Boring. I had to skim through a lot of it. I agree with reviewers who wondered who the audience was for this. No reason for it to be a graphic novel. The pictures added nothing, and there were way too many words, to be honest. I'm saying this as somebody who also reads a variety of things, including regular non-fiction and 1000 page fantasy epics, so it's not necessarily that I have a short attention span... It's just that I was expecting something more engaging from a graphic novel, I guess, and this was just boring. It's also by no means revolutionary, and honestly just kind of toes the mainline Democratic line pretty neatly, as far as I could tell. Maybe I'm just crazy left-leaning, I don't know. It just seemed like it was supporting the same old corrupt (sorry, they are corrupt) institutions. Definitely not a "maifesto" by any means. Yawn. Oh well. ( )

This is the 2012 "one book one school" summer reading for incoming freshmen at Millersville University
Very thought provoking.
Could supply many opportunities for discussion in government and/or English classes ( )

Brilliant look at the history of media and its relationship to audiences and government. A graphic novel to boot. Worthy of about 16 rereads. ( )

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 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 a lot of really good things to say. ( )

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 ( )