New Books In Journalism

In the wake of the September 11 attacks, US officials identified the so-called battle for hearts and minds as the “second front” in the war on terror. A wave of funding flowed into public diplomacy in the Middle East, seeking to change views of the United States through Arabic-language communications—often while hiding the traces of American origins. To what extent did this vast propaganda apparatus sway Arab public opinion? Which ideas and actors shaped American public diplomacy in this period? What are the lessons for information strategy today? The Long War of Ideas: American Public Diplomacy in Arabic After 9/11 (Columbia University Press, 2026) by Dr. Nathaniel Greenberg tells the story of American propaganda campaigns in the Middle East after 9/11, drawing on in-depth interviews with key players and previously classified documents. Dr. Greenberg shows how the United States tried to control perceptions of its response to 9/11 through news and entertainment, and reveals that Arab governments and unoffici

In U.S. Militarism and the Terrain of Memory: Negotiating Dead Space (Taylor & Francis, 2024), John Bechtold examines how the US military understands information and the media as a contested terrain. Focusing on the assaults on the Iraqi city of Fallujah in 2004, Bechtold shows the efforts the US military went through to make sure it was able maintain control over the battles’ narrative. This effort is more than public affairs and trying to shape how others understand the operations. Just like the military will fight over physical terrain, Bechtold argues that the military understands the information space and the news media as places of contestation that it must work to control. Using examples ranging from official memorialization efforts by the military to Luis Sinco’s photograph of James Blake Miller (the “Marlboro Marine”) to Gary Trudeau’s Doonesbury, this book shows how the assaults on Fallujah are remembered in US military history. Moreover, Bechtold shows how the military set the conditions for the Ba

Rolling Stone's first decade was truly rock and roll: chaotic, wild, and unpredictable. Brand New Beat: The Wild Rise of Rolling Stone Magazine (U California Press, 2026) by Peter Richardson charts the origins and evolution of the magazine during its formative early years in San Francisco. Founded in 1967 by a 21-year-old college dropout, Rolling Stone and its editors were steeped in the Bay Area's counterculture and viewed rock and roll as the animating spirit of a social revolution. Reaching beyond music, the magazine delved into the tempestuous culture and politics of the time.Acclaimed author Peter Richardson takes readers inside the iconic magazine during an era of legendary events, major cultural figures, and unforgettable music. Showing how Rolling Stone became a journalistic juggernaut—nurturing music-focused writers like Cameron Crowe, Lester Bangs, and Greil Marcus as well as New Journalism giants Hunter S. Thompson and Tom Wolfe—this book reveals how Rolling Stone both exemplified and critiqued the

How the rise of the culture wars afflicts the politics of education.  On August 9, 2022, the Denton Independent School District held a meeting to address complaints about its libraries. Like so many districts in Texas and across the country, Denton had been responding to accusations that children had access to inappropriate books at school. During the public comment session, a local man stood up to the podium and read a sexually explicit passage from a book that he wanted removed from Denton’s school libraries. But beguiled by the prospect of securing a political win, he had confused the title of the lurid psychological thriller he read aloud with a young adult fiction series about mermaids. While his attempt to ban a book that was never in Denton’s school libraries in the first place received a few laughs, it also reflects a deeply serious and troubling culture of conflict that has taken over the politics of education and now divides people so completely as to make public education as a shared endeavor seem

The philosopher G.W.F. Hegel “viewed history as consisting of stages punctuated by times of upheaval,” the author John B. Judis wrote in a recent essay for NOTUS, and “assigned to what he called ‘world-historical individuals’ a special role in spurring the transition from one era to another.” Trump, Judis posited, “is exactly such an individual,” comparable in this respect to Alexander the Great, Caesar and Napoleon. In our conversation, we discuss this proposition—including the forces that brought Trump to this role and the bleak destiny that typically greets “world-historical individuals.” Judis is the author of a number of books, including The Populist Explosion (Columbia Global Reports, 2016). John B. Judis is an author and American journalist, a contributing editor at Talking Points Memo, a former senior writer at the National Journal, and a former senior editor at The New Republic Veteran journalist Paul Starobin is a former Moscow bureau chief for Business Week and a former contributing editor of The

