The first book to demonstrate that, for the entire George W. Bush presidency, the news media utterly failed in their duty as watchdog for the public. In blistering prose, Eric Boehlert reveals how, time after time, the press chose a soft approach to covering the government, and as a result reported and analyzed crucial events incompletely and even inaccurately. From WMDs to Valerie Plame to the NSA's domestic spying, mainstream fixtures such as The New York Times, CBS, CNN, and Time magazine too often ignored the administration's missteps and misleading words, and did not call out the public officials who betrayed the country's trust. Throughout both presidential campaigns and the entire Iraq war to date, the media acted as a virtual mouthpiece for the White House, giving watered-down coverage of major policy decisions, wartime abuses of power, and egregious mistakes -- and sometimes these events never made it into the news at all. Finally, in Lapdogs, the press is being held accountable by one of its own. Boehlert homes in on the reasons the press did not do its job: a personal affinity for Bush that journalists rarely displayed toward his predecessor, Bill Clinton; a Republican White House that threatened to deny access to members of the media who asked challenging questions or voiced criticism; and a press that feared being tainted by accusations of liberal bias. Moreover, journalists -- who may have wanted to report accurately on the important stories -- often found themselves at cross-purposes with media executives, many of whom were increasingly driven by economic concerns. Cowed by all of these factors, the media abandoned their traditional role of stirring up meaningful public debate. Boehlert asserts that the Bush White House never subscribed to the view -- commonly held by previous administrations -- that a relationship with the press is an important part of the democratic process. Instead, it saw the press as just another special interest group that needed to be either appeased or held at bay -- or, in some cases, squashed. The administration actively undermined the basic tenets of accurate and fair journalism, and reporters and editors accepted their reduced roles without a whimper. To an unprecedented degree, journalists too often stopped asking uncomfortable questions of people in power. In essence, the entire purpose and pursuit of journalism was sacrificed. Riveting in its sharp denouncement, supported by dozens of glaring and troubling examples of journalistic malpractice, Lapdogs thoroughly dissects the press's misconduct during Bush's presidency and gives voice to the growing public dismay with the mainstream media.

Lapdogs of the Bourgeoisie investigates the latent issue of class underlying the field of contemporary visual art. On the one hand, it raises the question of whether a given socioeconomic background still helps define your artistic career--and to which point the said career might reflect or consolidate the hierarchies in question. On the other hand, the project asks whether the traditional analytical tools at our disposal are helpful in such an examination of the art world today. Class inevitably raises awkward questions regarding the very participants, their backgrounds, patrons, and ideological partialities. This is perhaps the reason why the role of class structure has been so easily overlooked in the production and presentation of contemporary art, especially so in an era where artists are coaxed into anthropological framings of their practice. What was it that made gender, sexuality, ethnicity, and nationality eclipse the class issue with such ease? Lapdogs of the Bourgeoisie presents a collaborative project with a number of practitioners that scrutinize their own positions, bias, and gaze within the hierarchy of cultural production. It seeks to identify the levels of affect class has in the field--from artists, through to curators, institutions, and even audiences--and also looks at the hidden anxieties involved, particularly in relation to the actual decision-makers in mainstream art. Contributors Charlotte Bydler, Neil Cummings, Annika Eriksson, Chris Evans, Liam Gillick, Nav Haq, San Keller, Hassan Khan, Erden Kosova, Dr. Suhail Malik, Marion von Osten, Natascha Sadr Haghighian, Dr. Malcolm Quinn, Tirdad Zolghadr

This collection enriches and complicates the history of prose fiction between Richardson and Fielding at mid-century and Austen at the turn of the century by focusing on it-narratives, a once popular form largely forgotten by readers and critics alike. The volume also advances important work on eighteenth-century consumer culture and the theory of things. The essays that comprise The Secret Life of Things thus bring new texts, and new ways of thinking about familiar ones, to our notice. Those essays range from the role of it-narratives in period debates about copyright to their complex relationship with object-riddled sentimental fictions, from anti-semitism in Chrysal to jingoistic imperialism in The Adventures of a Rupee, from the it-narrative as a variety of whore's biography to a consideration of its contributions to an emergent middle-class ideology.

Countries increasingly rely on independent fiscal councils to constrain policymakers’ discretion and curb the bias towards excessive deficits and pro-cyclical policies. Since fiscal councils are often recent and heterogeneous across countries, assessing their impact is challenging. Using the latest (2016) vintage of the IMF Fiscal Council Dataset, we focus on two tasks expected to strengthen fiscal performance: the preparation or assessment of forecasts, and the monitoring of compliance with fiscal rules. Tentative econometric evidence suggests that the presence of a fiscal council is associated with more accurate and less optimistic fiscal forecasts, as well as greater compliance with fiscal rules.

Before 1660, English readers and theatergoers had never heard of a "coquette"; by the early 1700s, they could hardly watch a play, read a poem, or peruse a newspaper without encountering one. Why does British literature of this period pay so much attention to vain and flirtatious young women? Our Coquettes examines the ubiquity of the coquette in the eighteenth century to show how this figure enables authors to comment upon a series of significant social and economic developments—including the growth of consumer culture, widespread new wealth, increased travel and global trade, and changes in the perception and practice of marriage. The book surveys stage comedies, periodical essays, satirical poems, popular songs, and didactic novels to show that the early coquette is a figure of capacious desire: she finds pleasure in a wide range of choices, refusing to narrow any field of possibilities (admirers, luxury goods, friends, pets, public gatherings) down to a single option. Whereas scholars of the period have generally read the coquette as a simple and self-evident type, Our Coquettes emphasizes what is strange and surprising about this figure, revealing the coquette to be a touchstone in developing discourses about sexuality, consumerism, empire, and modernity itself. Winner of the Walker Cowen Memorial Prize for an outstanding work of scholarship in eighteenth-century studies

Oriental Networks explores forms of interconnectedness between Western and Eastern hemispheres during the long eighteenth century, a period of improving transportation technology, expansion of intercultural contacts, and the emergence of a global economy. In eight case studies and a substantial introduction, the volume examines relationships between individuals and institutions, precursors to modern networks that engaged in forms of intercultural exchange. Addressing the exchange of cultural commodities (plants, animals, and artifacts), cultural practices and ideas, the roles of ambassadors and interlopers, and the literary and artistic representation of networks, networkers, and networking, contributors discuss the effects on people previously separated by vast geographical and cultural distance. Rather than idealizing networks as inherently superior to other forms of organization, Oriental Networks also considers Enlightenment expressions of resistance to networking that inform modern skepticism toward the concept of the global network and its politics. In doing so the volume contributes to the increasingly global understanding of culture and communication. Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.