Search

Media Essentials is a new kind of introductory text. It's built to help students focus on the fundamentals, so that no matter how the media evolves, students can understand what's really going on. Brought to you by best-selling authors Richard Campbell, Christopher R. Martin, and Bettina Fabos, the book distills the essential information on media industries and major concepts, incorporates the authors' accessible critical approach, and gives students all the study tools they need to succeed in the course and to be savvy consumers. And all of this in a brief, attractive format — for a very attractive price.

Media Essentials focuses on the most pivotal aspects of mass communication, and its new edition is more effective than ever at helping students understand the everchanging mass-media landscape. It features new Media Convergence and Media Literacy boxes plus specific, detailed case studies; a newly integrated chapter on the history of journalism; and an expanded program of video clips on LaunchPad that drive home the book's approach to media literacy and analysis.

Carefully documenting the deceptions and excesses of television news coverage of the so-called cocaine epidemic, Cracked Coverage stands as a bold indictment of the backlash politics of the Reagan coalition and its implicit racism, the mercenary outlook of the drug control establishment, and the enterprising reporting of crusading journalism. Blending theoretical and empirical analyses, Jimmie L. Reeves and Richard Campbell explore how TV news not only interprets "reality" in ways that reflect prevailing ideologies, but is in many respects responsible for constructing that reality. Their examination of the complexity of television and its role in American social, cultural, and political conflict is focused specifically on the ways in which American television during the Reagan years helped stage and legitimate the "war on drugs," one of the great moral panics of the postwar era. The authors persuasively argue, for example, that powder cocaine in the early Reagan years was understood and treated very differently on television and by the state than was crack cocaine, which was discovered by the news media in late 1985. In their critical analysis of 270 news stories broadcast between 1981 and 1988, Reeves and Campbell demonstrate a disturbing disparity between the earlier presentation of the middle- and upper-class "white" drug offender, for whom therapeutic recovery was an available option, and the subsequent news treatment of the inner-city "black" drug delinquent, often described as beyond rehabilitation and subject only to intensified strategies of law and order. Enlivened by provocative discussions of Nancy Reagan's antidrug activism, the dramatic death of basketball star Len Bias, and the myth of the crack baby, the book argues that Reagan's war on drugs was at heart a political spectacle that advanced the reactionary agenda of the New and Religious Right--an agenda that dismissed social problems grounded in economic devastation as individual moral problems that could simply be remedied by just saying "no." Wide ranging and authoritative, Cracked Coverage: Television News, the Anti-Cocaine Crusade, and the Reagan Legacy is a truly interdisciplinary work that will attract readers across the humanities and social sciences in addition to students, scholars, journalists, and policy makers interested in the media and drug-related issues.

Craft a meaningful life story! A written legacy of your life--one that encompasses experiences, lessons learned, failures and triumphs--is a gift your family and friends will cherish for years to come. Writing this story may seem daunting, but it doesn't have to be. Writing Your Legacy is a step-by-step guide to chronicling a life story that reflects your true self. Through a series of 35 guided themes, as well as supplementary exercises, you'll explore milestones, relationships, career paths, and major choices, and leave an eloquent record of your life for future generations. You'll also learn how to: • Become the hero of your story • Employ vibrant sensory details • Discover your unique voice • Dig up memories from your childhood and teen years • Overcome writer's block, address common fears, and stay motivated • Prepare your story for publication Writing your life story can grant you insight and clarity, help you heal past wounds, and serve as a treasured account you'll be proud to share. Your story deserves to be told. Capture the spirit of your life with Writing Your Legacy.

This book addresses the contemporary disillusion with truth, manifest in sceptical relativism. Contending that all contemporary theories of truth are too narrow, it argues for a novel conception of truth, by showing how error is implicated in the actions of all living things; and by analyzing uses of 'true' in non-linguistic contexts.