In Making the Liberal Media: How Conservatives Built a Movement Against The Press (Columbia UP, 2026), A.J. Bauer examines the history of the idea of a “liberal media bias.” Rather than trying to show whether or not “liberal media bias” is an accurate description, Bauer shows how this idea has been an animating force for conservative political activists and media figures. Bauer shows the lineage of “liberal media bias” criticism going back to early leaders in the modern conservative movement and press, as well as the conservative and right-wing grassroots. In addition to promoting this idea of media bias, these early conservative media pioneers taught their audiences how to be media critics themselves, a tradition that is still practiced today. A.J. Bauer is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Journalism and Creative Media at the University of Alabama. You can find a transcript of the interview here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premiu

This is a special edition of the New York Institute for the Humanities’ Vault podcast. On October 10, 2025, NYU’s Journalism Institute hosted a day-long conference titled Podcast Intellectuals: Producing Original Scholarship with Audio. Over the course of three panels, scholars, podcasters, and journalists discuss how academics might employ the techniques of narrative audio as part of their research. In this third, and final, panel, Robert Boynton moderates a conversation which asks, “Can podcasts save the university?” In it, Joy Connolly, Barry Lam, and Dr. Aurora Hutchinson discuss what role podcasts might play in the university’s system of hiring, promotion and tenure.  Robert S. Boynton is the director of the Literary Reportage program, and associate director of NYU’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. He is author of The Invitation Only Zone: The True Story of North Korea’ s Abduction Project, and The New New Journalism. Joy Connolly is president of the American Council of Learned Societies and a

This is a special edition of the New York Institute for the Humanities’ Vault podcast. On October 10, 2025, NYU’s Journalism Institute hosted a day-long conference titled Podcast Intellectuals: Producing Original Scholarship with Audio. Over the course of three panels, scholars, podcasters, and journalists discuss how academics might employ the techniques of narrative audio as part of their research. In this second panel of the day, Ellen Horne moderates a conversation with Chenjerai Kumanyika, Barry Lam, and Julia Barton, three veterans who have made a specialty of working on creative, idea-informed series. Professor Ellen Horne directs the Podcasting and Audio Reportage concentration at NYU’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. She was the executive producer and editor of Admissible: Shreds of Evidence, and was host, reporter, and producer for Luminary’s Lies We Tell. Horne was the executive producer of WNYC’s Radiolab, where she won George Foster Peabody Awards, Third Coast Awards, and the Kavli Scien

Hitler and My Mother-in-Law (OR Books, 2025) is a riveting memoir that explores the intersection of truth—both familial and political—through the colorful and complex life of the author's mother-in-law. In a time like our own of intense propaganda and manipulation, the only WWII female correspondent who covered both theaters of war, Pat Hartwell identified Hitler from a pile of ashes for the US military, and the troops awarded her with a million-dollar painting from Hitler's study. Really? She was the only woman in the CBS news room, assistant to the head of the Office of War Information, VP of one of the largest public relations companies in the world, third in command of UNICEF where she convinced Matisse to provide artwork for free, editor of her own Arizona newspaper where she hustled naïve art on the side, and eventually head of the Hawai’ian arts council, a state of extremely complex political and social stakeholders, where she left a legacy of preventing art fraud. Her story is a fascinating journey

This is a special edition of the New York Institute for the Humanities’ Vault podcast. On October 10, 2025, NYU’s Journalism Institute hosted a day-long conference titled Podcast Intellectuals: Producing Original Scholarship with Audio. Over the course of three panels, scholars, podcasters, and journalists discuss how academics might employ the techniques of narrative audio as part of their research. In the first panel, podcaster Benjamen Walker discusses his work with NYU media studies professor Mara Mills as they produce Tuning Time, a podcast about the politics of time stretching technology. Professor Mills is an interdisciplinary scholar in the fields of disability studies, Science and Technology Studies, and sound studies. She teaches in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication and is Director of the NYU Center for Disability Studies. Her work on “disability and media” spans disability arts and technoscience, with a focus on the history, politics, and cultures of electronics and digital media

