Public Executions: The Death Penalty and the Media (Crime, Media, and Popular Culture Series) Book

I really appreciated the perspective that this book brought to the debate regarding the media-saturated culture. In particular, I liked that Bird took a methodological approach to attempting to answer this question, and that she experimented with several different methodologies to go about looking for answers. It is that case that many of her answers were less satisfying than one would hope. She seemed hopelessly wishy washy on the extent to which she ever wanted to assign a particular reading to a given scenario. However, her rationale for supplying rich detail and asking how it might be that media, in fact, have several different effects on their audiences was not only refreshing when compared with the legacy of "media effects" criticism and the more "active audience" model that followed, but it also did a nice job of taking into account how it is that looking at different media in isolation from each other is no longer a sufficient way of accounting for any type of media effects.