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.

A seminal work and examination of the psychopathology of journalism. Using a strange and unprecedented lawsuit by a convicted murder againt the journalist who wrote a book about his crime, Malcolm delves into the always uneasy, sometimes tragic relationship that exists between journalist and subject. Featuring the real-life lawsuit of Jeffrey MacDonald, a convicted murderer, against Joe McGinniss, the author of Fatal Vision. In Malcolm's view, neither journalist nor subject can avoid the moral impasse that is built into the journalistic situation. When the text first appeared, as a two-part article in The New Yorker, its thesis seemed so radical and its irony so pitiless that journalists across the country reacted as if stung. Her book is a work of journalism as well as an essay on journalism: it at once exemplifies and dissects its subject. In her interviews with the leading and subsidiary characters in the MacDonald-McGinniss case -- the principals, their lawyers, the members of the jury, and the various persons who testified as expert witnesses at the trial -- Malcolm is always aware of herself as a player in a game that, as she points out, she cannot lose. The journalist-subject encounter has always troubled journalists, but never before has it been looked at so unflinchingly and so ruefully. Hovering over the narrative -- and always on the edge of the reader's consciousness -- is the MacDonald murder case itself, which imparts to the book an atmosphere of anxiety and uncanniness. The Journalist and the Murderer derives from and reflects many of the dominant intellectual concerns of our time, and it will have a particular appeal for those who cherish the odd, the off-center, and the unsolved.

In the early twentieth century, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Walter Lippmann said that the presentation of truthful news lies at the heart of democracy. This volume stems from Dan D. Nimmo’s conviction that opinion and policymaking are also significant, interrelated processes within any political system. A democracy poses problematic questions of the manner and means by which political ideas, opinions, and issues are transmitted throughout the body politic. In the United States, such communication is carried on primarily through the news media. Reporters and their sources interact to form crucial relationships linking citizen and official. Nimmo focuses on that interaction, using personal interviews with selected samples of Washington correspondents and their official news sources as his evidence. Nimmo’s research examines the relationships that develop between news sources and reporters as each engages in political communication, indicates the factors most influential in determining such relationships, and suggests the implications such findings have for interpreting the tension that characterizes government-press relations in a democracy such as the United States. In this era of heightened attention to the role of the media in political discourse, reissuance of this volume could not be timelier. This study features a new preface by Daniel Pearl Award winner Georgie Anne Geyer. It should be read by all media specialists, communication scholars, and journalists, and will be valuable for those entering these fields as well.