The Daily Planet

A Critic on the Capitalist Culture Beat

2000
Author:

Patricia Aufderheide

The first collection of essays by this major commentator on media and society.

The Daily Planet is a long-awaited selection of Patricia Aufderheide’s most important critical essays, updated and organized thematically to demonstrate the breadth of her thinking on media and film, public telecommunications policy, and contemporary society. The result is a pithy and provocative exploration of “the culture of daily life under capitalism.”

Patricia Aufderheide is a leading public intellectual in the very best sense of the term, and with The Daily Planet her important work is finally made widely available. Her observations about contemporary culture and society are essential reading for anyone interested in the direction of political culture.

Lawrence Grossberg, author of Bringing It All Back Home: Essays on Cultural Studies

The Daily Planet is a long-awaited selection of Patricia Aufderheide’s most important critical essays, updated and organized thematically to demonstrate the breadth of her thinking on media and film, public telecommunications policy, and contemporary society. The result is a pithy and provocative exploration of "the culture of daily life under capitalism."

Here, Aufderheide demonstrates criticism that is both activist and analytical. She probes the processes that shape our culture by examining diverse subjects, including the struggle to create quality children’s television programming, the meaning of Paul Harvey, the evolution of the war film over the past thirty years, and the ways journalism is changed by the Internet and other new technologies.

Throughout, Aufderheide foregrounds democratic values, displaying the penetrating insights that have made her a leading public intellectual and commentator on contemporary culture.

Patricia Aufderheide’s articles appear in a wide variety of publications’ including the Washington Post, Variety, and the Women’s Review of Books, and her commentaries have aired on National Public Radio. She is professor in the School of Communication at American University in Washington, D.C., and a senior editor of In These Times.

Patricia Aufderheide is a leading public intellectual in the very best sense of the term, and with The Daily Planet her important work is finally made widely available. Her observations about contemporary culture and society are essential reading for anyone interested in the direction of political culture.

Lawrence Grossberg, author of Bringing It All Back Home: Essays on Cultural Studies

Aufderheide's cultural criticism follows in the tradition of the public intellectual. In fact, she is one of the few film scholars who merit such a status.

Chon Noriega, author of Shot in America and editor of Urban Exile

In her introduction, Aufderheide mentions the dangers of being pigeonholed as a ‘left critic,’ when all the while you know that ‘left critics are to critics as military music is to music.’ The Daily Planet demonstrates that this is not so.

In These Times

A lucid and well-written collection of essays.

Cineaste

Roaming from film criticism to media analysis to politics, Aufderheide, a senior editor of In These Times, is a longtime policy wonk on telecom issues, and her thoughts on such matters as public-access cable are increasingly relevant in the mega-media-outlet-plus-cable-system-corporation era. These chewy essays probably shouldn't be ingested in one gulp, but any writer with a firm grasp on both where content comes from and the infrastructure that brings it to you is someone you ought to be reading.

Seattle Weekly

Aufderheide is at her best and most succinct. That she succeeds is tribute to her depth of knowledge and skill as a writer.

Cineaste

Aufderheide is a ‘public intellectual’ in the full sense of the word. She has developed a clearer vision than most of what she calls ‘the culture of daily life under capitalism’.

Media Ethics