Newsroom drama detailing the 2004 CBS 60 Minutes report investigating then-President George W. Bush's military service, and the ensuing firestorm of criticism that cost anchor Dan Rather and producer Mary Mapes their careers. On the morning of September 9, 2004, veteran CBS News producer Mary Mapes believed she had every reason to feel proud of a broadcast journalism job well done. By the end of the day, Mapes, CBS News, and the venerable CBS News...

Truman's life is a fake. He lives in a big studio with hidden cameras everywhere. His friends and co-workers are actors who play their roles in the most popular television series in the world: The Truman show. He thinks he is an ordinary man and has no idea about how he is being exploited. What will he do when he finds out?

Television comedy has long been on the frontline in how America evolves on social issues. There is something about comedy that makes difficult issues more palatable-with humor an effective device for presenting ideas that lead to social change. From I Love Lucy which introduced the first television pregnancy to Will & Grace, which normalized gay characters, the situation comedy has challenged the public to revisit social mores and reshape how we think...

Ballooning government? Millionaire welfare queens? Tort lawyers run amok? A $330,000 outhouse, paid for with your tax dollars? John Stossel says, "Give me a break." When he hit the airwaves thirty years ago, Stossel chased snake-oil peddlers, rip-off artists, and corporate thieves, winning the applause of his peers. But along the way, he noticed that there was something far more troublesome going on: While the networks screamed about the dangers of...

America is suffering from an information glut. Most Americans are no longer clear about what news is worth remembering or how any of it connects to anything else. Thus, Americans are rapidly becoming the least knowledgeable people in the industrial world. In How to Watch TV News, author and academic Neil Postman and television journalist Steve Powers show how you can become a discerning viewer. They show the difference between entertainment fodder...

Turning to issues of media policy, George Gerbner delivers a stinging indictment of the way the so called "information superhighway" is being constructed. By examining the logic of globalization he shows the ineffectual nature of our present responses - such as the V-Chip - to deal with the urgent crisis of the media. Showing the real uses to which the "information superhighway" will be put by its corporate masters, he urges the citizens of the world...

Race Against Prime Time is the only film to scrutinize how television news represents African Americans. This hard-hitting documentary takes us behind the scenes at the newsrooms of the three network affiliates during the Liberty City uprising in Miami which left 18 dead. It provides a classic case study of how the news gets made: what we see - and what we don't. Race Against Prime Time documents how local television newsmen anoint black community...

Set in Cold-War era 1988, Big Miracle is the real story behind the remarkable, bizarre, and often uproarious event that mesmerized the world for weeks. On October 7, an Inuit hunter found three California gray whales imprisoned in the Artic ice. In the past, as was nature's way, trapped whales always died. Not this time. Rose compellingly describes how oil company executives, Greenpeace activists, Eskimos, business, and military international...

"A riveting and revealing look at the shows that helped cable television drama emerge as the signature art form of the twenty-first century In the late 1990s and early 2000s, the landscape of television began an unprecedented transformation. While the networks continued to chase the lowest common denominator, a wave of new shows, first on premium cable channels like HBO and then basic cable networks like FX and AMC, dramatically stretched television's...