Content area
Full text
Darrell M. West, The rise and fall of the media establishment (Boston and New York: St. Martin's Press, 2001), xiii + 140 pp., ill., $45.00 (cloth).
Darrell M. West lays out an unexpected thesis in this book, arguing that the American media's influence on society and politics has not increased, but decreased in recent years with the proliferation of niche websites and cable television channels. But his argument doesn't quite hold up.
West, the John Hazen White Professor of Political Science and Public Policy at Brown University, devotes the bulk of his concise book to a very readable history of the American press, from the Revolution to the present day. He divides his subject into four eras: the commercial media, the objective media, the interpretive media, and the fragmented media. This hints at where he's headed.
The history is a fine effort for such a short tome, providing the uninitiated with an overview of the major trends, personalities and events of each era. Beginning with the battle between Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson over the very need for a free press, West leads readers briskly through the "yellow journalism" of the late 1800s and on into the modern era of Vietnam, Watergate and the scandals that embroiled Gary Hart, Monica Lewinsky and O.J. Simpson.
The peak of the media's power, West argues, came in the 1960s and 70s, when reporters exposed the fallacy of the Vietnam War and dethroned...