The introduction explores the author’s path into writing this book. It includes a formative experience at age 7, watching the special report on the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. in April 1968, and, much later, learning of King’s appearance as a commencement speaker at Springfield College, where the author is a professor of communications.

The introduction spells out the book’s focus and structure. It examines St. Augustine, Florida, the oldest city in the United States, one with a fascinating racial history that speaks volumes about the country’s history and present-day struggles. The book is built on a 7-part structure. The first part begins with the March on Washington in 1963, then goes back to the city’s founding in 1565, and examines the racial context between these two dates. The next six parts proceed chronologically through the signing of the Civil Rights Act in July 1964.

The book explores a uniquely double-edged time in American history, as well as a particularly bittersweet time in Dr. King’s life. That period also encompasses the vast majority of the civil rights struggle in St. Augustine. That struggle, the author argues, is one that has been consistently overlooked by historians.

This chapter shifts the setting to New England, where on October 26, 1963, President John F. Kennedy travels to Amherst College to dedicate the Robert Frost Library. Kennedy’s visit to campus is covered in part in the student newspaper by a sophomore named Marshall Bloom.

A creative, brilliant, quirky, and effeminate young man, Bloom had grown up in a male-dominated culture in Colorado. He had gotten the journalism bug in high school and yearned to be a writer of significance. Bloom is part of a polite protest at Amherst that greets President Kennedy with signs urging him to recommit to civil rights. The topic is gathering interest at the time on this overwhelmingly white campus.

Kennedy arrives at Amherst by helicopter, then travels across campus in an open-air limousine. He then delivers an eloquent speech that focuses not on civil rights or politics, per se, but on the critical role played by artists. Sometimes, Kennedy acknowledges, a great artist must “sail against the currents of his time.”

Although Mardi Gras in New Orleans has long been a subject of reams upon reams of journalism, it has almost never become the subject of a literary work. Lyle Saxon’s novella that opens Fabulous New Orleans is a rare exception to this pattern. In Saxon’s account, the mask serves a primary symbolic and literal function: in obscuring the masquer’s identity, it serves to liberate that person from the usual coordinates of identity (race, gender, age, class), unleashing in turn a broad range of subversive possibilities that register as keen pleasure, even continuous laughter. Saxon loved – and, in his time, was loved by – New Orleans to an extraordinary degree, making this novella one of the peaks of his life-long enjoyment of the city.

Mourning leading Lebanese journalist Kamel Mroueh, who was assassinated in 1966, Musa Sadr emphasizes the critical role of freedom, particularly in journalism, as essential for societal growth and individual dignity. The press is a vital battlefield for truth and justice, shaping public opinion, culture and society itself. Journalists bear profound responsibilities, acting as moral guides capable of uplifting or corrupting society through their work. Their freedom is both their right and society’s benefit, unleashing full human potential by removing external coercion and internal constraints.

Genuine freedom extends beyond mere absence of external control, encompassing liberation from personal desires and moral corruption. The ultimate freedom includes self-liberation through internal struggle (greater jihad), based on ethical purity and integrity. The text strongly condemns assassination and coercion as cowardly acts that undermine societal justice and morality, insisting society must protect journalists from economic hardship and threats.

Death is portrayed as a transformative rather than destructive force, moving humans toward spiritual perfection and eternal life. Mroueh (Abu Jamil) is honored as a martyr, whose death underscores the noble purpose of defending truth and freedom. Freedom alone ensures societal integrity and spiritual elevation. Only freedom safeguards humanity’s dignity and potential.

Exploring the representation of human rights abuses in media and journalism is a vital area of study, given that the media help shape understandings of the world and its conflicts. That said, the scholarship into the intersection of journalism, media, and human rights, which we trace here, is diverse. We identify three major strands: first, researchers who explore how propaganda and journalism can and have exacerbated human rights abuses; second, those who analyse how the conventions of mainstream journalism may lead to the misrepresentation or omission of human rights issues; and third, studies that focus on professional and citizen journalists and non-governmental organization reporters who cover human rights topics, often at significant risk to themselves. Within the tertiary sector, few courses are offered in human rights and media or journalism as a combined field, although the topic may pop up periodically in journalism and human rights courses. Where research clusters committed to human rights journalism exist, passionate individual researchers or small groups of scholars and teachers are most often at the helm.

Chapter 4 engages with China’s ideational power as part of its image-making in Ethiopia, and more broadly in Africa. The chapter directly speaks to the ongoing debates about the export of the China model to the Global South by delving into the content of and perceptions toward China’s official training programs of African elites. Rather than exporting a model, I find that Chinese educators and officials attempt to legitimize China’s governance (both domestic and global) and to show off China. The actual delivery of these trainings carries some consistency, such as the presentation of China as an alternative type of democracy, as well as some arbitrary content diffusion in specific governance domains like journalism. Far from passively buying into the “China model,” Ethiopian participants soften their perceptions of China, but also negotiate and reject some of its persuasion narratives and strategies.

This chapter attends to Los Angeles’s long and varied history of journalistic writing. For Chihara, the LA Times, which grew in prominence along with the city itself in the early decades of the twentieth century, incubated writing about the developing city not only in its own pages but also in the resistive responses to its advocacy on behalf of capital. Chihara then turns her attention to the New Journalism-era writings of Joan Didion and Eve Babtiz, in which personal positionality is as unapologetically present within text as within the city – even as the two differed markedly in their subjectivities and styles. In Jonathan Gold’s restaurant reviews of the 1990s and 2000s, food is only ever part of the story: Gold uses the global tastes and smells of LA’s culinary culture to hymn, critique, and grieve the city itself. In conversation with writer Matthew Specktor, Chihara considers the material challenges faced by contemporary writers in Los Angeles – the decline of traditional journalism; the rising cost of living; corporate consolidation of creative industries – and wonders if careers in LA reportage like those of Didion, Babitz, and Gold are still possible.

