Publications and Media Books

If you ever thought you knew about the world...think again! Commander X will astonish you and open your eyes to the truth of this world and what will be. Religious and not religious alike...brace yourselves. All the things on the sci-fi channel ARE NOT, I REPEAT ARE NOT MADE-UP!!! These stories are exaggerated truths of whats really going on but dressed up as fiction. The whole hollow earth theory is really portrayed here because aliens are not entirely from distant world but are in actually here in our own galaxy and our own planet. A must read for a serious truth seeker. Keep it spiritual because that's what its all about people!!! A excellent read!!

When I read the reviews for this book prior to buying it and found that most of them were less than complimentary, I took that with a grain of salt. Part of me even thought that some of the reviews may have been "planted" to discourage the public from purchasing this book. I had never read anything by Commander X before so I was curious, but even after reading the book I hadn't read anything by X. The entire book is hodgepodge of different authors and random articles pulled off the internet. It does, however, offer some interesting theories and musings which are entertaining, but few are backed by any extensive evidence. I'm not going to tell you not to buy this book because I did, and you may want to read it for yourself to decide where you stand. If you're like me you'll find the part written by Branton particularly incoherent and I'll leave you with the two words in his section that made me put this book down, "communist homosexuals".

I mean come on. Over $20 for only 100 pages? This "Commander X" character is trying to win the lottery by putting out skimpy books that could easily be condensed into one volume. But that's not all - all of this information (and much more, in fact) can easily be found for free on the Internet. Commander X = RIPOFF.

COMMANDER X CLAIMS TO HAVE BEEN HIGH UP IN THE SECRET GOVERNMENT. HE SIMILARLY CLAIMS TO HAVE BEEN IN CHARGE OF MAJOR SECRET PROJECTS ETC ETC ETC.
THE GUY CANT EVEN STRUCTURE A SENTENCE THE BOOK IS POORLY WRITTEN AND IS FULL OF GRAMMATIC ERRORS AND SENSATIONALISM. A GOVERNMENT WHO EMPLOYS SUCH A GUY (MR x) (PROBABLY CANT SPELL HIS NAME)TO PREPEARE REPORT FOR THEM WE HAVE NO NEED TO FEAR.
THERE IS ABSOLUTELY NO EVIDENCE PROVIDED BY HIM.
IT MAKES A GOOD YARN HOWEVER FOR PRE-SCHOOLERS.

PS EXCUSE THE ERRORS MRX TRAINED.

I have the first edition of this book, and recently bought the expanded edition. Most of the new material is available on the Internet if you know where to look, so it wasn't new to me, and none of the illustrations in the book are original, although many readers may not have seen them previously. That said, I will admit that this is one of the best compilations of material on reptilian, or scaly-skinned aliens (UFO occupants) currently available. Some of the information in the book is downright paranoid, as is often the case with published information regarding secretive reptilian humanoids. The book also was produced on a very low budget, as is evident from the simple magazine type binding, with additional material simply thrown in as inserts. Nevertheless, I would recommend this for the collection of anyone seriously interested in reports of reptilian humanoids and their possible role within the UFO phenomenon and the world in general. Just remember to take it with a grain of salt, as no one really knows what the big picture really is regarding this subject.

The audio book is a great addition to my listening collection. It serves as a good overview for anyone new to Scrum. While the audio quality was not perfect, the speaker was easy to understand and provided excellent information. I recommend this to anyone who cannot attend a seminar in person.

It was great hearing a seminar on Scrum. But It has its lacks, it is a recorded seminar and the audice ask Quastions you cannot hear, only the answer. The is anoying and frustrating in this audio. But the speak is quite competent and intertaining

Reviewed by Regan Windsor for Reader Views (9/06)

Scrum is a term taken from the sport of rugby which refers to the process used to get the ball back in play. Taken from a project management perspective it is used to continuously get projects back on track. Part of the Agile philosophy of placing a high importance on the human side of the project, it focuses on working with the customer to follow a process of developing iterations, going over the project with the customer, determining any changes, and continuing with the next iteration.

"Agile Project Management Using Scrum" is a live taping of a presentation of the same name given by Kevin Aguanno, a specialist in managing complex consulting, integration, and software development projects. While the Scrum has its roots in IT software development projects, its methodology is applicable to a wide range of projects both within and outside the scope of IT.

