The Influencing Machine: Brooke Gladstone on the Media

A meandering and thoughtful view on the media. Delivers many ideas very efficiently - graphic nonfiction is a very unusual method for a book, it works quite well.

Brooke Gladstone is here to help. This graphic novel will take you through all types of media and how to navigate today's manipulative journalism world with Brooke's wit. Teaching readers about Caesar's newspapers, penny presses and even today's heavy media world.

Complaints about the media are pretty rife, in just about any time, it seems, along with a lot of misconceptions about how it's worked in the past. In this book, Gladstone sets out to try to address these problems with a historical overview of the topic, starting from the Mayans and the Romans, but

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mostly focusing on the US context through the years. Along the way, she goes through a good amount of history and historical figures (Jefferson definitely switched his views once he was in office, but still stayed in favor of a free press to the end), philosophers, and quotes from authors, journalists and poets about how they feel about the press. For a fairly short book, you come away feeling like you've picked up a lot on the topic.

Gladstone addresses a good amount about how people have felt about objectivity through the years, as compared to disclosure, discusses the different kinds of bias, talks about changes in how people have dealt with censorship, with covering wars, with changes in media, and other sorts of exciting topics. That was meant unsarcastically; I rather like discussions about media, so this was a good fit for me, but if you're not into the topic as a matter of general interest, this might still be a good book for you, and get you think about the topic.

I wasn't sure at the outset how well the graphic format would fit the discussion, but I've read a bunch of non-fiction comic setups through the years, and so I had an open mind about it. This actually was a nice hybrid; the pictures were crisp, well done, with the green tones making it feel somehow historic, and illustrated the point, or even carried it, sometimes, but there were also occasional pages of text to make the point where the pictures might have gotten in the way. In other words, the pictures and the words were both used quite judiciously.

On the whole, this was a really quite interesting book, if not super in depth, and a nice, fast and easy read. It's a worthy match for some of the other non-fiction comics I've read, like various books by Larry Gonick, for example, and I'm open to trying more of this sort of thing now.

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This is the kind of book I am bound to be a sucker for - a news person that I really like, coupled with a graphic artist I love. Brooke gives a great overview of media through the ages - and Josh Neufeld creates the drawings that make the story come to life with the personalities and events that

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made the history.

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Gladstone’s presentation is clear and balanced. Neufeld’s illustrations are a perfect match for the tone and help clarify the concepts. This book goes beyond the idea of media as newspapers, radio and TV to examine concepts like information overload and the way technology is changing how we

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interact with the news.

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Impressive take on the evolving, conflicted history-present-future of the media--and what it means to us as consumers and creators.

What do we call this? It's not a graphic novel, more a sort of documentary comic. Similar in tone to Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics, this is a tour through the history and issues of the media, with what feels like a switch in gears in the last third to as critique of the way we interact with

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the internet generally. I would love to see it used as the the textbook for a media studies course, as it's well referenced, entertaining, full of arresting anecdotes, and a fertile mix of good discussion topics. Plus it's slim and undergrads would actually read it.

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Graphic novel about media bias and information seeking behavior written by NPR correspondent - pretty much my ideal nonfiction book, but somehow I didn't enjoy this very much.

Perhaps because Gladstone is new to the medium, I found the book suffered greatly from a lack of narrative and structural

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cohesion. Her apparent thesis in the introduction - that consumers and advertisers cause media bias - did not seem to be the guiding thesis of her discussion, which spanned history, psychology, and personal opinion.

This really threw me off, and as she shared anecdotes and opinions I kept thinking, "Yes, but why are you telling me this?" Her tone was often one of refutation, but I couldn't figure out whose argument she was critiquing.

A better frame narrative would have helped. So much of nonfiction writing is telling people what you are about to tell them.

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Aside from one quibble I have over her reading of Yeats, I cannot recommend this book highly enough.