Infrastructures that underlie public debate have a significant role in public opinion formation and have long been regulated in multiple ways. Limiting the domination of opinion power by particular interests has been one of the stated aims of such regulation. But the approaches have also depended on the often-unstated presumption of a journalistic-editorial role being highly influential in the formation of public speech and opinion. This chapter examines how communication infrastructures have changed with the development of major platforms and resulting changes in journalism’s role within public debate. These changes raise new regulatory challenges if opinion power is to be limited, and they make the positive dimensions of freedom of expression all the more valuable for understanding what would now be required for communicatively legitimate forms of democracy. The chapter examines aspects of the Digital Services Act and the European Media Freedom Act in light of freedom of expression’s positive dimensions to consider how European law and practice might promote a pluralism of public speech that is curated in the audience’s interests.

This chapter charts Alejo Carpentier’s connection with Mexico, from his momentous first visit in 1926, when he traveled to Mexico City as editor of Carteles, to his later friendships with major Mexican intellectuals, and including his publishing choices in the early and late phases of his career, (EDIAPSA; Fondo de Cultura Económica; Siglo Veintiuno). It focuses particularly on Carpentier’s friendship with Diego Rivera and his circle, as well as on his depictions of Mexicans living in 1920s Havana. This chapter describes Carpentier as part of a transnational community of intellectuals bonding over shared ideas on avant-garde art and politics. It argues that Mexican literary, visual and musical culture and the Mexican Revolution impacted Carpentier’s life deeply and shaped his vision of Latin America.

This chapter argues that the influence of Carpentier on Cuban literature of his time and after is not clear, given that there was some animosity towards him. It cites as reasons the fact of Carpentier’s absence from Cuba in the 1970s. It also acknowledges that the teachers who taught the Novísimo generation of Cuban writers with whom the author identifies most closely all emphasized the mastery of Carpentier’s prose and admired what they called Carpentier’s carnivalization of language or baroque language. The chapter concludes that understanding how Carpentier’s lifelong journalism had served as a foundation of his literary writing was an important lesson for him and others, and he ends by calling Carpentier a classic.

This chapter examines significant gay American travel writers from the nineteenth century to the present who mine the political, aesthetic, and ethical dimensions of travel writing to interrogate the experience of non-heteronormative life. From Herman Melville’s Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life (1846) to Robert McAlmon’s time in Paris in the 1920s and Edmund White’s landmark account of travel in the US (published in 1980), the chapter traces how experiences of exoticism, exile, and home have conditioned the representation of gay masculinity.

The private sector, including but not limited to banks, plays a vital role in countering the financing of terrorism. The success of the private sector has been uneven when it comes to countering the financing of terrorism. In some cases, this has resulted in groups gaining access to funds in furtherance of their objectives. The chapter also points to the importance of true collaboration between the public and private sectors in combatting the financing of terrorism.

The first instalment of Zola’s novel Vérité appeared on 10 September 1902, just nineteen days before the author died under suspicious circumstances that were likely related to his involvement in the Dreyfus Affair. The novel provided an allegorical transposition of the contemporary political drama that had divided the nation, but which, as yet, had been denied its proper dénouement. This chapter explores how Zola imagined the right and just resolution of the legal case, as well as of the national crisis it galvanised. Working across Zola’s journalistic and fictional versions of the Affair, it argues that Zola understood the Dreyfus case as an aesthetic problem: as a matter of style, taste, plot, and plausibility. In order for the truth to win out, Zola must imagine the aesthetic and ethical re-education of a nation; and this happy ending involves harnessing an acceptable version of the idealist imagination.

In journalism education, the First Amendment’s guarantee of press freedom is typically taught as a cornerstone of American democracy. Yet this approach too often fails to grapple with the historical and ongoing realities of racial inequality and the experiences of marginalized communities, particularly Black Americans, in relation to press freedom. The traditional emphasis on teaching journalists to be strictly “objective” often leads the press to report in ways that perpetuate the status quo and fail to hold those in power accountable.

In this chapter, I argue for a critical reexamination of how the First Amendment and press freedom are taught in journalism classrooms. I draw on historical analysis, legal case studies, and contemporary examples to advocate for a “reparative journalism” approach. By centering the voices and experiences of those who have been systematically excluded from the full protections of the First Amendment and by interrogating the complex relationship between race, power, and the press, this approach seeks to develop a more inclusive, historically grounded, and forward-looking vision of journalism’s role in society.

Historically, local newsgatherers played a key democracy-enhancing role by keeping their communities informed about local events and holding local elected officials to account. As the market for local news has evaporated, more and more cities have become “news deserts.” Meanwhile, fewer national legacy news providers can afford to invest in the processes and expertise needed to produce high-quality news about our increasingly complex world. The true crisis of press legitimacy is the declining cultural investment in the systematic gathering of high-quality news produced by independent, transparent, and trustworthy sources.

Although scholars usually point to a handful of cultural and economic factors as undermining news quality and press credibility, various critics now identify a more covert culprit: the US Supreme Court. The Court is partly to blame for the press’s declining credibility, these critics claim, because the Court’s First Amendment decisions hinder the ability of state defamation law to hold the press accountable for defamatory falsehoods. The implication is that the press would regain much of its credibility if the Court would remove these constitutional barriers – especially the requirement that public officials and public figures demonstrate “actual malice” on the part of the press for a defamation claim to prevail. Nonetheless, as this chapter explains, the current landscape of high-profile defamation cases, and the public reaction to them, casts doubt on whether things could be so easy.