(Originally aired: 10-07-87) MARTIN MAYER

Independent / Writer Scholar


Author: "Making News"
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The program can be viewed in its entirety by clicking the you tube link below:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oe_EzQSn0J8 - MARTIN MAYER
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
More about: MARTIN MAYER
Martin Mayer, unemployed since 1954, is the author of 34 books, of which four–Madison Avenue, USA; The Schools; The Lawyers and The Bankers–were major bestsellers. The Lawyers for many years held the record as the book most frequently stolen from the Mid-Manhattan Library, a reflection, said a librarian, on the kind of kid who goes to law school these days.
From 1952 to 1975 Mr. Mayer wrote a monthly column on serious music for Esquire; from 1986 to 1989 he wrote a twice-monthly column for American Banker about banking; and from 1990 to 1992 he wrote a monthly column for American Film about television. In the 1960s he chaired a New York City local school board and served on the President’s Panel on Educational Research and Development for Presidents Kennedy and Johnson. In the early 1980s he was a Commissioner on President Reagan’s National Commission on Housing.
At one time or another, Martin Mayer has been a consultant to the American Council of Learned Societies, the Carnegie Corporation, the Ford Foundation, the Sloan Foundation, the Kettering Foundation, and the Twentieth Century Fund. He wrote the centennial history of the Metropolitan Opera, and from the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s he was the New York and Washington critic for Opera Magazine in Britain.
Trained as an economist (his tutor at Harvard was Wassily Leontief; his course in European central banking was taught by Joseph Schumpeter), Martin Mayer has for the last 25 years written most often about financial subjects; since 1993 he had been a Guest Scholar (now non-resident) at The Brookings Institution. In the last four years, twelve of his books, several of them more than forty years old, have been translated into Chinese and published in China–and the Chinese have paid royalties. His book on The Fed was recently published in Korean and in Turkish.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Editorial Reviews for "Making News"
From Publishers Weekly
Veteran journalist Mayer gives an overview of the news media's history and current structure.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
Mayer specializes in making insiders' worlds (e.g., Wall Street, Madison Avenue) accessible to outsiders, and he's a wonderful demystifier. Here, his approach to the news media is refreshingly free of cant. No, he says, the diversity of media outlets in the past didn't necessarily make it the good old days. Nor is the switch from old fashioned "news" to interpretive "journalism" necessarily for the better. The things that interest people haven't changed much in human history, and people need news not to provide truth but for a "sense of what's going on around them." Mayer's history of TV news and the evolution of "the feelies" and his discussions of media coverage of the 1984 elections and Tylenol scare show broad experience and sound judgmentexactly the qualities he recommends for media ills. Recommended especially for general readers. Dan Levinson, English & History Depts., Thayer Acad., Braintree, Mass.
Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc
|