In the Mouth of the Wolf: A Murder, a Cover-Up, and the True Cost of Silencing the Press by Katherine Corcoran

Hello my lovely readers! This was one of the book selections for the Morbidly Curious Book Club. I don't follow the book selections each month. I usually just find what interests me from their list for the year and put it on my TBR list. This book really piqued by interest, since I am a journalist and we all know I love a good journalism book. Let's get into it!

SYNOPSIS

Regina Martínez was no stranger to retaliation. A journalist out of Mexico's Gulf Coast state of Veracruz, Regina's stories for the magazine Proceso laid out the corruption and abuse underlying Mexican politics. She was barred from press conferences, and copies of Proceso often disappeared before they made the newsstands. In 2012, shortly after Proceso published an article on corruption and two Veracruz politicians, and the magazine went missing once again, she was bludgeoned to death in her bathroom. The message was clear: No journalist in Mexico was safe.

Katherine Corcoran, then leading the Associated Press coverage of Mexico, admired Regina Martínez's work. Troubled by the news of her death, Corcoran journeyed to Veracruz to find out what had happened. Regina hadn't even written the controversial article. But did she have something else that someone didn't want published? Once there, Katherine bonded with four of Regina's grief-stricken mentees, each desperate to prove who was to blame for the death of their friend. Together they battled cover-ups, narco-officials, red tape, and threats to sift through the mess of lies-and discover what got Regina killed.

The Race Beat by Gene Roberts

 Hello my lovely readers!

A journalist reading a book on journalism? Groundbreaking. Let's get into it!

SYNOPSIS
This is the story of how America awakened to its race problem, of how a nation that longed for unity after World War II came instead to see, hear, and learn about the shocking indignities and injustices of racial segregation in the South—and the brutality used to enforce it.

It is the story of how the nation’s press, after decades of ignoring the problem, came to recognize the importance of the civil rights struggle and turn it into the most significant domestic news event of the twentieth century.

Drawing on private correspondence, notes from secret meetings, unpublished articles, and interviews, veteran journalists Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff go behind the headlines and datelines to show how a dedicated cadre of newsmen—first black reporters, then liberal southern editors, then reporters and photographers from the national press and the broadcast media—revealed to a nation its most shameful shortcomings and propelled its citizens to act.

We watch the black press move bravely into the front row of the confrontation, only to be attacked and kept away from the action. Following the Supreme Court’s 1954 decision striking down school segregation and the South’s mobilization against it, we see a growing number of white reporters venture South to cover the Emmett Till murder trial, the Montgomery bus boycott, and the integration of the University of Alabama.

We witness some southern editors joining the call for massive resistance and working with segregationist organizations to thwart compliance. But we also see a handful of other southern editors write forcefully and daringly for obedience to federal mandates, signaling to the nation that moderate forces were prepared to push the region into the mainstream.

The pace quickens in Little Rock, where reporters test the boundaries of journalistic integrity, then gain momentum as they cover shuttered schools in Virginia, sit-ins in North Carolina, mob-led riots in Mississippi, Freedom Ride buses being set afire, fire hoses and dogs in Birmingham, and long, tense marches through the rural South.

For many journalists, the conditions they found, the fear they felt, and the violence they saw were transforming. Their growing disgust matched the mounting countrywide outrage as The New York Times , Newsweek , NBC News, and other major news organizations, many of them headed by southerners, turned a regional story into a national drama.

The Presidents vs The Press by Harold Holzer

 

Hello my lovely readers!

I bought this book while on my books about journalism kick. I'm not someone who is particularly interested in politics. I vote in my local elections and the presidential election, but I don't necessarily care to talk about politics or anything like that. But it's mainly focused on the role the media plays in each U.S. president's term. Let's get into it!

SUMMARY

From George Washington to Donald Trump, presidents have attacked, manipulated, denigrated the press.

Washington groused about his treatment in the newspapers. Thomas Jefferson used a reporter to find dirt on his rival Alexander Hamilton, only for that same reporter to expose his own affair with his slave Sally Hemings. Andrew Jackson rewarded loyal newspapers with government contracts and Abraham Lincoln shuttered critical papers and imprisoned their editors without trial.

Readers are guided through the clashes between chief executives and journalists, showing who won these battles and girding us for a new fight to protect the nation's greatest institution: a free and functioning press.

The Chicago Defender by Ethan Michaeli

 

Hello my lovely readers!

Over on my Bookstagram account, I'm participating in the Mega May challenge where you commit to reading a 500-plus page book that you've been meaning to read.

I've committed to four and honestly, I think I can finish all four! I'm halfway there.

This book was an ABSOLUTE steal. I found it at McKay's Books for $12. Don't you love that? It was in perfect condition and is right up my alley, being a Black journalist. Let's get into it!

SUMMARY

The Chicago Defender was founded in 1905 by Robert S. Abbott and is still in publication today. The newspaper condemned Jim Crow, catalyzed the Great Migration and focused the electoral power of Black America. 

It was smuggled into isolated communities in the segregated South, helped elect mayors and presidents and had contributions from legends like Richard Wright, Ida B. Wells, Langston Hughes and Martin Luther King Jr.

Defender alum Ethan Michaeli brings to life the reporters who braved lynch mobs and police brutality to do their jobs from the age of Presidents Theodore Roosevelt to Barack Obama.