Capturing News, Capturing Democracy


Book Description

The Voice of America (VOA) is the oldest and largest U.S. government-funded international media organization. In 2020, Donald Trump nominated Michael Pack, a right-wing documentarian and close friend of Steve Bannon, to lead the organization and curb what Trump saw as the network's overly negative reporting on the U.S. During the seven months that Pack oversaw the agency, more than 30 whistleblowers filed complaints against him, a judge ruled that he had infringed journalists' constitutional right to freedom of speech, and he refused to respond to a subpoena issued by the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations. How did such a major international public service media network become intensely politicized by government allies in such a short time, despite having its editorial independence protected by law? What were the effects on news output? And what can we learn from this situation about how to protect media freedom in the future? Capturing News, Capturing Democracy puts these events in historical and international context--and develops a new analytical framework for understanding government capture and its connection to broader processes of democratic backsliding. Drawing from in-depth interviews with network managers and journalists, and analysis of private correspondence and internal documents, Wright, Scott, and Bunce analyze how political appointees, White House officials, and right-wing media influenced VOA changing its reporting of the Black Lives Matter movement, the presidential election, and its contested aftermath. The authors stress that leaving the VOA unprotected opens it and other public media to targeting by authoritarian leadership and poses serious risks to US democracy. Further, they offer practical recommendations for how to protect the network and other international public service media better in the future.




Authentic Portraits


Book Description

The most successful portraits take us well beyond the surface of how someone looks and show us the inner essence of who someone is. They reveal character, soul, and depth. They uncover hidden hopes and profound truths, revealing that authentic and deeply human light that shines within. And while technical expertise is undoubtedly important, it’s not the light, camera, or pose that creates a great portrait. It’s you, and it’s the connection you create with the subject that makes all the difference. In Authentic Portraits, photographer Chris Orwig teaches you that the secret to creating meaningful portraits is simple: curiosity, empathy, kindness, and soul…plus a bit of technique. While Chris spends significant time on the fundamentals of “getting the shot”—working with natural light, nailing focus, dialing in the correct exposure, effectively posing and directing the subject, intentionally composing the frame—he also passionately discusses the need for personal development, creative collaboration, and connection with the subject. Because who you are directly and deeply affects what you create, and it is only through cultivating your own inner light that you will be able to bring it out in your subjects. Filled with instruction, insight, and inspiration, Authentic Portraits is an honest and personal book about creating better frames. It’s also about becoming your best self. Take the journey, and you’ll learn to find your vision and voice, bring intention to your photography and your life, embrace mystery, and understand the importance of gratitude and empathy. Along the way, you will teach the camera to see in a way that replicates how you feel, and you’ll find you have all you need to create work of lasting significance.




Capturing the South


Book Description




Capture


Book Description

Reading canonical works of the nineteenth century through the modern transformation of human–animal relations From Audubon’s still-life watercolors to Muybridge’s trip-wire locomotion studies, from Melville’s epic chases to Poe’s detective hunts, the nineteenth century witnessed a surge of artistic, literary, and scientific treatments that sought to “capture” the truth of animals at the historical moment when animals were receding from everyday view. In Capture, Antoine Traisnel reveals how the drive to contain and record disappearing animals was a central feature and organizing pursuit of the nineteenth-century U.S. cultural canon. Capture offers a critical genealogy of the dominant representation of animals as elusive, precarious, and endangered that came to circulate widely in the nineteenth century. Traisnel argues that “capture” is deeply continuous with the projects of white settler colonialism and the biocapitalist management of nonhuman and human populations, demonstrating that the desire to capture animals in representation responded to and normalized the systemic disappearance of animals effected by unprecedented changes in the land, the rise of mass slaughter, and the new awareness of species extinction. Tracking the prototyping of biopolitical governance and capitalist modes of control, Traisnel theorizes capture as a regime of vision by which animals came to be seen, over the course of the nineteenth century, as at once unknowable and yet understood in advance—a frame by which we continue to encounter animals today.