In the vein of An Illustrated History of Economics, Brooke Gladstone has put together here a rather succinct history of media and all the problems that come along with it in a graphic novel form. The illustrations are by Josh Neufeld and are expertly done in a three tone style. I was fortunate

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enough to attend a discussion with Gladstone where she discussed her ideas for the book and answered a number of questions from the audience. One of the themes that run throughout the book are her depictions of various biases that have been present in media since the beginning of the written word. She goes over the "goldilocks number", "the great refusal", the "commercial bias", the "status quo bias", the "visual bias" and many more. In other words, there are a lot of ways in which media is unfair. Her main point, however, is that the media has never been fair, despite the current sense that modern media is untrustworthy and unreliable. Instead, Gladstone believes that Americans need to be ever conscious of where they get their information and that they have good filters in place for receiving new input. Gladstone is ultimately a cautious optimist. She summarizes it when she says "Our limits are purely human. Our enemies are not the digital bits that dance across our screens but the neural impulses that animate our lizard brains. We get the media we deserve." In other words its possible to live in a world with ever increasing information but its up to us to make good choices. That seems reasonable to me. Has there ever been a time when more critical thinking has been a detriment to the human species?

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It took me a while to get into the format but I did and found the book very intriguing. It is very well done and the illustrations are a good complement.

Several interesting essay in graphic form on media studies. There was one item I learned more about. I had been aware that many newspapers had their origins as party news. If you were a Democrat/Republican you would read a paper that often had Democrat/Republic in its name. I figured the reader did

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not want fair, unbalanced, objective news. The reader expected the party line on events. I learned that there papers were fairly expensive. The New York Sun was a ground breaking paper with a new model of news - only a penny versus about 6 cents for a party paper but it used advertising heavily to lower the price. This new model of paper took over the marketplace and would eventually buy out the older papers. The new model of newspaper would be independent of funding from the political party and would print almost anything to sell the goods. I recommend it as a good intro to the issues involved with news and the media.

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This is a thoughtful look at the history of the media. It might be helpful to use in certain classrooms.

This is a book about Rhetoric, which gets such short shrift these days that I don't have a shelf for it. It was an assigned text for Veronica, and I see something catching lying around, I have to snake it from other family members, otherwise they wouldn't know where to look for it. If you're

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unfamiliar with rhetoric, this makes a fabulous introduction, and if you already know about it, you'll enjoy how everything is tied to modern media. The graphic novel format makes it feel lighter than it would otherwise, a delightful way to slip in education. Gladstone knows whereof she writes: she's been covering media for NPR for quite a few years. Excellent.

Copy borrowed from high school text collection

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Very patchy... I really enjoyed Gladstone's exploration of the history of journalism. The first publication of community news was written by scribes of the Egyptian pharoes, for PR purposes. Bad events could be blamed on the pharoe's enemies, and good events could be credited to his fair

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leadership.

Skipping ahead, the book delves into trends and biases in the media.

It's a bit disheartening that Gladstone's conclusions at the end of the book are that the public essentially has the quality journalism it deserves. If I follow her correctly, she's saying the public has the burden of demanding the sort of "Fourth Estate" journalism which speaks truth to power, and which holds our public and private institutions to account, which asks hard questions and pursues the answers doggedly. Unfortunately, when our journalists fail in this charge, it isn't always clear to the public. An easily understood lie often supplants difficult and nuanced truths.. and when it does, how is the public to know? We often don't find out (if at all) until much, much later. Sometimes, the truth is learned too late to reverse bad public decisions, like the decision to go to war in 2003. To say the public got the journalism they deserved in that circumstance strikes me as a case of "blaming the victim". Ms. Gladstone seems to be telling journalists they can be as slack, lackadaisical , and biased as they can get away with. That is the sad effect our profit-driven media has sunk to. What we need is an idealism, an allegiance to an idea of Truth and the notion of journalism as a noble calling.

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Brilliant look at the history of media and its relationship to audiences and government. A graphic novel to boot. Worthy of about 16 rereads.