By James Boylan
The Rise of Radio, From Marconi Through the Golden Age
by Alfred Balk
McFarland & Company
350 pp. $35 paper
Like Garrison Keillor, Woody Allen, and other childhood buffs, Alfred Balk has never gotten over radio as it was — the efflorescent, sometimes cheap and overcommercialized, sometimes brilliant, network programming of the years from roughly 1925 to 1950. Balk, a magazine journalist and teacher who was the editor of cjr a while ago, has assembled an affectionate history based on ambitious research and interviews with dozens of the survivors of that time. The theme songs, the advertising slogans, the gags, and the blunders are recalled and recounted. Indeed, that is a problem; the book dwells so much on snippets from individual programs, writers, and actors that it threatens on occasion to degenerate into one of those “old-time radio” compilations. Still, this entertaining account makes the valid point that radio in that era managed some achievements, culturally, educationally, and journalistically, that it never matched again, while conceding that the golden age also contained dross.
New News Out of Africa: Uncovering Africa's Renaissance
by Charlayne Hunter-Gault
Oxford University Press
173 pp. $23
Almost any day’s news from Africa plays variations on what Charlayne Hunter-Gault calls the four D’s of the African apocalypse — death, disaster, disease, and despair. As she notes, The Economist not long ago called Africa “The Hopeless Continent.” Hunter-Gault presents another perspective — that of an American journalist who has shifted her home base to Africa. Until recently CNN’s bureau chief in Johannesburg, following a distinguished career on PBS and in print media specializing in human rights, she now lives in South Africa, the country she sees as the anchor of a new continent emerging in the twenty-first century. In this series of essays, based on lectures she delivered at Harvard, she does not minimize Africa’s problems, but sees new economies, democracies, and societies emerging, often unnoted in the media of the rest of the world. She devotes her final section to reporting, the need for the international media to “come in right” (a term she picked up while covering the Black Panthers), meaning truthful, realistic, continuing coverage. Finally, she sees the work of a rising and hope-filled generation of African journalists as a key to the future, however hobbled their work may be now.
People's Movements, People's Press: The Journalism of Social Justice Movements
by Bob Ostertag
Beacon Press
232 pp. $23.95
This compact work offers selected chapters in the history of American insurgent journalism. The book began as a commission by the Independent Press Association, a coalition of ethnic and community publications, undertaken by Bob Ostertag, a scholar-composer-activist based at the University of California at Davis. The value of his approach lies in the skill with which he combines the history of the journalism of such movements with the history of the movements themselves. He finds fresh insights in the abolition and women’s suffrage movements and their overlaps. In tracking the emergence of gays and lesbians and their press, he wrestles with the paradox of the journalistic transformation from a semi-underground press to one that has experienced overwhelming prosperity; he is not entirely happy with the changes. His narrative of the journalism of GI dissidence during the Vietnam War reveals anew the depth and seriousness of the resistance, and the ultimate inability of the Pentagon to cope with it. The final chapter, on environmental journalism, is not concerned primarily with individual human rights, and appears to be, perhaps, in the wrong book.
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