PLEASE NOTE this is a 2014-15 reading list—the precise content may change in future years.
Some generally recommended books:
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Edward Bernays, Propaganda (1928) [The classic of public relations. You can find here:
http://www.whale.to/b/bernays.pdf]
Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion (1922). [The work that did the most to ‘professionalise’
journalism by calling for a special sense of ‘objectivity’. You can find it here:
http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/6456]
Sue Curry Jansen, Censorship: The Knot that Ties Knowledge and Power (1991) [Best and
perhaps only book that talks about state regulation of expression from Plato the Soviet
Union, including discussion of ‘self-censorship.]
Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962). [Classic of the transition from speech to
print, relatively scholarly by McLuhan’s standards]
Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media (1964). [The entire history of modern media in a
groovy sixties sort of way: http://beforebefore.net/80f/s11/media/mcluhan.pdf]
Evgeny Morozov, The Net Delusion (2010). [Exhaustive critique of the internet – a great
antidote to more utopian understandings of the new social media]
Geraldine Muhlmann, A Political History of Journalism (Polity 2008)
Geraldine Muhlmann, Journalism for Democracy (Polity 2011).
Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann, The Spiral of Silence (1982). [See ‘Introduction’ below]
Douglas Rushkoff, Program or be Programmed (2011). [A proposed solution to our
intellectually lazy Apple-fied world: learn computer code, just like you learned how to write]
Robert Wuthnow, Communities of Discourse (1989). [Sociological treatment of the flow of
information that led to the Protestant Reformation, the Enlightenment and 19c Socialism]