La democratie et les medias au 20e siecle (review)

It is too bad that Democracy and the Media is in French, because this very useful book will be inaccessible to those who most need it: historians of technology whose lack of language skills is matched by a provincial focus on national exceptionalism. The book's value rests in Catherine Bertho Lavenir's synthesis of the history of the media and political power in five Western nations over the course of the twentieth century. Her starting point is Harold Innis's observation that the media became powerful forces for historical change in Western nations during the world wars. Since 1914, technologies of communication have been central to the political life of western Europe and the United States. Struggle for control of the media has been a struggle over both the hardware of communication technologies and the messages they transmit

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