The Influencing Machine: Brooke Gladstone on the Media

The media. Most of us have, like me, a love-hate relationship with the media. Can't live with it, can't live without it, right?

In this book, Brooke Gladstone explores the history of the media, and in particular, the history of the American media. Now, you might think this would be a boring subject, but Gladstone and her book, both in comic/graphic form, makes it both interesting and entertaining - and I really enjoyed it. If you are unhappy with the media today, it seems we have been here before. "Everything we hate about the media today was present at its creation."

Additionally, Gladstone explores issues related to the media—bias (who knew there were that many kinds!?), objectivity, propaganda, war coverage, disclosure, to name a show more few. She also touches on contemporary media issues (photoshopification of photos, citizen journalism...etc) and looks ahead into the future (chips in our heads, anyone?). There's a lot in this book.

I didn't think I would like the graphic/comic rending of the book, but in hindsight, I thought it a perfect vehicle for it. The visual style spread the ideas out a bit, giving you a bit of space to mull them over, while augmenting the ideas with illustrations, some quite humorous. As I said before, it's a fabulous blend of education and entertainment. She isn't defending the media so much as explaining and educating. Yes, it's as bad as we thought. "So news consumers seeking quality information have to penetrate an intensifying fog of passion and poppycock. That take great commitment. Because truth seekers also must struggle endlessly with a force even more seductive than the media, a force that weaves an irresistible vision of a familiar and predictable world."

Here's some tidbits:

"There's a long-standing debate in the media biz over whether news outlets should give the public what it wants, or what it needs. This debate presupposes that media execs actually know what it wants or needs. And that there actually is a unitary 'public' ."

"Impartiality, like news itself, is whatever the publisher says it is."

"The American media are not afraid of the government. They are afraid of their audiences and advertisers. The media do not control you. They pander to you."

"{Neil}Postman says the moment we could get instant news from everywhere--news not directly relevant to us--that's when news became entertainment. Or as C. K. Chesterton put it: Journalism largely consists of saying 'Lord Jones is Dead' to people who never knew Lord Jones was alive. But Chesterton's news came from newspapers. In fact, as far back as Caesar's Acta Diurna, news has always been entertainment. The difference between their eras and our own is that now, news from everywhere is relevant. Unemployment in the Middle East, environmental policies in Asia, epidemics in Africa--this news affects us all. And now we can act, easily, to spread the news, and even influence how those stories end." show less

This surprised me. I was sure that I wasn't going to like it, but I did. I'm constantly ticked off by the media. Constantly. I can't watch more than five minutes of the mainstream news before a new stress twitch starts somewhere around my eyes. It's not new for me. My media “black pill” was back in the mid-80s when someone I knew was murdered and I had to read the press coverage in the NYC press. I don't completely believe anything they say unless I can verify it with at least two or three other sources.

I developed the habit of checking and rechecking events that mattered to me. With the advent of the Internet, it became so much easier to track down sources. I wasn't confined to the library to do my checking on important stuff. I show more had a huge resource sitting in my house. I could go to other sources, listen to multiple sides of an issue, and find witnesses to an event talking directly to the public. So much better.

Gladstone essentially says the same thing. We shouldn't trust what we read or hear. We should check and double-check the things that are important to us. Don't rely on Twitter for the news. Figure out what those Facebook posts really mean. And most important, don't blame the media when you misinterpret things. Headlines are not the news. Headlines sell the paper (or get the clicks). That's what they are meant to do.

So yeah! The illustrations kept this light-hearted and she had plenty of excellent things to say. show less

Complaints about the media are pretty rife, in just about any time, it seems, along with a lot of misconceptions about how it's worked in the past. In this book, Gladstone sets out to try to address these problems with a historical overview of the topic, starting from the Mayans and the Romans, but mostly focusing on the US context through the years. Along the way, she goes through a good amount of history and historical figures (Jefferson definitely switched his views once he was in office, but still stayed in favor of a free press to the end), philosophers, and quotes from authors, journalists and poets about how they feel about the press. For a fairly short book, you come away feeling like you've picked up a lot on the show more topic.

Gladstone addresses a good amount about how people have felt about objectivity through the years, as compared to disclosure, discusses the different kinds of bias, talks about changes in how people have dealt with censorship, with covering wars, with changes in media, and other sorts of exciting topics. That was meant unsarcastically; I rather like discussions about media, so this was a good fit for me, but if you're not into the topic as a matter of general interest, this might still be a good book for you, and get you think about the topic.

