Jan. 8, 2009
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| Associate Dean Amy Reynolds is co-author of a new book, Terrorism and the Press. |
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Peter Lang Publishing just made the book available three weeks ago, and it already appears on Amazon, Barnes and Noble and other booksellers.
Reynolds and co-author Brooke Barnett, M.A. ’91, Ph.D. ‘01, have collaborated may times on research projects and have co-authored previous works, including Communication and Law: A Multidisciplinary Approach to Research.
For this project, the two take a press-centered approach, which Reynolds said had not been done before.
“On the role the press plays, little has been written from a journalism or mass communications perspective,” Reynolds said. Instead, other books have come from reporters’ personal experiences or from other disciplines, such as political or military science, criticism or cultural studies.
To start the project, the two surveyed journalism and other fields to get a sense of the perceptions of terrorism reporting.
“We looked at where work done in our field and in others intersected and diverged,” Reynolds explained. They looked at American and global coverage of the terrorist actions of Sept. 11, Oklahoma City, London’s subway bombings and attacks in Madrid and India.
The book is a scholarly work that the authors believe is well-suited to courses such as international or crisis reporting. But Reynolds said she and Barnett also wrote with a general public audience in mind.
“This is a topic that won’t go away,” said Reynolds, who finished the introduction to the book at the time of the Benazir Bhutto assassination. “The press-centered approach provides a way to pull together information from several disciplines to better see the importance of the press as well as the influence of media.”
Barnett now is associate professor in the School of Communications at Elon University and director of the Elon Program for Documentary Production. Her professional background includes work as a news director, documentary producer, reporter, and producer in public television.
Reynolds, M.A. ’91, has a Ph.D. in mass communication from the University of Texas at Austin. She is the author or editor of four books and numerous refereed journal articles and book chapters. Her professional background includes work as a reporter and editor at newspapers and as a reporter, producer, and news director at local television news stations.
