Book Review
The Whole Scholar Catalog
Patricia
Aufderheide,
American University
The
Daily Planet: A Critic on the Capitalist Culture Beat
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000
368 pages, 5 7/8 by 9 inches. $19.95 Paper ISBN 0-8166-3342-8 ; $49.95 Cloth
ISBN 0-8166-3341-X
It is rare to see a scholar of political communication as a fully rounded, engaged citizen. The work we do in our field tends to exist in isolation from other parts of our intellectual and everyday lives. Unless one knows a scholar personally, the ways a research agenda develops and connects with forms of public service and teaching and with acts of civic engagement tend to hide behind the veil of academic impartiality. The Daily Planet is a rare look at a scholar's work in a fully rounded life.
Patricia Aufderheide, professor in the School of Communication at American University in Washington, D.C., and a senior editor of In These Times magazine, has collected twenty-seven articles and essays in her latest book, a large enough selection to make the book useful to a wide variety of readers, who will want to scan some articles, dip into others, and study the rest in detail. There are plenty of options. They range from very brief articles (3 pages) to extended research essays (22 pages), and each one clearly speaks to a constituency.
Scholars will find such essays as "Public Broadcasting and the Public Sphere" thorough and enlightening, based on historical information that does not go out of date. It is the sort of research article that becomes a basic reference tool and a refresher course rolled into one.
Activists will be fascinated by articles describing the nuts and bolts of political life and how it is influenced in Washington. Her account in the introduction of running a one-person (what to call it? lobbying? outreach?) operation is full of telling detail, down to the turned-up noses at her dot-matrix printer. "Doing Business with the Democrats," her short piece on meeting with the transition team for the Clinton Administration, is a lesson in the limits of intellectual influence.
Professionals will find the essay, "Paul Harvey and the Culture of Resentment," a clear example of evenhanded media biography, analysis, and criticism. Aufderheide is frank about the marketing of Harvey (which approaches the control measures of, say, an Arnold Schwarzenegger) and its impact on anyone studying him as a media phenomenon. She is also balanced in her discussion of his impact on people's thinking.
General readers will probably find most engaging her personal essays. "Oh Grow Up," the closing piece on her immersion in and reemergence from full-time child-rearing, is the most memorable of these, although personal touches appear in many of the essays. Students will find these nicely balance the scholarly studies (which do explain such things as her research methods) and give them a chance to see what the intellectual life is like, what a scholar does.
The book breaks with the turgid norm for scholarly writing. It rarely lapses into jargon or sinks to academic phraseology. Aufderheide writes clearly and directly, as if in conversation. Although I have met her only a few times, I had the distinct sense that I was sitting down with a scholar-as-friend. The Daily Planet is a distinct pleasure to read.
The research has all been published before, but in venues so scattered — Afterimage, legal briefs, the pages of newspapers and magazines, as well as scholarly journals — that it would be difficult for anyone within one of her fields of interest to know much about her others.
The political dimension runs through all the essays, but members from our specialty might not be familiar with her work within visual communication, for example, or within new media technology. Her wide range may make the book hard to classify but speaks highly of her versatility as a scholar and confirms her claim to be a public intellectual.
To guide the reader, The Daily Planet includes a brief introduction to each essay, and a complete list of the original publications is provided at the end of the volume. These signposts make the book useful, as well as insightful and original. My only reservation about the collection is its seeming finality. At the end, Aufderheide includes excerpts from published interviews she conducted as a reporter/writer on assignment. One unfamiliar with the author could be left wondering if the book might be a definitive collected works. Luckily, we can expect to see much more to come from this remarkable colleague.