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Ethics in Media Communications: Cases and Controversies (with InfoTrac®) |
Author: Louis A. Day
Published: 2005-03-01 |
List price: $100.95
Our price: $80.76
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As of: November 20th, 2008 06:28:53 PM
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Customer comments on this selection.
 An awful, awful text
Ethics was a required subject in my major of Telecommunications, which deals with electronic and broadcast mass media. This text is a very poor way to instill the importance of ethics within TCOM.
Louis Alvin Day often rambles on for paragraphs at a time about abstract philosophical ideologies. Only occasionally will something useful be mentioned, such as the SAD (Situation-Analysis-Decision) formula. Day has chosen quantity over quality with his phrasing, like a college undergrad who has mastered the art of stretching a concise, one-page discourse out to five pages of superfluous fluff to meet the trivial page minimum assigned.
Telecommunications is one of today's most visual industries. Consequently, those who choose this field are visual thinkers. Unfortunately, this text has absolutely no visuals. Instead, the book is 480 pages of text, presented in two columns per page, never once straying into creative territory; never a single chart, graph, or even a small inset for sub-topics.
The hypothetical ethics case studies were somewhat intriguing, but too fantastic to draw useful parallels to real-world scenarios. Moreover, The presentation of facts tended to favor one course of action over the other, thus failing its mission to stimulate discussion and debate.
This book was painful to read, and even more painful to try to study. If you are an instructor searching for a suitable TCOM Ethics text, please do your students a favor and look elsewhere.
 Painful
Maybe it's not possible to write an interesting or engaging book on this topic. Maybe the muddle that is media ethics doesn't lend itself to a presentation in straightforward, punchy language. Maybe it's impossible to separate one's deeply held beliefs from laying out all sides of an ethical issue.
Whatever the reason, this is not an engaging text, and it isn't very helpful, either. Each chapter begins with a wandering narrative about the chosen topic. Day hems and haws for a dozen pages or so without ever really saying very much, although as you move from chapter to chapter an impression will likely build in your mind: The world would be a very boring place if Day decided what the media should include and exclude from publications and the airwaves.
The chapters end with several scenarios to consider. These are overwritten to the point of farce, littered with meaningless adjectives that appear to be intended to convey gravity but actually betray Day's opinion about each scenario. By the time you're asked what you would do, you can have little doubt what he would do.
Some textbooks simply need an update to be brought back to relevance. This book needs a new author who, instead of lamenting everything that has happened in the world since 1963, is prepared to engage with it and help young media practitioners make decisions in it. If you're about to be forced to read this book in class, prepare to be annoyed!
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