Showing results by publisher "Tantor Media" in Media Studies

In 2018 Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene took to social media to share her suspicions that the California wildfires were started by 'space solar generators' which were funded by powerful, mysterious backers. Instantly, thousands of people rallied around her, blaming the fires on "Jewish space lasers" and, ultimately, the Rothschild family. For more than 200 years, the name "Rothschild" has been synonymous with two things: great wealth, and conspiracy theories about what they're "really doing" with it.

Fully updated chapters continue to address how technology and increasing levels of education have exposed people to more information than ever before. These societal gains, however, have also helped fuel a surge in narcissistic and misguided intellectual egalitarianism that has crippled informed debates on any number of issues. Over the past several years, the rise of populism and conspiracy theories have taken this to new levels. All voices, even the most ridiculous, demand to be taken with equal seriousness, and any claim to the contrary is dismissed as undemocratic elitism.

Featuring profiles of Machu Picchu, the Nazca Lines, and other archaeological mysteries, Impossible Truths shines a startling new light on the true relationship between alien species and humankind. 

Disinformation is designed to evoke a strong emotional response to push us toward more extreme views, unable to find common ground with others. The false claims that led to the breathtaking attack on our Capitol in 2020 may have been only a dress rehearsal. Attack from Within shows us how to prevent it from happening again, thus preserving our country's hard-won democracy.

New York Times bestselling author, Kent Heckenlively, JD, and acclaimed UFO documentary director, Michael Mazzola, collaborate to bring you the latest information on the Congressional disclosure hearings and the unknown history of UFO crashes. Featuring interviews with leading figures in the UFO movement, this book delves into the government's role in recovering these crafts, attempts to understand the technology, and postulates on the intentions of these beings.

As bombs rained down on Gaza in October 2023, images of mass death and destruction gripped the world, and openly genocidal statements from Israeli leaders foretold the magnitude of horrors to come. But the United States media was quick to downplay, obscure, and repackage an emerging campaign of...

What does it mean to call a place home? Who is allowed to become a member of a community? When can we say that we truly belong? These are some of the questions of place and belonging that renowned cultural critic Bell Hooks examines in Belonging: A Culture of Place. Traversing past and present, Belonging charts a cyclical journey in which Hooks moves from place to place, only to end where she began—her old Kentucky home.

Science doesn't speak for itself. Neck-deep in work that can be messy and confounding and naïve in the ways of public communication, scientists are often unable to package their insights into the neat narratives that the public requires. Enter celebrities, advocates, lobbyists, and the funders behind them, who take advantage of scientists' reluctance to provide easy answers, flooding the media with misleading or incorrect claims about health risks. In Bad Advice, Paul A. Offit shares hard-earned wisdom on the dos and don'ts of battling misinformation.

From its first publication in 1992, Men, Women, and Chain Saws has offered a groundbreaking perspective on the creativity and influence of horror cinema since the mid-1970s. Investigating the popularity of the low-budget tradition, Carol Clover looks in particular at slasher, occult, and rape-revenge films. Although such movies have been traditionally understood as offering only sadistic pleasures to their mostly male audiences, Clover demonstrates that they align spectators not with the male tormentor, but with the females tormented.

A revelatory account of how words and actions combined to destroy Britain's colonial rule and secure Washington's American victory The American Revolution was not only fought on bloody battlefields, it was waged with the ink of pen and print. George Goodwin shows how the leaders of the American...

In the 1950s, Confidential magazine, America's first celebrity scandal magazine, revealed Hollywood stars' secrets, misdeeds, and transgressions in gritty, unvarnished detail. Deploying a vast network of tipsters to root out stars' sexual affairs, drug use, and sexuality, publisher Robert Harrison destroyed celebrities' carefully constructed images and built a media empire. Confidential became the best-selling magazine on American newsstands in the 1950s, surpassing Time, Life, and the Saturday Evening Post. Confidential's spectacular rise was followed by an equally spectacular fall.

All forms of recreational digital consumption—whether on smartphones, tablets, game consoles, or TVs—have skyrocketed in the younger generations. Most media experts do not seem overly concerned about this situation: children are adaptable, they say, they are "digital natives," their brains have changed and screens make them smarter. But other specialists—including some pediatricians, psychiatrists, teachers, and speech therapists—dispute these claims, and many parents worry about the long-term consequences of their children's intensive exposure to screens.

Thanks to the power of its "mystic" Indian origins, yoga promises peace, self-realization, and release. But what if this is just hype? In Fascist Yoga, Stewart Home sweeps away the half-truths to reveal a new origin story of modern postural practice. Starting with the world's first modern yogi—a Californian escapologist who added Hindu fairy dust to circus exercises—this history reveals a community full of grifters, occultists, and white supremacists, out to exploit and recruit via the medium of exercise.

We present ourselves and encounter others through profiles. A profile shows us not as we are seen directly but how we are perceived by a broader public. Profile-based identity is evident everywhere from pop culture to politics, marketing to morality. This book argues that the profile marks an epochal shift in our concept of identity and demonstrates why that matters. You and Your Profile blends social theory, philosophy, and cultural critique to unfold an exploration of the way we have come to experience the world.

On December 15, 1985, powerful mafia don Carlos Marcello, referring to JFK's death, told a fellow Texas prison inmate, in part, that, "Yeah, I had the son of a bitch killed." This changes everything about not only the president's assassination but also reveals Marcello's complicity in the deaths...

This book offers an unflinching look at the creative and structural challenges of storytelling in interactive media. Drawing on over 30 years of industry experience, Kelly Vero explores the rich interplay between narrative, design and technology, making the case for why story is foundational to...

In an age riven by "fake news," "alternative facts," and disputes over the validity of everything from climate change to the size of inauguration crowds, the authors argue that social factors, not individual psychology, are what's essential to understanding the persistence of false belief and that we must know how those social forces work in order to fight misinformation effectively.

Family Guy and Philosophy brings together low-brow, potty-mouthed, cartoon humor and high-brow philosophical reflection to deliver an outrageously hilarious and clever exploration of one of TVs most unrelenting families. (Okay, its not that high-brow.)  

There's the Freedom of Information Act, and then there's Ventura's way. The official spin on numerous government programs is flat-out bull, according to Jesse Ventura. In this incredible collection of actual government documents, Ventura, the ultimate nonpartisan truth-seeker, proves it beyond any doubt. He and Dick Russell walk listeners through 63 of the most incriminating programs to reveal what really happens behind the closed doors.

Leafing through photos from the January 6 insurrection, extremist researcher Noelle Cook was struck by how many women looked like her: middle-aged white women in puffy coats. Women were not on the fringes of the extreme right, she realized. They were radicalizing each other, and the pandemic was changing them. So who were the women of J6? And why did some of them believe in shape-shifting reptilians and the health benefits of colloidal silver?