Voices of a Nation: A History of Mass Media in the United States (4th Edition)

Rating:
Summary: Clear and concise, for high school and college students.
Review: Folkerts and Teeters reveal the history of mass media in the United States in an organized, clear and concise manner for all high school and college students. Voices of the Nation takes a good look at all forms of communication, from electronic and print to speaking and persuasion. This up-to-date textbook is a must have for any student of communication or journalism

Rating:
Summary: Voices of a Nation as Rather Bland Media History
Review: The grammer and overall literary style is the least of the problems with this text. Overall it is a reflection of the mass media that it portends to be chronicling. Its factual inaccuracies, lack of historical depth, perpensity towards over-simplification, combined with the bad writing all conspire to make this text an example of the inadequacies of the mass media that pervades society, while providing very little real understanding of what the media has meant to the development of American society. Understandably, it is one of the few texts to deal with the subject and it does make a noble effort at synthesing a great deal of information, but higher demands of both grammer style and factual accuracy should have been placed upon it. As a high school text it may work, but I find it severely lacking in the meat of true historical analysis and understanding of the media within American society. One would find a much better historical analysis of the media in Michael Schudson's "Discovering the News." Though limited in scope, it provides the historical and social analysis that this book is sorely lacking.

Rating:
Summary: Poorly Written and Compiled Book
Review: This was an assigned reading. For the authors, thank god it was required. The book is shallow and poorly constructed. Paragraphs float around in the book with no relevance to a larger meaning or significance. Often information is written without any historical significance or context. The book seems to be merely requoting passages from other, more significant works instead of drawing larger conclusions of the time period. A lot of the information is inaccurate and poorly researched. Indeed, when writing about The New York Herald, the authors don't even both to mention when it was founded. Stay away from this book. I have never read a more difficult and poorly written book.