River Stones Grow Plants tells the tale of the accidental scientist Richard Campbell's 1994 encounter with his uncle, Dr. Thomas Logan, who unintentionally dropped of a few watermelon seeds in his gravel bed designed for weed block with lawn fabric separating the soil from the gravel. The next spring a watermelon grew. The roots simply lined above the lawn fabric under the rocks, separated completely from the soil. After years of observations, testing and research, Campbell determined that sedimentary rock is made up of the sediment of the sea, or decayed organic life fossilized into a rock. This rock is call river rock, river stones or pea gravel. Add water to the rock in an ideal environment, drop in some seeds, and you have a living ecosystem capable of plant production. River Stones Grow Plants (RSGP) is Richard Campbell's account of developing the modern-day application of geological agriculture. Campbell's accidental discovery in the mid-1990s picks up where scientists left off with RSGP sharing 24 years of observations, testing and refinement for contemporary society to use and leverage for life's growing applications. Geological agriculture is defined as the study of using river stones as the growing medium for plants absent the use of soil and fertilizers. The common term is referred to as gravel gardening.

In this book, Richard Campbell reformulates Anselm’s proof to show that factual evidence confirmed by modern cosmology validly implies that God exists. Anselm’s proof, which was never the “ontological argument” attributed to him, emerges as engaging with current philosophical issues concerning existence and scientific explanation. Because every observable thing has a beginning, it can be deduced that there is always in reality something than which a greater cannot be thought, which exists necessarily. It follows that its non-existence is inconceivable. Anselm then proves that this is the God in whom he believes, who alone so truly exists that He could not be thought not to exist. The contingent nature of the universe is therefore a consequence of the proven belief that God is the Creator of everything else.

Gettin' Kinda Itchie traces the circuitous lives of the various groups in which the members of The Mamas & The Papas performed in the years before the formation of their group. Many of the groups are long lost to history: The Abstracts, The Smoothies, The Journeymen, The Hepsters, The Colonials, The Halifax Three, The Triumvirate, The Big 3, Mac's Pipe & Drum House Band, Cass Elliot & The Big 3, D & Z, The Mugwumps, and The New Journeymen. The groups may now be answers to trivia questions, but they each contributed to the sound, style, and persona that became the bedrock of American folk rock. More than a verbal flow chart, this book is the untold story of the prequel to The Mamas & The Papas. Thei harmonies soothed and satisfied millions amid the reverberating cacophony of the times. Social upheaval, riots, and the war in Vietnam were largely quelled with dreams of California and a song about the common reality of the first day of the week. The Mamas & The Papas stood as troubadours of a generation and a powerful American answer to the British Invasion. Between 1965 and 1968 the group garnered top ten hits like "Monday Monday," "Creeque Alley," "Dedicated To The One I Love," "I Saw Her Again" and "California Dreamin'," which would ultimately go on to sell tens of millions of records. They broke new ground as architects of the historic 1967 Monterey International Pop Festival, which kicked off the Summer of Love and the next wave of popular music. It was the end of a long path-a magic circle. This book is about that magic and that circle. It is about the groups, music, and experiences that created The Mamas & The Papas. It is the account of The Smoothies carrying spears in costume, and of the FBI tracking The Mugwumps in Cold War Washington, D.C., and secret marriages to avoid the Draft and keep on singing. This is four musicians' journey from coffeehouses to nightclubs and gymnasiums, before leaving folk music behind and taking flight.

This book argues that a plausible account of emergence requires replacing the traditional assumption that what primarily exists are particular entities with generic processes. Traversing contemporary physics and issues of identity over time, it then proceeds to develop a metaphysical taxonomy of emergent entities and of the character of human life.

In this scholarly but non-technical book, Campbell elucidates the concept of truth by tracing its history, from the ancient Greek idea that truth is timeless, unchanging, and free from all relativism, through the seventeenth-century crisis which led to the collapse of that idea, and then on through the emergence of historical consciousness to the existentialist, sociological, and linguistic approaches of our own time. He gives a scholarly but vivid and economical exposition of the views of a remarkably wide range of thinkers, always showing how their ideas engage with our contemporary concerns. He argues that current problems with truth arise from the way differing past conceptions continue to resound in our contemporary use of the word, and suggests that we must formulate a new conception of truth that is compatible with awareness that human existence is finite and contingent--with awareness of our own historicity.