New review of “Covering America”

This recently appeared in the Midwest Book Review:

The Journalism Shelf

Covering America
Christopher B. Daly
University of Massachusetts Press
PO Box 429
Amherst, MA 01004
9781558499119 $49.95 http://www.umass.edu/umpress

Award-winning author Christopher B. Daly, a veteran journalist as well as an instructor of history and journalism at Boston University, presents Covering America: A Narrative History of a Nation’s Journalism. Covering America lives up to its title with an exhaustively researched, scholarly, and in-depth chronicle of the art and craft of journalism in America, from 1705 to the present day. Chapters discuss the foundations of the American Press including Ben Franklin and his contemporaries, the rise of newspapers; how journalism covered slavery and the Civil War, the Great Depression, World War II, and other monumental historical events; the twentieth century rise of major media conglomerates; and much more. “Whether for-profit or not, the institutions that engage in mass communication have been almost entirely in private hands, separate form the government… From a small-scale shop to a factory-sized corporation to a global conglomerate, the news business as a business has kept pace with broader trends. That process has in turn created a recurring set of crises in which the values of journalism have come into conflict with the values of business.” A handful of vintage black-and-white photographs illustrate this meticulous, methodical, and absolutely invaluable contribution to history and journalism shelves, worthy of the highest recommendation especially for public and college library collections.