Trump goes after the news media not because he thinks they’re strong, but because he thinks they’re weak and he can diminish them further.
David Greenberg
David Greenberg, a professor of journalism and media studies and of history at Rutgers University, is the author of Nixon's Shadow and Calvin Coolidge.
Posted inMoney, Politics, and Power
Truth in Politics Now
Demanding that we seek out the truth is a start—but it is only a start.
Posted inBooks, Arts and Culture
Zealots of Our Time
In his new book, They Knew They Were Right: The Rise of the Neocons, Jacob Heilbrunn examines the state of the neoconservative movement in the wake of the Iraq War.
Posted inBooks, Arts and Culture
Overheating: The Sequel
Is the growing corporate dominance of radio and TV stations, newspapers, and other media organs really that bad for society?
Posted inBooks, Arts and Culture
Heroes, Weren’t They?
The Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle, and the Awakening of a Nation by Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff (Knopf, 518 pages, $30.00) On February 6, 1956, Peter Kihss of The New York Times was covering the enrollment of the first black student, Autherine Lucy, at the University of Alabama. Mobs of racist […]
Posted inBooks, Arts and Culture
Red Parallels
The Age of Anxiety: McCarthyism to Terrorism by Haynes Johnson (Harcourt, 624 pages, $26.00) A major threat to the United States suddenly seizes national attention. Alongside some levelheaded responses, many public figures — motivated by fear, displaced resentment, or opportunism — magnify and exploit the menace in ugly ways. Pandering to an angry, […]
Posted inBooks, Arts and Culture
Only Yesterday
More Equal Than Others: America From Nixon to the New Century by Godfrey Hodgson (Princeton University Press, 379 pages, $29.95) Restless Giant: The United States From Watergate to Bush v. Gore by James T. Patterson (Oxford University Press, 448 pages, $35.00) Anyone wishing to understand the United States in the three decades after World […]
Posted inBooks, Arts and Culture
Up With Rags
A Matter of Opinion by Victor S. Navasky (Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 464 pages, $27.00) When I was in college and a member of my university’s Liberal Party, a common question posed to candidates for party office was a dichotomy: “New Republic or Nation?” (The American Prospect did not yet exist.) Most people didn’t […]
Posted inBooks, Arts and Culture
Liberals, Think Big
Return to Greatness: How America Lost Its Sense of Purpose and What It Needs to Do to Recover It by Alan Wolfe (Princeton University Press, 224 pages, $22.95) In recent years, the sociologist Alan Wolfe has emerged as one of America’s most astute thinkers about religion, politics, and society. Unlike so many generalists who […]
Posted inBooks, Arts and Culture
Action Liberalism
Eugene McCarthy: The Rise and Fall of Postwar American Liberalism by Dominic Sandbrook (Knopf, 416 pages, $25.95) The Fall of the House of Roosevelt: Brokers of Ideas and Power from FDR to LBJ by Michael Janeway (Columbia University Press, 284 pages, $27.50) The Guardians: Kingman Brewster, His Circle, and the Rise of the Liberal Establishment […]