Smoke and Mirrors: Violence, Television and Other American Cultures

The probing, provocative examination of television that Rolling Stone called "dense, funny, and smart as hell." In Smoke and Mirrors, John Leonard, one of the nation's leading media critics, offers a provocative challenge to conventional ideas about television. Instead of scapegoating television as the cause of crime in our streets, stupidity in our schools, and spectacle rather than substance in our government, Leonard sees something else inside the box: an echo chamber and a feed-back loop, a medium neither wholly innocent of, nor entirely responsible for, the frantic disorder it brings to our homes.