The constant focus on receiving validation throughout the project reduces the risk of falling outside the scope, budget, or time constraints of the project. It also ensures that project retains validity and usefulness to the customer -- providing what they need as opposed to what they ask for. This is accomplished by ensuring the project team has a strong understanding of what the client is using the software for, what is behind the changes they request, and where the strongest risk in the project lies, whether it be the scope, the dollars, or the time.

Scrum cannot be applied to all projects. Its focus is on projects that have aspects of "good enough" as opposed to high risk or critical projects. The methodology, however, still has value and can be applied to pieces of many project.

"Agile Project Management Using Scrum" delivers a concise summary of the Agile philosophy and the methodology surrounding Scrum. Useful as a tool to be utilized in the quick and successful completion of a broad spectrum of projects, you will also find in its methodology a management philosophy applicable beyond the project environment. A useful tool for all who manage!

I was expecting a little more on the subject of Agile. I didn't know enough about the subject to know that Scrum is apparently a special version / process of Agile.

RRR

I have been doing Project Management for about eight years. I had heard of Agile Development, but only had a loose idea of what it was. I had never heard of SCRUM. I found this CD to be a very informative experience. It is a recording of a speaking engagement by Kevin Aguanno, a Canadian certified PM and Agile/SCRUM expert.

While the sound quality could be better, as I listened to the approximately hour long presentation, I found myself worrying less about the sound quality and becoming more interested in the content. Mr. Aguanno gives a concise overview of Agile Development methods and SCRUM; what they are, when and how to use them, and illustrates his lecture with many on point examples from his own experience. He even explains where the name SCRUM is derived from!

This is NOT an in depth course. This is an overview, an introduction. If you want project plans and lengthy documentation, look elsewhere. If what you are looking for is an introduction to SCRUM, what it is and when to use it, you will be very, very satisfied with this audio CD!

This book functions as an excellent outline for reflecting on rhetoric and propaganda through the ages. The authors review the history and literature of propaganda pretty thoroughly. Not much scholarship on the subject seems to have escaped their attention. You can use the references at the back of the text as a good guide to all the major academic books and articles on propaganda (at least those that have been written over the past fifty years).

After attempting to define propaganda, the authors devote the first half of the book to a historical survey of the subject, from ancient times to the present. The second half of the book is devoted to an analysis of the techniques of propaganda. My only negative critique of this book is that the authors are not fluid writers. But this did not put me off from reading the book in its entirety. I'm often impatient with awkward wording, or choppiness of phrase in a book, but the authors' thoroughness of documentation, and their commitment to survey and summarize the academic literature thoroughly, makes the text worthy of close (if sometimes painful) reading.

The overwealming impression that I got from the Propaganda and Persuasion was that it was muddled and poorly put together. I would probably rate it at three stars but there are enough gems in this to justify a four. Even though the flow of the book is clunky you will end up taking away a lot from it.

My first complaint is that the book spends a lot of time tripping over the definition of propaganda. There is obviously quite a bit of rigorous academic debate on exactly what propaganda is but the book has trouble deciding how, when and in what format it wants to present the debate. Rather than coming up with a coherent, consistently used definition of propaganda (or even multiple definitions that are used in parallel) it haphazardly loops back on itself covering the same information two and three times.

I think this accounts for roughly 75-100 extra pages that would have been more useful as examples of propaganda throughout the ages, more rigorous analysis using the constructs presented, or even just pictures. The book has a few very cool pictures of propagandistic architecture, art, and old posters from wars. I would have been much happier with more pictures of actual propaganda that were deconstructed using the theories presented.

Coverage of the propaganda leading up to and through the first gulf war was better than nothing but certainly not what I would expect from academic material. The authors managed to strip down a fairly interesting subject into kind of blah coverage. It should also be noted that this book covers a reasonably basic view of history, something that might be suitable for first or second year undergraduates. That's not a complaint per se, just something you should know.

The book also takes on a lot of info regarding abstract theories of communication. In this respect I think this book would work quite well as a reference for a communications class but even there it is a little weak on explanations in some places.

Although my review may seem overly negative there is a lot of good content in this book that will REALLY make you think. Very quickly I could see that most people use the term propaganda incorrectly. The perfect example of this is the other reviewer who thought the book itself was propaganda because of a "liberal" slant.

