In this Newsweek piece on the battle over “spin” in the Iraq campaign, I was pleasantly surprised to read comments from my journalism history professor:
The question is how to fight back, when today’s most powerful technologies?the Web, cell phones?are better suited to small, nimble organizations. Back in the 1930s national leaders could almost wholly control the framing of their messages, says Donald Shaw, a professor of media theory at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill who has written about reforms for military public-affairs officers. But now, “the podium has lost its influence.”
One of the key themes of Dr. Shaw’s research — if I remember it correctly from the class I took 15 years ago — is that the rise of a new communication medium always corresponds with the decline of the previously dominant medium.
