Historical Sociology on the Paradoxes of News Media This book deals with political crises and how to understand them in historical contexts. Through comparisons of two ground-breaking events in American political history, the book deals with how to understand all comparable events through a particular sociological lens. The author presents a method to understand two political crises; Watergate and Iran-Contra, and then shows us how we can use comparative sociology to untangle similar crises in the past and crises to come. As democratic systems have progressed, political crises are presented...

In this book, the focus is on media ownership of the news media and the effects this might have on news media reporting. We will focus on two relatively recent historical events relevant to what is here described as 'democratic practice, ' i.e. the actual state of a functioning democracy. These events, Watergate and Iran-Contra, are used as test cases to detect possible variations in reporting on the part of the corporate news media in the United States, including ABC news, NBC news, and CBS news. It is often suggested that media consolidation and monopolization has had an adverse effect on...