Even if you accept the (dubious) argument that the book has a liberal bias that does not meet even the lightest qualifications for propaganda. Does the book contain intentional lies that are psychologically designed to subvert the readers own best interest? Do Jowett and O'Donnell hide or misrepresent their own identities in order to perpetuate this deception? Do they use creative artisanship to promote poorly reasoned support for government programs? NO, NO, NO and if anonymous reader has gotten past the third chapter they would know this book is not propaganda!

Since reading the book it appears that when most people say "x is propaganda" what they really mean is "x is an opinion/fact that I don't really like and want to suppress by labeling it propaganda." In this sense the word propaganda is frequently a "white" form of propaganda itself. Whoa....meta! Admittedly the book does dig on Rush Limbaugh in passing but justly so, he's said some insanely stupid stuff. If you're a fan of his parts of the book will make your ego a bit sore.

The book also impacted to a very large degree the way I conceive of political maneuvering by all governments. It appears that most leaders are not in fact agents of a populace but instead working out what they can get the populace to put up with. That is of course something that I took away not anything the book proclaims. Prop and Persuasion wins stars because it is awash in compelling anecdotes that I ended up sharing with friends and family. Despite what I said above there is some crucial explorations of propaganda taxonomy. Perhaps the book is even worth a read for these alone.

However, this book failed to pass the ultimate textbook test, at the end of the semester almost all of the students I took the class with trashed or resold the book. Even more telling is that most people decided not to read it at all. My complaint was that the book was poorly ordered everyone else in my class thought it was dry and uninspiring. I can see where they are coming from and accept that maybe my personal interest in the subject influences my opinion. I even showed the book to 2 other friends and they both found the writing unengaging. I certainly don't think that was the case but I since this is a review I want to encompass as many opinions as possible. Personally, I was actually looking forward to the class and read 80% of the book before the semester even started.

My final say is that this is a decent book for a classroom setting. I would have enjoyed reading it for it's own sake but among my peers (whom I consider to be highly educated, intelligent and witty) it was a dud. If you liked this or are generally interested in the subject matter I would also recommend Toxic Sludge is Good For You by John Stauber and Sheldon Rampton. It manages to tell many of the same stories in a more interesting way while using less space. Another winner is Noam Chomsky's short and sweet Media Control:Spectacular Achievements in Propaganda. You won't agree with ALL of his views but it's concentrated, hard hitting and rigorous.

Cheers and Happy Reading!
-TitaniumDreads

I was looking forward to a fair and unbiased book about propaganda, so was saddened to see this hope dashed by chapter 3. At this point, several books by conservative authors like Limbaugh, Bennett, and Bloom are referenced, and the authors start using a lot of "quotes" when referring to these authors--of the sort you use when you want to indicate that a thought is silly or wrongheaded. The authors even comment on individuals who make time to "read" these polemical books (their use of quotes indicating that the works aren't readworthy--presumably because they're conservative). I noticed that the discussion only treated conservative icons and books as sources of propaganda in this discussion. Might I take the time to remind authors Jowett & O'Donnell that many liberal authors, such as Franken, Moore, Dubose, Hightower, Conason, and a host of others, exist on the far left--shouldn't these be included in a balanced list of polemical authors? In the next edition of this book, I hope the authors attept more balance in examining a topic that demands fairness. Jowett and O'Donnell might want to include "books" by liberal "authors" as examples of propganda, too, so that readers don't get the wrongheaded impression this book is not just ABOUT propaganda, it is also a SOURCE of propaganda. One shouldn't get the impression that the authors have liberal political biases that are leaking through the page. It's hard to take the authors of this topic seriously if they can't camouflage their own desire to influence opinion.

What campaigns have effectively changed public opinions over the years and how were they propagated? This book provides some answers as it traces such movements.

The book opens with a discussion on the differences between propaganda and persuasion. It takes up from there in the second chapter with a look at propaganda's early use in the Church. It was positive, as in propagating the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

Later propaganda became institutionalized, as explained in chapter three. In the fourth chatper, the authors begin to examine modern propaganda campaigns. Toward the end some case studies are given. And the concluding chapter talks about how propaganda works in modern society.