As news reporters, we are in the story-telling business, the eye witnesses to history, writing, it's ‎said, ‘the first draft of history'.‎ The fall of the Berlin Wall. Lockerbie. Hillsborough. Dunblane. Mad Cow disease. 9/11. ‎These are all events that have entered our national, and international, consciousness. Events so ‎momentous that we can all say where we were, what we were doing, when the Berlin Wall fell, or ‎when the planes hit the Twin Towers. Award-winning television news reporter and political ‎correspondent, Glen Oglaza, can say exactly where he was when these events happened. He was ‎there, he had a front-row seat as history unfolded. And in this informative and fascinating account of ‎those years, he allows the reader to be there too. From Thatcher and the miners' strike, to the Gulf ‎War, the Good Friday Agreement and Tony Blair at Number Ten, captivating national and global ‎events are all given an intriguing new inside angle. ‎ Glen Oglaza is an award-winning television news reporter and

In Killers of Roe: My Investigation Into the Mysterious Death of Abortion Rights (Legacy Lit, 2026) reporter Amy Littlefield investigates the secret killers and hidden motives behind the death of abortion rights. They are going to kill people, investigative reporter for The Nation Littlefield knew, when the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. As a journalist covering abortion for more than a decade, she had already chronicled many near-death experiences caused by anti-abortion policy. After the anti-abortion movement's staggering defeat of Roe, she became fascinated with their victory and why they seemed so much better organized than the pro-choice movement. She set out to investigate the murderers of Roe. Killers of Roe chronicles Littlefield's journey into the unexplored corners of the most successful social movement of our time. As in every good murder mystery, the killers turn out to be the people you least suspect, like a disgraced former Congressman obsessed with offshore tax evasion and an unknown su

This episode features Yashica Dutt, journalist and author of Coming Out as Dalit. We began with a discussion of her choice to write a memoir, the significance of the memoir as a genre of Dalit writing, the politics around passing as upper caste, and what her mother’s role in the life taught her about Dalit feminism as a counter to Brahminical patriarchy. We then moved on to what her work as a journalist in India and the U.S. has revealed about the differences in the operations of caste in the two contexts. Finally, we ended with her coverage of the Zohran Mamdani campaign, both its promises and its failure to address the caste question head-on. Guest: Yashica Dutt is a journalist and author whose writings can be found on her Substack, Featuring Dalits and in New Lines magazine. Mentioned in the episode: Yashica Dutt, Coming Out as Dalit Rohith Vemula: an Indian PhD scholar at the University of Hyderabad whose suicide drew attention to widespread institutional casteism. Kumari Mayawati: first Dalit woman

Most of us would agree that American journalism has problems. Rushed reporting and thin coverage. Timidity in the face of adversity. Polarized perspectives and euphemistic language. Groupthink about complicated events.While much blame has been levelled at big tech, in How the Cold War Broke the News: The Surprising Roots of Journalism's Decline (Polity, 2025) Dr. Barbie Zelizer traces the decline of American journalism to the Cold War. She makes the bold claim that Cold War-era practices are to blame for the state of journalism today, undermining a once trusted media environment. This groundbreaking book shows how journalism's current problems can be traced back to customs developed over half a century ago and demonstrates how they've continued to upend journalism, journalists and the news ever since. We all need a news environment that works. This book tells us why it doesn't and offers a plan to make it better. If our news is better, so is our democracy. And, if our democracy is better, we may be too. Thi

Studying Chinese media has never been a stable intellectual enterprise. As Professor Yuezhi Zhao once observed, it often resembles aiming at a target that appears clear from a distance but becomes elusive on closer inspection. Over the past decade, that target has grown even more fragmented and mobile. Media systems across the Chinese-speaking world—including the People’s Republic of China (PRC), Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macao, and transnational Chinese communities—have been reshaped by rapid technological transformation, intensifying geopolitical rivalry, and profound political change. It is against this backdrop that the second edition of The Routledge Handbook of Chinese Media has been published. Rather than simply updating a reference work, this edition reflects a field fundamentally reconfigured. Assumptions formed before the full societal penetration of digital platforms and social media now require serious reconsideration. The digital is no longer one topic among many; it is central to understanding contemp

