Chapin saying hi and this, like Honor, is another wonderful James Bowman book.
The excessive damage they have done to themselves and others May 6, 2008
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
Everyone is biased - it's a simple fact of life. It's the media's job to simply feign unbiased and honest reporting. "Media Madness: The Corruption of Our Political Culture" is an examination of today's media and the mythology that governs it. Written with a dry, sarcastic wit throughout, author and writer for the Wall Street Journal James Bowman attacks the media's obsessive love of scandal, moral superiority, and the excessive damage they have done to themselves and others, and how the world is moving away from them because of it. "Media Madness: The Corruption of Our Political Culture" is highly recommended for community library social issues shelves and for anyone also disenfranchised with today's news media.
 Major Disappointment May 1, 2008
Although I found Bowman's previous book (Honor: A History) to be not all that well-written, there was enough of interest for me to consider adopting Media Madness for the course I teach on politics and the media. I was hoping it would provide a well-reasoned conservative take on the media, but I was very disappointed. Bowman's method is to construct a theory of isolated instances, as opposed to conducting a more rigorous analysis of the evidence at hand. This is not a work of scholarship by any means - it is an ill-informed partisan jeremiad. Bypass it in favor of Neil Postman's classic Amusing Ourselves to Death, or Farhad Manjoo's True Enough.
Media Madness April 15, 2008
1 out of 3 found this review helpful
James Bowman is a very intelligent man but a terrible writer.His sentence structure is terrible and I find myself having to reread his ideas several times to divine the meaning.I was looking forward to this book as it is such an important subject but find I have a hard time picking it up to read now.
Through The Journalist's Peephole March 22, 2008
15 out of 18 found this review helpful
Henry James spoke years ago of the "house of fiction" through whose windows writers must necessarily peer out at the visible world. James added that while these windows were of varying size and breadth, it was the duty of any conscientious writer to attempt to be "one on whom nothing is lost."
In other words, if a God-like "objectivity" is not fully granted to any writer, he is still obliged, after recognizing his angle of vision, to search out truth and be as fair to the realities he treats as possible. In attacking the oft-repeated claim by movers and shakers from our mass media to possess a complete and superhuman "objectivity", James Bowman argues most persuasively that journalists should recognize and admit they too look through vision-limiting windows at the events they report. His position here is similar to the noble one of Henry James. In acerbic, witty prose, Bowman shows in case after case that our self-described, "objective" journalists, in fact and unfortunately, look at life not even through a large living room window, but at best through a peephole. They are these days by and large ignorant of or deceptive about their own easily identifiable and widely shared biases. These include a devotion to multiculturalism, utopian fantasy, and moral equivalence, among others. Such biases are embraced with complete, uncritical dogmatism. People opposing the views of such journalists, consequently, can't be ill-informed or simply mistaken, but are deemed necessarily "wicked." Bowman's conclusion is that such practices have led to the corruption not only of the mass media and its reporters but of "our political culture" at large.
Not all readers may share Bowman's out in the open, on-the-table political views, but that's neither here nor there when it comes to assessing the value of his book. As a well-documented analysis of current "media madness," it is indispensable. In my view, it should become required reading in college composition and journalism classes.
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