Propaganda (doctrines, ideas, arguments, facts, or allegations spread by deliberate effort through any medium of communication in order to further one's cause or to damage an opposing cause) is something that may or may not actually be true. Sadly Jowett focuses on conservatives and ignores leftists who control the media in many countries in the West such as the BBC, NPR, NBC, CBS, ABC, the NY Times, etc.
Yes, both ends of the political spectrum disseminate "propaganda" but in Jowett's view, only conservatives engage in it, and they are always "wrong."
The truth is far more complex, and Jowett does a very poor job of having any semblance of balance in a complex subject.
The only reason I gave this piece of leftist garbage one star is that is the lowest rating you can give. The sad part of this is that this book is used as a teaching tool by many leftists in academia today to indoctrinate, and not educate, their students by using propaganda tools like this loathsome book.

I was so disapointed when I received this book and started going through it. The pages were childish, the activities (if you could call them that) were absolutly stupid! Out of the entire book I could maybe use 3 or 4 in a real substitute teaching situation. Maybe a regular teacher could use some of the ideas, but I'm a substitute teacher and there is no way that you could use these so called activities. I am so disapointed and don't recommend this to any substitute teacher. Poor contents and poorly illustrated :(

I substitute teach and have found this book's activities to be very useful as time fillers and lessons. The students have enjoyed the activities.

Last year was my first year as a substitute teacher. I found that having this book with me saved me several times. The activities are clever. My 8th and 9th grade students loved the wordles. The younger loved the squiggles.

I wouldn't enter a classroom without this book!

This book was not helpful at all. I take substitute teaching and education seriously. I was looking for real activities that I could use when the teacher did not leave plans or if I had a few minutes to spare. The activities were not original or helpful.
Additionally, the pages looked like a child designed them. It was not professional. Neither was the publishing. Much of the ink was faded.

I found that this book is full of many reproducibles and ideas to keep students busy in the classroom. Although I plan on using it while substituting, classroom teachers can use many of these activities when their lessons run short or they have 5 or 10 minutes to fill.

This is all amateur common sense stuff. It is clearly a power point presentation and the speaker is not very experienced. Basically the whole thing can be summed up in one sentence:

"PMBOK Rules are Guidelines and you should still excercise common sense in their usage."

This taped seminar is far from the quality and value of other project management products on the market. The speaker can be insightful at times during the seminar but by in large he is simply regurgitating lessons learned by any PM with 2 years or more experience.

Reviewed by Bette Daoust, PhD for Reader Views (8/06)

At first glance of the title, you may wonder if you actually need to follow the rules for project management. In actuality, it is more like who should actually break the rules and when. The answer to this question is delicately dealt with in this audio CD. Paul Berman recommends not breaking any rules until you are an expert. An expert is one who knows all the ways not to do something. His analogy is to learn to color the picture within the lines first and really know how to do it well. Once you have mastered being within the lines, then discover what coloring outside the lines will do to the overall picture.

I really agree that there is no place for innovation in project management unless you are an expert with the basics. However, once the basics are mastered, being able to discover unique solutions is the key to being a successful project manager.

Do you want to break the rules in project management? If so, then listen closely to what Paul Bergman has to say on this CD.

This is a recording of a live seminar. Audio was pretty good, information was of value. If you are interested in this stuff or simply need to hear confirmation of what you've thought about project management then this is your audio book.

this book was a waste of money! The pictures looked like cartoons and the instructions were non existant! The only instructions were in the last few pages and they were very vague. Like, details may be added now. That doesn't help much. Needs details like feather patterns abd brush strokes for feathers. I might as well have thrown $10.00 out the window.

The book is inexpensive and provides basic images of several duck species. However, it provides painting instructions only for mallards. For example, the book lists the primary paint colors for the other species, but it doesn't offer any information as to which of these colors are to be mixed to obtain the colors depicted in the images. This was a problem when I needed to repaint by Woodie dekes.

If you're looking for a super-accurate detail-oriented definitive authority on duck plumage, you won't find it in "Painting Duck Decoys..." The 24 color plates within could've been done by any budding high school art student. If not crude, they are at best poor approximations, not terribly useful for anyone concerned with painting decoys realistically. Perhaps the proportions of the ducks depicted will be of use to some. But most serious artists will undoubtedly find much more accurate information in books featuring photographs rather than the amateurish paintings in "Painting Duck Decoys..."

I am excited to see this book being offered at Amazon.com I became familiar with Anthony Hillman's book when I began painting my own decoys and had trouble finding any refrence material at hobby shops, craft stores or sportsman shops but my wife called our local library and found this book and it has been a God send. People have been very impressed with my refurbished decoys! So were the ducks! Although I am finnished painting my decoys, I am going to buy a copy for my collection! It is a piece of art in it self, The illustrations are crisp, clear and precise. The instructions are freindly enough for a beginner! I want to thank the author, Anthony Hillman for sharing his knowlege in his book. I have looked at all the hunting catalogs and have found that with the help of Anthony's book, my decoys look more realistic and I have saved money that I would have forked out for at least 4 dozen new decoys.

