Book Notes

Noam Chomsky, The New Military Humanism: Lessons from Kosovo (Monroe, ME: Common Courage Press, 1999), 199 pp.

Noam Chomsky is at it again. This time around, the foil for his rapier pen is the post-cold war regime for conducting international affairs, which Chomsky dubs "the New Humanism." The idea behind this New Humanism is for "enlightened states" like the United States and Great Britain to redirect foreign policy from parochial interests to global crusades for justice and human rights. In practice, however, Chomsky argues, implicit moral judgments are drawn about the merits of specific instances of human rights violations. No surprise that, for Chomsky, the media are fully complicit in this nonegalitarian implementation of the New Humanism. In particular, the mass media engage in voluntary "literary censorship" that makes cases like Kosovo appear worthy of intervention and cases like Turkey unworthy of intervention. As with Chomsky's other books, The New Military Humanism is always provocative, often well argued, and sometimes even convincing.

Martin Gilens, Why Americans Hate Welfare: Race, Media, and the Politics of Antipoverty Policy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 296 pp.

For several decades now, welfare bashing has been a popular and profitable political sport in the United States. So much so that Bill Clinton ran for president with a promise to "end welfare as we know it" and then boasted to have done just that with the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996. Also for several decades now, racial attitudes in the United States have been characterized by the uneasy concurrence of overwhelming support for racially egalitarian principles but durable opposition to racially egalitarian policies. Martin Gilens synthesizes these two trends brilliantly in this important and provocative new book. A large measure of public antagonism toward antipoverty policy, Gilens argues, is because welfare has become "racialized." The public equates "poor" with "black" and with stereotypes of African-Americans that make the poor appear "undeserving" of welfare protection from government. Critically, the media's coverage of poverty directly reinforces and reproduces this racialization of poverty. Gilens's arguments are based on meticulous analyses of both opinion polls and television and newsmagazine coverage on poverty. This is an illuminating and myth-breaking work that deserves a careful reading by anyone interested in media effects, social welfare policy, and public opinion.

James Sanders, South Africa and the International Media, 1972-1979 (London: Frank Cass, 2000), 288 pp.

This engaging book examines the South African propaganda apparatus and foreign correspondents during the 1970s. It details the efforts of the South African state to obscure and manipulate the international media's coverage of news out of South Africa during this time. It also describes the general limitations and biases of foreign correspondents: limited sources, paternalism toward disenfranchised blacks, and the murky negotiation of Cold War ideologies in the developing world. These themes are elaborated with careful case studies of three media stories: the meager wages paid to black South Africans by British companies, the Soweto uprising, and South Africa's invasion of Angola. James Sanders's analysis is based largely on some 140 in-depth interviews of journalists, antiapartheid activists, and propagandists within South Africa's Department of Information. This densely documented book fills a conspicuous void in our understanding of the international media and the antiapartheid struggle in South Africa.

Barbara Dianne Savage, Broadcasting Freedom: Radio, War, and the Politics of Race, 1938-1948 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 391 pp.

We live, for better or for worse, in an era in which new communications technologies seem to materialize overnight, each one boasting the potential to transform our social, economic, and political lives profoundly. In Broadcasting Freedom, Barbara Dianne Savage steps back from this dizzying reality to examine a decidedly old communications technology, radio, and its impact on transforming race relations in the United States after World War II. Savage examines national public affairs programming about African-Americans and race relations during the heyday of radio, from...