The Language of Journalism: Newspaper culture. Volume one

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Transaction Publishers - 478 páginas
The newspaper is to the twentieth century what the novel was for the nineteenth century: the expression of popular sentiment. In the first of a three-volume study of journalism and what it has meant as a source of knowledge and as a mechanism for orchestrating mass ideology, Melvin J. Lasky provides a major overview. His research runs the gamut of material found in newspapers, from the trivial to the profound, from pseudo-science to habits of solid investigation. The volume is divided into four parts. The first attacks deficiencies in grammar and syntax with examples from newspapers and magazines drawn from the German as well as English-language press. The second examines the key issues of journalism: accuracy and authenticity. Lasky provides an especially acute account of differences between active literacy and passive viewing, or the relationship of word and picture in defining authenticity. The third part emphasizes the problem of bias in everything from racial reporting to cultural correctness. This is the first systematic attempt to study racial nomenclature, identity-labeling, and literary discrimination. Lasky follows closely the model set by George Orwell a half century earlier. The final section of the work covers the competition between popular media and the redefinition of pornography and its language. The volume closes with an examination of how the popular culture both influenced and was influential upon literary titans like Hemingway, Lawrence, and Tynan.

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Chromatic Deceptions
193
The Stained Cloak of Ethnicity
196
The NWord and the JWord
199
The Breaking of Taboos
203
Mark Fuhrmans NWord
207
The Color Spectrum of Race Card
211
Ebonic Demotic
214
Defusing the Enemys Vocabulary
221

In the Land of Jargontua
24
The Cult of Chic Obscurity
28
Sort ofKind of
32
The Quest for Uncertainty
35
Like in the OJ Simpson Trial
37
On Not Speaking English So Good
38
Sort of Suspicious Kind of Guilty
43
Signals of Prevarication
45
Of Plastic Prose in Bits and Pieces
47
The Folksy Affectation of Simplicity
52
AngloAmerican Differences
60
The Coming of the Soccer Moms
63
The Wrong Profession?
66
LifeStyle Crosses the Ocean and Returns
69
Transatlantic Variations
74
1nsuring for All Risks
76
Making a Meal of 1t
78
Teutonics or Refighting World War II
85
On Hating the Huns
88
Ugly Germans and Aryan Heroes
90
The Art of Quotation
93
The Little Goose Feet Starting and Finishing
95
Behind the Confession
99
Expensive Words
101
Television and Press War
105
Of Trash and Rubbish
108
The Shrinking AttentionSpan
112
When the Kissing Had to Stop
118
Oohs Ahs and a Wee Bit of Bother
120
Mailers Tales of Oswald
123
Citations Sown SketchWriters and Tinted Spectacles
127
All 1 know is just what 1 read in the papers Sez You? Sez Me
129
1nverted Commas in Sports
130
Unquoting the Quote
140
Words Words Words The Old Maid of Times Square
143
Jefferson Under a Shadow
144
The Infobahn
146
Boots Boogaloos and Giant Raves
147
The Strategy of Misquotation BB and KKs Memorably Misquoted TagLines
151
When Scotspeak Goes ScotFree
154
Killing with a Quote
160
The Wide Open Range of Malpractice
161
The Interviewer and the Interviewee
163
The Quest for Meaning
169
Race and the Color of Things Black White and Other Spurious Shades
171
Suspicion by Omission
178
The Risks of Shedding Light
181
Wog Golliwog and Likely Stories
183
Race in the Shadow of Enlightened Counsel
184
Illusions in New York and London
189
The Shock Threshold
231
Speaking with a Forked Tongue
234
The Case of the Jew Rifkind and Howards End
247
On the Most Powerful Words
256
Diluting the Deadly Epithets
257
The Art of Punditry
267
Expertise Then and Now
269
In the Pseuds Comer
275
Is It Cricket?
282
Of a High DumbDown Tolerance
284
Pop Kulcher
287
Pliable Platitudes
289
Pop Critics Folklore
293
The Art of Explanation
295
Of Rats and Men
301
The Troubles of the Queen of Green
302
Mistranslation and Misunderstanding
304
First the Bad News then the Good
306
Keeping Up with the AvantGarde
313
Towards a Negative Cultural Tax
317
A Forward and Backward Glance
320
Bert Brechts Three Dots
322
Hard Words and Generation Gaps
325
The Fword and Other Obscenities
329
Skirmishes in the Sex War
331
The Galaxy Strikes Back
333
Of Circumlocutions and Pleonasms
337
World War II Fifty Years After
343
A Trio of Asterisks
345
Gender in the Combat Zone
349
The Politics of the FWord
359
Repeating the Error or Compounding the Offense
363
From Jefferson to Ochs to Murdoch
364
Lady Dis 1nLaws
367
Jacqueline Du Pre or Tragedy in the Family Circle
369
Expletives in Public Life
371
The Point of the Anecdote
374
Motiveless Malignity
376
Remembering the Founding Fathers
379
Kenneth Tynan
387
Peregrine Worsthorne
412
Osbornes Effing Anger
416
Amis Pere et Fils
418
Jeeves in Sardinia
426
A Thought on the Hall of 111 Fame
427
One Newspaper Comes Out of the Closet
432
Notes
439
Index
467
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