Jacob Mchangama, founder and director of the think tank Justitia, has written a one-volume history of freedom of thought, which ranges from the lone Demosthenes of 4th-century BCE Athens to the recent controversies regarding Donald Trump. In Free Speech: A History from Socrates to Social Media (Basic Books, 2022), Mchangama argues that the history of freedom of thought has recurrent themes, such as a free speech entropy: the perception of rulers or governments that if speech is not restricted then social or political decline or disorder is inevitable. Mchangama also notes how restrictions usually have the unintended effect of emboldening the speakers and making the forbidden speech even more attractive to potential listeners. This history also reveals advocates of free speech less familiar to Western readers, such as the ninth-century Persian scholar Ibn al-Rawandi, a theologian and later skeptic whose life illustrates the debates possible in medieval Islam. Mchangama reviews the modern debates regarding f

In the 1930s and 1940s, amid intensifying anticolonial activism across the British Empire, dozens of new West African and Caribbean newspapers printed their first issues. With small staffs and shoestring budgets, these newspapers nonetheless became powerful vehicles for the expression of Black political thought. Drawing on papers from Trinidad, Jamaica, Ghana, and Nigeria, Leslie James shows how the press on both sides of the Atlantic nourished anticolonial and antiracist movements. Editors with varying levels of education, men and women journalists, worker and peasant correspondents, and anonymous contributors voiced incisive critiques of empire and experimented with visions of Black freedom. But as independence loomed, the press transformed to better demonstrate the respectability expected of a self-governing people. Seeing themselves as “the Fourth and Only Estate,” the sole democratic institution available to a colonized population, early press contributors experimented with the form and function of the

How did politicians deal with mass communication in a rapidly changing society? And how did the performance of public politics both help and hinder democratization? In Politicians and Mass Media in the Age of Empire (Cambridge UP, 2025), Dr. Betto van Waarden explores the emergence of a new type of politician within a system of transnational media politics between 1890 and the onset of the First World War. These politicians situated media management at the centre of their work, as print culture rapidly expanded to form the fabric of modern life for a growing urban public. Transnational media politics transcended and transformed national politics, as news consumers across borders sought symbolic leaders to make sense of international conflicts. Politicians and Mass Media in the Age of Empire historicizes contemporary debates on media and politics. While transnational media politics partly disappeared with the World Wars and decolonization, these 'publicity politicians' set standards that have defined media po

In The Price of Truth: The Journalist Who Defied Military Censors to Report the Fall of Nazi Germany (Cornell, 2023), Richard Fine recounts the intense drama surrounding the German surrender at the end of World War II and the veteran Associated Press journalist Edward Kennedy’s controversial scoop. On May 7, 1945, Kennedy bypassed military censorship to be the first to break the news of the Nazi surrender executed in Reims, France. Both the practice and the public perception of wartime reporting would never be the same. While, at the behest of Soviet leaders, Allied authorities prohibited release of the story, Kennedy stuck to his journalistic principles and refused to manage information he believed the world had a right to know. No action by an American correspondent during the war proved more controversial. The Paris press corps was furious at what it took to be Kennedy’s unethical betrayal; military authorities threatened court-martial before expelling him from Europe. Kennedy defended himself, insisting

Undaunted: How Women Changed American Journalism (Knopf, 2023) is a representative history of the American women who surmounted every impediment put in their way to do journalism's most valued work. From Margaret Fuller's improbable success to the highly paid reporters of the mid-nineteenth century to the breakthrough investigative triumphs of Nellie Bly, Ida Tarbell, and Ida B. Wells, Brooke Kroeger examines the lives of the best-remembered and long-forgotten woman journalists. She explores the careers of standout woman reporters who covered the major news stories and every conflict at home and abroad since before the Civil War, and she celebrates those exceptional careers up to the present, including those of Martha Gellhorn, Rachel Carson, Janet Malcolm, Joan Didion, Cokie Roberts, and Charlayne Hunter-Gault. As Kroeger chronicles the lives of journalists and newsroom leaders in every medium, a larger story develops: the nearly two-centuries-old struggle for women's rights. Here as well is the collective f