New releases by Interpol, Phoebe Bridgers, Lambchop
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Tendentious arguments for why journalism still matters
ANGUS REID urges us to understand the persecution of Jason Arday from a political and historical perspective, and to see the victim in human terms
Re-releases of the classics Gypsy Rhumba and Buena Vista Social Club, and a stunning album by Palestinian artist Faris Ishaq
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JOHN GREEN welcomes a valuable and incisive analysis of a world become hyperpolitical but without the mass movement institutions to represent it
Why Journalism Still Matters
by Michael Schudson
(Polity, £15.99)
MICHAEL SCHUDSON is a professor at the Columbia School for Journalism and his book is very much a reflection of a US-oriented discourse.
He argues that journalism is essential for a functioning democracy — undoubtedly true in principle — and sees “professional” journalists as akin to medical practitioners who take the Hippocratic oath. They are individuals with a higher calling, somehow apart from the general public in pursuing unadorned truth and disavowing their own prejudices in that pursuit.
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