'You'll never be a journalist's bootlace!' This is the story behind the stories we think we know. 'The News Man' is a very personal look at the public face of news by one of Australia's most well-loved and respected news presenters of our time. Mal Walden was seventeen when he applied for his first job in media. Starting out as a country radio announcer, he went on to work in Launceston and Melbourne before making the shift to television as a news anchor for channels Seven and Ten. At age seventy he gracefully crossed the finishing line to be recognised as the longest-serving newsman on Australian television. Each year Mal maintained a journal in which he recorded his many serendipitous and life-changing moments. These memories form a record of not only his life as a newsman, but of the evolution of television news.

This is the story of a small town Southern boy who grows up to be a local television icon. Following Dick McMichael's life from the early years of radio to today's television, we experience the great changes in the industry and the country. We also learn how he grew up in the segregated South and ended up working with a black female co-anchor who owes her first break in TV news to him. It is an inside look at the stresses and pressures that shape the broadcast newsrooms of America. It begins shortly after radio broadcasting began in the United States. "You could say that broadcasting and I grew up together. Radio broadcasting was born in Columbus in 1928 in a dressing room of the brand-new Royal Theater when WRBL went on the air. I was born two years later." We move with young Dick through the tough years of the Great Depression when his family's small home was crowded with relatives who needed some place to stay until work could be found again, through World War Two when he saw his big brother, brother-in-law and first cousin head overseas with the U.S. Army, while he, as a Boy Scout, collected old newspapers for the war effort. All of this is paralleled by changes in the world of broadcasting. We follow his career from the time he was a seventeen-year-old radio announcer, to the height of his radio career at WSB in Atlanta, and to his television days in Columbus, Atlanta and Columbia, South Carolina. We see him get into hot water and almost fired as a result of his investigative reporting at one station. We get a firsthand look at what goes on inside the walls of broadcast newsrooms, and how economics affects the way news is covered and reported. We see both sides of the organized labor movement as he, on one hand, represents his fellow members in a union contract negotiation with one station, and, on the other hand, when he is on the other side of the fence as a vice president of news when a union tries to organize the staff at another station. Dick McMichael has seen the way broadcast news has changed from its inception until right now. He has seen entertainment and commercial considerations triumph over serious journalism. He has also suffered personal tragedies, losing his dear wife to a chronic disease, but he has also has children and grandchildren to enjoy. His story is important because television news affects every one of us everyday. Not just network television news, but the hundreds of local television news operations that reach and affect just as many or even more people. He was honored by the Georgia Association of Broadcaster's with the 2004 "GAB Broadcaster of the Year" Gabby Award.

From the author of Fire and Fury, this irresistible account offers an exclusive glimpse into a man who wields extraordinary power and influence in the media on a worldwide scale—and whose family is being groomed to carry his legacy into the future. If Rupert Murdoch isn’t making headlines, he’s busy buying the media outlets that generate them. His News Corp. holdings—from the New York Post, Fox News, and The Wall Street Journal, to name just a few—are vast, and his power is unrivaled. So what makes a man like this tick? Michael Wolff gives us the definitive answer in The Man Who Owns the News. With unprecedented access to Rupert Murdoch himself, and his associates and family, Wolff chronicles the astonishing growth of Murdoch's $70 billion media kingdom. In intimate detail, he probes the Murdoch family dynasty, from the battles that have threatened to destroy it to the reconciliations that seem to only make it stronger. Drawing upon hundreds of hours of interviews, he offers accounts of the Dow Jones takeover as well as plays for Yahoo! and Newsday as they’ve never been revealed before.

A Newsman Remembered is not just the story of the life of Ralph Burdette Jordan (RBJ or Jock) who was a remarkable newspaperman/motion picture publicist/war correspondent. It is also a glimpse into an era of American social and political history that is now, unfortunately, largely forgotten if not discarded. The compelling personalities with whom he engaged Aimee Semple McPherson, William Randolph Hearst, Louis B. Mayer, General Douglas MacArthur are but fading memories which this book briefly restores. The first half of the 20th century began as an era of optimism that encompassed a belief that working hard along with seizing the main chance would produce social, professional and financial success. Ralph Jordan certainly exuded that optimism in everything that he encountered in his short life. Along with his contemporaries, moving into the great (largely ill-defined) middle class was his overarching goal. Within this goal, family life was an important ingredient for him - marriage in his day was still a partnership with clearly defined marital roles and expectations. Ralph and Marys marriage reflected that domestic configuration. Religious faith if not always observed to the letter also formed an important part of their family life. It could not be otherwise for them and those other largely third-generation descendants of Mormon pioneers (and their non-Mormon contemporaries) with whom they associated. These so-called Mormon second- and third-generation diasporans were willing even eager to leave behind them the remoteness of what was then described as Zion, to seek more promising futures elsewhere, retaining as best they could their unique heritage. Thus, Ralph Jordans story is indeed a life and times story worth telling!

When Lt. Cdr. Waldo Drake, USNR arrived in Pearl Harbor in June 1941 as the U.S. Pacific Fleet’s first Public Relations Officer (PRO), he was an admired maritime reporter for the Los Angeles Times and Reserve Officer appointed to intelligence duties. By October 1944, he was hated by most of the correspondents assigned to cover the war against Japan and seen by officials in Washington as an obstacle to the development of Navy public relations. What led Drake to become the Pacific Fleet’s first PRO, what happened during the three years he served on the CINCPAC staff, and why he was removed from that position are the focus of Nimitz’s Newsman: Waldo Drake and the Navy’s Censored War in the Pacific. Following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, Adm. Chester Nimitz, USN assumed command of the Pacific Fleet and inherited Drake’s services. Drake became responsible for informing America’s press about the Pacific Fleet’s wartime role and thus gained an outsized ability to influence American public opinion. The Navy’s decision to allow public relations officers to censor press copy caused numerous conflicts between Drake and the correspondents assigned to the Fleet. It was Drake’s love for the Navy, his tendency to take on every job himself, and above all his close relationship with Adm. Nimitz that allowed him to perform censorship duties with approval. Drake’s protection of Nimitz, and his reticence to give the press any information that could endanger operational security or dampen morale, caused Navy victories to go under-reported—much to the consternation of officials in Washington. In analyzing the dynamics of Drake and Nimitz’s relationship, and in highlighting Drake’s interactions with correspondents and Navy officials, Nimitz’s Newsman reveals the inside story of the Navy’s censored war in the Pacific during World War II.

Herbert G. Klein was a significant figure in both journalism and political history during the mid- to late Twentieth Century. Klein is best known as longtime advisor to Richard Nixon, and was with Nixon at peak moments in his career, including the Checkers Speech and Nixon’s 1960 and 1962 campaigns. Upon Nixon’s election as President, Klein became the White House Director of Communications, a new position Klein was tasked with designing. For four years, Klein was known as one of Nixon’s chief advisors. But then, for reasons historians have never fully explored, he disappears from Nixon’s political landscape as well as from scholarly and public prominence. This book establishes Herbert G. Klein as a formative figure in the Richard Nixon White House, whose contributions to Nixon’s press strategies, their subsequent impact on the president’s actions, attitudes, and eventual fall, have been largely overshadowed in scholarly literature. It explores the then-emerging, and now enduring, conflict between journalistic truth and presidential image. The work draws from previously unexplored materials on Klein in the Richard Nixon Presidential Library. The account is notable for the first examination of Klein’s only known oral history, lessening a gap in the existing literature on Nixon’s aides and his relationship with the media.