I Read, Therefore I Blog

The Blurb On The Back:

Is Weekend Update fake news?
How can we tell the difference between satire, smart-assert, and seriousness?
What is the benefit of jokes that cause outrage?
The Church Lady has a bad case of moral superiority. How about you?
What can Wayne and Garth teach us about living a happy life?

Live from New York for over forty years, Saturday Night Live is seriously funny, and through decades of sketches, monologues, commercials, music acts, and a huge cast of recurring characters, NBC’s original late-night comedy sketch show has brought a touch of levity to everything that is laughable about modern life. Many of the greatest minds in modern comedy - Bill Murray, Eddie Murphy, Steve Martin, Tina Fey, Amy Poehler, Chris Rock, Kate McKinnon and more - have honed their craft at SNL, finding fresh ways to highlight the ridiculous and absurd in our boardrooms, newsrooms, mailrooms, sorority houses, music studios, churches, schools, and everywhere in-between. Politicians from Gerald Ford to Donald Trump have had their faults and foibles lampooned by SNL’s election sketches and satirical news segments, and all the while, Weekend Update has shown us that the medium is the message.

Of course, comedian-philosophers from Socrates to Sartre have always produced and provoked us, critiquing our most sacred institutions and urging us to examine ourselves in the process. In Saturday Night Live and Philosophy, a star-studded ensemble cast of philosophers takes a close look at the “deep thoughts” beneath the surface of the award-winning late-night variety show and its hosts’ hijinks. In this book, philosophy and comedy join forces with the strength of the Ambiguously Gay Duo to explore the meaning of life itself through the riffs and beats of the subversive parody that gives the show its razor-sharp wit and undeniable cultural and political significance.

( The Review (Cut For Spoilers): )

The Verdict:

Jason Southworth is a philosophy instructor at several colleges and universities. Ruth Tallman is department chair and teaches philosophy at Hillsborough Community College. This mixed bag of 20 essays (part of a series on philosophy and pop culture) examines the elements of Saturday Night Live through various philosophical schools of thought but you need to be a hardcore SNL fan or an undergraduate philosophy student to get the most from it.

Thanks to the Amazon Vine Programme for the review copy of this book.

The Blurb On The Back:

Offers fresh insights and empirical evidence on the producers, consumers, and content of News 2.0

News 2.0 has forever changed the news business. This second generation of news is made, distributed, and consumed on the internet, particularly social media. News 2.0: Journalists, Audiences, And News On Social Media examines the ways in which news production is sometimes biased and how social networking sites (SNS) have become highly personalised news platforms that reflect users’ preferences and world views. Drawing from empirical evidence, this book provides a critical and analytical assessment of recent developments, major debates, and contemporary research on news, social media, and news organisations worldwide.

Author Ahmed Al-Ravi highlights how, despite the proliferation of news on social media, consumers are often confined within filter “bubbles”. Emphasising non-Western media outlets, the text explores the content, audiences, and producers of News 2.0, and addresses direct impacts on democracy, politics, and institutions. Topics include viral news on SNS, celebrity journalists and branding, “fake news” discourse, and the emergence of mobile news apps as ethnic mediascapes. Integrating computational journalism methods and cross-national comparative research, this unique volume:

- Examines different aspects of news bias such as news content and production, emphasising news values theory.
- Assesses how international media organisations including CNN, BBC, and RT address non-Western news audiences.
- Discusses concepts such as audience fragmentation on social media, viral news, networked flak, click bait, and internet bots.
- Employs novel techniques in text mining such as topic modelling to provide a holistic overview of news selection.

News 2.0: Journalists, Audiences, And News On Social Media is an innovative and illuminating resource for undergraduate and graduate students of media, communication, and journalism studies as well as media and communication scholars, media practitioners, journalists, and general readers with interest in the subject.

( The Review (Cut For Spoilers): )

The Verdict:

Ahmed Al-Rawi is Assistant Professor of News, Social Media, and Public Communication at Simon Fraser University in Canada. Although this is an interesting book about the impact that social media has on news dissemination (including “bubbles” and “fake news”) that looks beyond the US and Europe, the heavy focus on methods of analysis and statistical tools makes it more useful for students of the subject than for general readers like me.

Thanks to the Amazon Vine Programme for the review copy of this book.

The Blurb On The Back:

From Margaret Thatcher and Benazir Bhutto to Hillary Clinton, women have made great strides in the political arena in recent decades. Yet studies have shown that media coverage can have a dramatic effect on the public perception of women in politics. Gender, Politics, News: A Game Of Three Sides explores the origins and evolution of the role of gender in the broader processes of political communication. Focusing primarily on power, patriarchy, and culture, author Karen Ross reveals the incredibly complex relationships that exist between politics, gender, and media in the modern era. She probes deeply into the myriad ways in which these issues play out both in the high-octane context of national elections and during the deadline-driven pressures of everyday political reportage. Topics covered include feminist theories of politics and political communication, gendered journalism, the ways in which women political candidates are framed in news discourse during elections, gender considerations in the role of the political spouse, the differential treatment of women and men politicians by the media and the public in the face of scandal, and many more. Ross offers a global perspective on issues of gender, politics, and news media with a range of case studies from the US, UK, New Zealand, South American, and more. Timely and thought-provoking, Gender, Politics, News: A Game Of Three Sides is an important and unique addition to the growing scholarship on gendered political communication, which argues that despite some encouraging moments, politics and news are still primarily jobs for the boys.

( The Review (Cut For Spoilers): )

The Verdict:

Karen Ross (Professor of Gender and Media at Newcastle University) analyses the relationship between gender, politics and the media but the book is a victim of timing (although published in January 2017, it was written before the result of the 2016 US presidential election was known) and it’s very western focused (although Benazir Bhutto is namechecked on the back cover description, there’s no mention of her in the text and no analysis of the issues facing her while Sri Lanka, India, and Liberia are little more than passing references). Putting those points aside, however, Ross’s work is a detailed examination of the issues that face women seeking to enter the political arena and while there are things here that won’t come as a surprise to any woman who has sought to put herself forward, the comprehensive gathering of supporting studies and the way Ross breaks down the arguments and makes her points is authoritative and convincing

Thanks to the Amazon Vine Programme for the review copy of this book.

The Blurb On The Back:

In It’s Only a Movie, the incomparable Mark Kermode showed us the weird world of a film critic’s life lived in widescreen. Now, in The Good, The Bad And The Multiplex, he takes us into the belly of the beast to ask: ‘What’s wrong with modern movies?’

If blockbusters make money no matter how bad they are, then why not make a good one for a change? How can 3-D be the future of cinema when it’s been giving audiences a headache for over a hundred years? Why pay to watch films in cinemas that don’t have a projectionist but do have a fast-food stand? And, in a world in which Sex And The City 2 was a hit, what the hell are film critics for?

Outspoken, opinionated and hilariously funny, The Good, The Bad And The Multiplex is a must for anyone who has ever sat in an undermanned, overpriced cinema and asked themselves: ‘How the hell did things get to be this terrible?’

( The Review (Cut For Spoilers): )

The Verdict:

Mark Kermode’s polemic on the modern film industry is a sharply written, coherent read with a lot of wit and better still, you don’t have to be a film student in order to follow it. It’s the type of book that would appeal to anyone who claims to love cinema and I’m really keen to read Kermode’s other work on the subject.