This was the only text used in a recent Communication course. It is very very "dry", and difficult to get through in a 6 wk course. Good to keep on the shelf for Comm majors. Good luck if you are required to use it as I did! Yikes.

This book provides a solid overview of Organizational Communication from a scholarly perspective. The authors do an excellenct job of identifying and elaborating on key issues, elaborating on related inquiry and elaborating on future considerations for the field.

This book characterizes much of what is wrong with the current way in which text-books are pumped out by authors/academics/publishers to serve as a new yet ultimately qualitatively useless addition to the heap of knowledge in any given field. It is not that the topics presented here are useless, meaningless or anything of the sort, it is simply that the mediocrity with which they are written about and presented to the reader- supposedly a student attempting to learn about these subjects- is apparant on nearly every page.
If the mark of someone who truly understands their field of study is their ability to clearly and easily convey and teach it to others, than many of the contributors to this book do not truly understand their field, certainly not to the extent that they should when being held up as the fore front of their academic field. Read or Buy if you must, but turn to others sources for a better reading and learning experience.

I recently recieved this book for Christmas. As an aspiring comic and cartoon artist, I usually try to pick up as many books concerning the subject as I can; they are few and far between. I was excited at first, but upon reading through it, I was very disappointed. Not only did I not learn very little that was new for me from this book, it did not deal in depth with either the art or the more technical side of comic books (the writing, the layouts, the character development, and so on). It DID provide some minute details that I hadn't run into, such as average page numbers and page sizes, but that was about the extent of the book's usefulness. I believe, however, that this book was intended for a different audience; mainly, those people who are trying to draw comics for the first time. This book will more than likely give them a generalized overview of what the genre is that they are looking at. However, to the more experienced artist, who has been at the drawing board for a year or two and with a few other comic instruction books on his shelf, this book doesn't deliver.

If you are an aspiring comic book artist looking to take the next step - from merely sitting at your desk and sketching to making publishing-ready work, this book can help point out this little details that most overlook or fail to learn.

This book is an incredibly elitist rabid intellectual rant, highly opinionated and abstract that were it written by a student it would be judged to be incoherent.Do you know what diegesis means?...becuase i couldn't find it even in a good dictionary.and that's just the tip of the iceberg. As an attempt to communicate it is lousy except to about 10 people in the world who might describe it as a rattling good read...name dropping practically every sentence,showing off prodigious intellectual prowess at the expense of communication.Are you a lecturer? Do you want to ruin the lives of your students? Then tell them to read this.

The digital explosion is ushering in a frightening future built upon transnational structures of power and greed presided over by the high priests of technology and management. But it is not too late to fight for an alternative future shaped not by the corporate cyborg but by aesthetics, the "pursuit of an ethical mode of being ... despite the conditions in which we find ourselves" of "being digital".

Sean Cubitt spits in the face of the digerati (a species of Cyclops who rule in the land of the blind masses) who foresee an infinitely expanding seamless web of information into which all humankind and industry must disappear. Reader in Video and Media Studies at the Liverpool John Moraes University, Cubitt dives into the multi-disciplinary welter of knowledge architectures to distill hard truths from the technobabble of the technotopians. "The fastest and widest impact that computers have had is in deepening the class structures of contemporary society on a global scale ... the demolition, not just of jobs, of communities and of cultures, but of hope itself as a direct or indirect effect of the electronics communication that have enabled the entirely destructive expansion of finance capital," he writes.

Resistance to and subversion of the "matrix", the technetronic, computer-mediated space dreamed up by sci-fi writer William Gibson in which giant corporations call the shots, offered by hackers, crackers and phreaks is an infantile reaction to a global technology which "while offering the appearance of naturalness and emancipation from onerous chores, introduces new orders of supervision and surveillance", Cubitt points out.

His book, a critique of the hard-sell of the digital revolution, is a mine of information as Cubitt apprehends the linkages between technological developments and their consequences for human society.

