Media Warfare

The concluding volume of Melvin Lasky's monumental The Language of Journalism pays particular attention to the gradual easing and near disappearance of censorship rules in the 1960s and after and the attendant effects on electronic and print media. In lively and irreverent prose, Lasky anatomizes the dilemmas posed by the entrance of formerly "unmentionable" subjects into daily journalistic discourse, whether for reasons of profit or accurate reporting. He details the pervasive and...
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The concluding volume of Melvin Lasky's monumental The Language of Journalism pays particular attention to the gradual easing and near disappearance of censorship rules in the 1960s and after and the attendant effects on electronic and print media. In lively and irreverent prose, Lasky anatomizes the dilemmas posed by the entrance of formerly "unmentionable" subjects into daily journalistic discourse, whether for reasons of profit or accurate reporting. He details the pervasive and often indirect influence of the worlds of fashion and advertising on journalism with their imperatives of sensationalism and novelty and, by contrast, how the freeing of language and subject matter in literature--the novels of Joyce and Lawrence, the poetry of Philip Larkin-- have affected permissible expression for good or ill.