Capturing the South


Book Description

In his expansive history of documentary work in the South during the twentieth century, Scott L. Matthews examines the motivations and methodologies of several pivotal documentarians, including sociologist Howard Odum, photographers Jack Delano and Danny Lyon, and music ethnographer John Cohen. Their work salvaged and celebrated folk cultures threatened by modernization or strived to reveal and reform problems linked to the region's racial caste system and exploitative agricultural economy. Images of alluring primitivism and troubling pathology often blurred together, neutralizing the aims of documentary work carried out in the name of reform during the Progressive era, New Deal, and civil rights movement. Black and white southerners in turn often resisted documentarians' attempts to turn their private lives into public symbols. The accumulation of these influential and, occasionally, controversial documentary images created an enduring, complex, and sometimes self-defeating mythology about the South that persists into the twenty-first century.




Capturing Loyalty


Book Description

Written by two highly successful business coaches and management consultants, this book explains how to improve profitability by focusing on turning a business's already satisfied customers into highly satisfied customers by removing their sense of risk. The authors also provide a fail-safe method for identifying the risks inherent in your business. Every business owner or manager knows that creating satisfied customers is key to establishing customer loyalty and building a business. But many are applying the wrong strategy in trying to achieve customer loyalty: instead of focusing on consistent execution of the company's value proposition on a day-to-day basis, they waste their efforts constantly chasing after new customers or trying to address every complaint. Using research to demonstrate how striving to turn merely satisfied customers into highly satisfied customers significantly affects loyalty behaviors and in turn boosts profits, Capturing Loyalty lays out a new approach to a very old problem. Additionally, it presents a blueprint for identifying the perceived risks to consumers inherent in your business—many of which are not readily apparent to the casual or even invested observer—and explains how to minimize those risks. Authors Larson and McClellan explain why trying to ensure 100% customer satisfaction is not the path to achieving customer loyalty, and that the reality is that customer dissatisfaction is rarely the result of an error a business has made—two concepts that many initially find counterintuitive. You'll learn how to offer your company's products and services in a manner that creates highly satisfied customers, understand the true value and vast economic benefits of having highly satisfied customers, and see why highly satisfied customers are actually cheaper to serve than others. The book presents a clear and comprehensive plan for creating a loyalty initiative suitable to your business and cascading it through your entire organization, from the C-suite to the line employees.







Capturing a Locomotive


Book Description

In spite of focusing on the famous battles like other books from this time period dealing with historical aspects of the Civil War, Capturing a Locomotive gives the reader personal accounts of the Union soldiers who carried out the mission. The story details the capture of a railway train inside Confederate territory. Survivors of this mission were the first soldiers with the rank of Private awarded with the Congressional Medal of Honor.




Capturing the News


Book Description

Anthony Collings found himself in his share of difficult situations in his thirty-four years as a newsman. Like being captured by AK-47–toting Syrians in Lebanon in 1981 while looking for missiles that threatened a new outbreak of hostilities with Israel, or being “detained” by the KGB in Moscow in 1967 during his first foreign posting for the Associated Press filing stories about Soviet dissidents. Name a hot spot, and Collings has likely been there. From AP correspondent to Newsweek bureau chief to CNN reporter, he covered the Middle East, Rome, Moscow, London, Paris, and Washington. Now he has gathered stories about his work in a book that is both a journalist’s memoir and a commentary on the current ethical crises in the news media and how to address them. Brimming with entertaining stories about journalism, especially the chaotic early years at CNN when he and his colleagues established the first major cable news network, Collings’s book reveals the dangers and pressures of covering the news and the difficulties of overcoming obstacles to the truth. He recalls smuggling tapes out of Poland after the Communists had imposed martial law; flying dangerously near Libya’s “Line of Death”; interviewing world figures from Brezhnev to Kaddafi and Arafat; and winning awards for covering Iran-Contra and the Oklahoma City bombing. Collings brings fresh insights to the Oliver North affair and examines how the press was suckered in its coverage of the Jessica Lynch prisoner-of-war story in 2003. He voices his concerns regarding oversimplified reporting of complex issues and poses provocative questions about covering terrorism. In this book, Collings presents an insider’s appraisal of the American news media’s failings and accomplishments. Easy to read, informative, and thoughtful, Capturing the News will enlighten general readers interested in how journalists cover current affairs, while offering newsmen food for thought about the craft and ethics of journalism.