Documentary film can encompass anything from Robert Flaherty's pioneering ethnography Nanook of the North to Michael Moore's anti-Iraq War polemic Fahrenheit 9/11, from Dziga Vertov's artful Soviet propaganda piece Man with a Movie Camera to Luc Jacquet's heart-tugging wildlife epic March of the Penguins. In this concise, crisply written guide, Patricia Aufderheide takes readers along the diverse paths of documentary history and charts the lively, often fierce debates among filmmakers and scholars about the best ways to represent reality and to...

The Daily Planet is a long-awaited selection of Patricia Aufderheide's most important critical essays, updated and organized thematically to demonstrate the breadth of her thinking on media and film, public telecommunications policy, and contemporary society. The result is a pithy and provocative exploration of "the culture of daily life under capitalism".

Here, Aufderheide demonstrates criticism that is both activist and analytical. She probes the processes that shape our culture by examining diverse subjects, including the struggle to create quality children's television programming, the...

The Daily Planet is a long-awaited selection of Patricia Aufderheide's most important critical essays, updated and organized thematically to demonstrate the breadth of her thinking on media and film, public telecommunications policy, and contemporary society. The result is a pithy and provocative exploration of "the culture of daily life under capitalism".

Here, Aufderheide demonstrates criticism that is both activist and analytical. She probes the processes that shape our culture by examining diverse subjects, including the struggle to create quality children's television programming, the...

The passage of the Telecommunications Act of 1996 inaugurated a new and highly volatile era in telecommunications. The first major overhaul of U.S. communications law since 1934--when no one had a television set, a cordless phone, or a computer--the Act was spurred into being by broad shifts in technology use. Equally important, this book shows, the new law reflects important changes in our notions of the purpose of communications regulation and how it should be deployed. Focusing on the evolution of the concept of the public interest, Aufderheide examines how and why the legislation was...

Beginning with a survey of the contemporary landscape of copyright law, Aufderheide and Jaszi drew on their years of experience advising documentary filmmakers, English teachers, performing arts scholars, and other creative professionals to lay out in detail how the principles of fair use can be employed to avoid copyright violation.