I wasn't sure at the outset how well the graphic format would fit the discussion, but I've read a bunch of non-fiction comic setups through the years, and so I had an open mind about it. This actually was a nice hybrid; the pictures were crisp, well done, with the green tones making it feel somehow historic, and illustrated the point, or even carried it, sometimes, but there were also occasional pages of text to make the point where the pictures might have gotten in the way. In other words, the pictures and the words were both used quite judiciously.

On the whole, this was a really quite interesting book, if not super in depth, and a nice, fast and easy read. It's a worthy match for some of the other non-fiction comics I've read, like various books by Larry Gonick, for example, and I'm open to trying more of this sort of thing now. show less

This is a book about Rhetoric, which gets such short shrift these days that I don't have a shelf for it. It was an assigned text for Veronica, and I see something catching lying around, I have to snake it from other family members, otherwise they wouldn't know where to look for it. If you're unfamiliar with rhetoric, this makes a fabulous introduction, and if you already know about it, you'll enjoy how everything is tied to modern media. The graphic novel format makes it feel lighter than it would otherwise, a delightful way to slip in education. Gladstone knows whereof she writes: she's been covering media for NPR for quite a few years. Excellent.

Copy borrowed from high school text collection

In the vein of An Illustrated History of Economics, Brooke Gladstone has put together here a rather succinct history of media and all the problems that come along with it in a graphic novel form. The illustrations are by Josh Neufeld and are expertly done in a three tone style. I was fortunate enough to attend a discussion with Gladstone where she discussed her ideas for the book and answered a number of questions from the audience. One of the themes that run throughout the book are her depictions of various biases that have been present in media since the beginning of the written word. She goes over the "goldilocks number", "the great refusal", the "commercial bias", the "status quo bias", the "visual bias" and many more. In other show more words, there are a lot of ways in which media is unfair. Her main point, however, is that the media has never been fair, despite the current sense that modern media is untrustworthy and unreliable. Instead, Gladstone believes that Americans need to be ever conscious of where they get their information and that they have good filters in place for receiving new input. Gladstone is ultimately a cautious optimist. She summarizes it when she says "Our limits are purely human. Our enemies are not the digital bits that dance across our screens but the neural impulses that animate our lizard brains. We get the media we deserve." In other words its possible to live in a world with ever increasing information but its up to us to make good choices. That seems reasonable to me. Has there ever been a time when more critical thinking has been a detriment to the human species? show less

This is a graphic non-fiction book by NPR radio host Brooke Gladstone, in which the reader is given a history of journalism in the United States, a discussion of bias and accountability and objectivity and clashes between the media, the public and those in power, and thoughts on the future of communications. It was pretty interesting. My favourite bits were the ones about people's perceptions and expectations of the media, with their attendant discussions about cognitive dissonance and other interesting psychological phenomena. Worth picking up if you're interested in the media and journalism.

Very patchy... I really enjoyed Gladstone's exploration of the history of journalism. The first publication of community news was written by scribes of the Egyptian pharoes, for PR purposes. Bad events could be blamed on the pharoe's enemies, and good events could be credited to his fair leadership.

Skipping ahead, the book delves into trends and biases in the media.

It's a bit disheartening that Gladstone's conclusions at the end of the book are that the public essentially has the quality journalism it deserves. If I follow her correctly, she's saying the public has the burden of demanding the sort of "Fourth Estate" journalism which speaks truth to power, and which holds our public and private institutions to account, which asks hard show more questions and pursues the answers doggedly. Unfortunately, when our journalists fail in this charge, it isn't always clear to the public. An easily understood lie often supplants difficult and nuanced truths.. and when it does, how is the public to know? We often don't find out (if at all) until much, much later. Sometimes, the truth is learned too late to reverse bad public decisions, like the decision to go to war in 2003. To say the public got the journalism they deserved in that circumstance strikes me as a case of "blaming the victim". Ms. Gladstone seems to be telling journalists they can be as slack, lackadaisical , and biased as they can get away with. That is the sad effect our profit-driven media has sunk to. What we need is an idealism, an allegiance to an idea of Truth and the notion of journalism as a noble calling. show less