Category: Review

Reviewed and translated by Mandy Tröger | Rarely are there dissertations that make a central contribution to a better understanding of historic reality. Sylvia Dietl’s book is such a dissertation; it rewrites an entire chapter of German media history. This is no small achievement. An indication of the book’s strength are its 658 pages and over 1700 footnotes. But the book’s power lies in its content: Dietl analyzes the transformation and restructuring of East Germany’s broadcasting system more than 30 years ago. The political scientist does this on the basis of a broad range of sources, with analytical ingenuity and a love for detail. In ten chapters, she shows how the unification of the Western Federal Republic of Germany (FGR) and the Eastern German Democratic Republic (GDR) came along with »a complete transfer of institutions from West to East Germany«.

Reviewed and translated by Stine Eckert | He wasn’t a champion of women, says Daniel Siemens in an Online-Talk orga­nized by the Critical Communication Studies Network on March 15, 2022, about Hermann Budzislawski, whose biography he wrote. It is the first one about the man »behind the world stage« – a pun referring to Budzislawski’s years as editor-in-chief of the famous and influential German Weltbühne magazine, meaning literally World Stage, during the Weimar Republic. Again and again, Siemens addresses Budzislawski’s difficult interactions with women authors. For instance, when he shrugged off the article offered by 29-year old Hannah Arendt about the Jewish World Congress, perhaps because she signaled she also could take her work to the competition, the Tage-Buch magazine. Or when he denied that Dorothy Thompson, one of the most important American journalists at the time, had achieved her fame through her own work and charisma. But first things first.

Reviewed by Claudia Wilhelm | Edited by Stine Eckert and Ingrid Bachmann, this volume brings together ten essays by big names in feminist communication and media research. All ten authors have won the Teresa Award for the Advancement of Feminist Scholarship, awarded by the Feminist Scholarship Division (FSD) of the International Communication Association (ICA). The Teresa Award honors work that makes an important contribution to the development, reach and influence of feminist research in communication and media studies. It is intended to increase the visibility of gender-related research among an expert audience. The essays trace the lines of development of feminist research within media and communication research.

By Fritz Hausjell and Wolfgang R. Langenbucher | A project by the University of Vienna’s Department of Communication, the idea of selecting and presenting the best books by journalists was co-founded by Hannes Haas (1957-2014) and is compiled by Wolfgang R. Langenbucher and Fritz Hausjell. The first edition was published in 2002 in the quarterly journal Message, founded by Michael Haller. When that journal ceased publication, the book recommendations were documented in the magazine Der österreichische Journalist [The Austrian journalist] from 2015. This was interrupted in 2020 and 2021 due to the pandemic. In 2022, a new place of publication was found: Journalism Research.

Reviewed by Horst Pöttker | This highly insightful book is presumably an academic final thesis, although neither the foreword nor the footnotes indicate this. The methodological gymnastics surrounding the content analyses and the style that oscillates between youthfully flippant and academically uptight give rise to this conclusion. The book is insightful because it reveals a lack of attention in three ways.

Reviewed by Sabine Schiffer | In his book, Christian Hardinghaus sets himself the task of explaining to his readers how they can uncover propaganda and thus evade the (intended) manipulation. The aim of Jonas Tögel’s book is to make NATO’s strategy papers and considerations visible in public discourse and thus to shed light on the human sphere as a potential sixth theater of war – alongside water, land, air, space and cyberspace.