Outstanding Academic Titles 2024: Communications and Media

Enjoy this week's Outstanding Academic Titles list snippet: Five titles pertaining to communications and media

Posted on March 13, 2025 in Outstanding Academic Titles

Enjoy these five selections from the Choice Reviews 2024 Outstanding Academic Titles list. This week, we highlight Outstanding Academic Titles focused on communications and media. A hearty congratulations to the winning authors, editors, and publishers!

1. Believability: sexual violence, media, and the politics of doubt
by Sarah Banet-Weiser and Kathryn Claire Higgins Polity, 2023

Banet-Weiser and Higgins (both, Annenberg School for Communications) take as the starting point of Believability the notion that sexual violence has never been and will never be a question of the truth. Rather, they assert, it is has been and continues to be a question of the economy of believability, which is contextual: Who is the teller? Who is the accused? What are their identities? and What is the historical context? To interrogate the concept of the economy of believability in the media, the authors analyze several television shows, among them the mini-series Unbelievable and the program The Morning Show, and some public cases, including Amber Heard’s defamation case against Johnny Depp, the trial of R. Kelly, and the rape of Chanel Milller. The analysis is carefully crafted and apt. View on Amazon

2. Fake news in America: contested meanings in the post-truth era
Dimaggio, Anthony R. Cambridge, 2023

DiMaggio (political science, Lehigh Univ.) provides a deep dive into disinformation in contemporary American politics and media using a sociopolitical framework and drawing on individuals’ preexisting beliefs and values, media consumption patterns, demographic factors, partisanship, and ideology. DiMaggio, a scholar of political communication, has previously published related titles, including The Politics of Persuasion: Economic Policy and Media Bias in the Modern Era (CH, Aug’17, 54-5488); Selling War, Selling Hope: Presidential Rhetoric, the News Media, and US Foreign Policy since 9/11 (CH, Mar’16, 53-3275); and The Rise of the Tea Party: Political Discontent and Corporate Media in the Age of Obama (CH, Jun’12, 49-5948). DiMaggio uses detailed case studies, such as an analysis of Fox News and an evaluation of Donald Trump’s Twitter account, to demonstrate how Trump and right-wing pundits have spread anti-intellectualism and a distrust of experts in an effort to undermine the reporting of Trump’s presidential corruption. DiMaggio concludes the book by addressing how people can better identify and fight back against fake news, including reforming the education system with a greater emphasis on critical thinking and information literacy skills. View on Amazon

3. Avoiding the news: reluctant audiences for journalism
by Rasmus Kleis Nielsen, Ruth Palmer, and Benjamin Toff Columbia, 2023

This book provides rare insights into chronically inattentive news media audiences in three nations. In findings from a comprehensive study, the authors suggest consumers’ level of interest in politics, frequency of international travel, and ideological leaning are among the predictors of their eschewal of news media platforms (broadcast, internet, and print). Most of the findings are based on consumer interviews in the US, UK, and Spain. An appendix includes some details about the interviewed “news avoiders” (n=128). Despite the study’s disconcerting findings for news organizations, the authors provide suggestions for journalists to engender audience interest. They carefully explain the study’s mixed methods (qualitative and quantitative) and limitations. The book’s clear writing is accessible to journalism professionals and diverse student audiences. Comprehensive references are included with extensive notes in a separate section. The book is an excellent companion to Michael S. Pollard and Jennifer Kavanagh’s Profiles of News Consumption: Platform Choices, Perceptions of Reliability, and Partisanship (2021).View on Amazon

4. On comics and grief Jacobs, Dale. Wilfrid Laurier, 2024

On Comics and Grief covers the year after the author’s mother passed away, during which he experienced profound loss and grief while working on a project predicated on Jacobs’s reading of every commercially produced comic book published in the US in 1976. The book is organized in 12 chapters prefaced by an introduction. Each chapter represents a month when Jacobs reads and analyzes two titles for his study, synthesizing personal experience with the traditionally non-personalized project of scholarship. Jacobs’s approach reveals deep and sometimes startling connections between coming to grips with emotional experiences and practicing literary criticism. The comics selected for each month often represent extremes of comics content and thus readership. April’s selections, for example, are issues of Daredevil and Little Dot. The juxtaposition of seemingly different comics suggests critical tensions that complement Jacobs’s personal account. The author enhances and complicates this effect by interrupting his narrative with quotes from writers who work in different authorial contexts, from comic studies to commercial advertisements. Impressive in scope and moving in affect,  View on Amazon.

5. Entitled opinions: doxa after digitality Alford, Caddie. Alabama, 2024

Although a number of books have been published on the topic of social media and opinion in the last several years, Alford (Virginia Commonwealth Univ.) offers something remarkably fresh: a rhetorical theory that demonstrates the mutually constitutive nature of social media and opinion, and that provides a conceptual framework for analyzing the functional operations of opinion in the digital world and the open-ended and generative nature of its process of formation. Alford explains how the ancient Greek concept of doxa allows for a deeper appreciation of the nuanced ontological and epistemological workings of opinion creation and transformation. The chapter on opinion and invention is particularly inspired; it examines how an opinion marking what has been unrecognized and undiscussed exists, momentarily, as a wholly new, often catalyzing creation before being incorporated into the always evolving and generating discourse of doxa. In a world seen as increasingly polarized and despairing of authentic dialogue via social media, Alford offers a way forward that is thought-provoking and potentially groundbreaking. Ideal for students and scholars of rhetoric and communication, the volume is also relevant for work in philosophy, critical theory, and information science. View on Amazon.

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