The problem of the promised utopia is that communication is reduced to aggression, command, power and submission. The matrix, into which the corporations want everyone and everything jacked in, is coded for the re-engineering of the human soul. The synergistic corporation is the actually existing cyborg, "not an assemblage of people but a machine ensemble ...a massive processing machine whose employees and consumers are its biochips", he warns.

The attack on extant cultures is multi-pronged. At the level of language, English is the standard, "oppressor" language of the Net, eroding the core role of other languages and cultural contexts. "Corporate culture responds to micro-cultural resistance with target marketing." And the designers of the Macintosh and Windows WIMP (window-icon-menu-pointer) interface further saw that "images have a greater efficiency in imparting information than language does" in combination with the expansion of the global market.

Cubitt analyses the process and aesthetics of reading since the human-computer interface allows the infinite generation of texts capable of varied readings. The traditional private and public experience of reading is replaced by the playful, the fantasy. This suits the digerati who foist an illusion of heightened individualism ("the user is in control") and mass personalization on consumers of the digital myth.

Transvestitism and tourism are the features of the Net, much lauded but in truth symptomatic of the shifting, fragmentation and disintegration of the self, Cubitt notes. The new individualism is a projection of the corporate cyborg. Control remains in the hands of the elite who code the heart and confines of the technologies bequeathed to users who are integrated into command heirarchies.

The creation of libraries was followed by the development of systems of classification of information. The synthetic Colon Classification cataloguing system developed by S.R. Ranganathan in 1933 became the founding principle of mechanical systems of information retrieval, the grandparent of Internet search engines and similar knowledge architectures, "no longer dependent on humanist mnemonic culture". Memory fails, and so does meaning, when everything is reduced to an eternal now in real time.

The individual is in danger of losing all privacy with the creation of databases which render him as a "data image" or a "data self". The "real" self is reduced to "mere" writing in binary code, a ghost in the machine. Bizarre forms of desocialisation appear in cyber cultures, community is sacrificed for competition. "To restore the social requires dismantling the binary to build a concept of mediation between presence and absence ... the materiality of media, people and their objects", Cubitt suggests.

He pours cold water on the prophecies of cyber-theologians who deny mortality, the post-humanists and transhumanists who speak of erasing the body and de-materializing the complex human processes of socialization in their fantasies of "downloading the meat-mind into the matrix" and being "human as program or human in programs".

As Cubitt makes his radical analysis of the histories and contributions of poetry, philosophy, art, radio, cinema, video, space technologies, remote sensing and the Hubble telescope, he unveils the magical braid running through it all. "Between the data records and its interpreters there always lies the work of manipulation," he warns. It has to do with the degradation of all "material", including "nature, human-modified nature, human-produced nature and human nature itself" to consumable commodities.

The digitally controlled play-world promises coherence and universalisation, homogenization. It leads to hyper-individualization and dispersion in cyberspace and "the sociality of images and implicitly of shared experience" is lost.

Digital aesthetics, concerned with the question of the future and the whole field of possibilities, suggests that the utopian question cannot be resolved by moving inexorably towards a corporatised technotopia. It must emerge from the shadow of corporate culture, that consciousness industry whose objective is to create brand identity adhered to by synergistic personalities forged through the introduction of play into work, masquerades, role-plays, simulations and alter egos, Cubitt says.

Digital aesthetics must break "the grip of the networked society's culture of selves", refuse being retrofitted into the corporate cyborg and "reinvent the machineries, the processes and selves of human-machine communication", Cubitt states. Thus the foundations for an evolutionary future which is genuinely global and democratic and outside the administered boundaries of the synergistic corporation can be laid. Is humanity up to this challenge? (the end)

With all due respect for Mr. Stevens, the premise of my book is just the opposite of the one he reports. The entire book argues that the market CANNOT be trusted with a commodity like news.

McManus writes this book examining local broadcast television news and the influences that impact the news gathering/presentation process.

The book does a good job of showing how marketing influences have become routinized in the process and even does a good job justifying why this is not alarming.

However, when expanded to journalism as a process, McManus's scope loses its focus. He builds a case suggesting that since the marketplace decides what news products can or will survive, a market-driven model will produce the best journalism. The obvious glaring gap in this logic is the assumption that consumers and marketing firms will evaluate journalistic media based solely on journalism standards, and not other over-riding elements, such as entertainment or convenience.

Overall, McManus' book is very sharp at explaining the influences presently affecting local news stations. Despite my obvious disagreement with his ultimate conclusions, I would recommend this book for its literature review and discussion of the environment.