The newspaper is to the twentieth century what the novel was for the nineteenth century: the expression of popular sentiment. In the first of a three-volume study of journalism and what it has meant as a source of knowledge and as a mechanism for orchestrating mass ideology, Melvin J. Lasky provides a major overview. His research runs the gamut of material found in newspapers, from the trivial to the profound, from pseudo-science to habits of solid investigation.

1: A Question of Style; 1: Words Win, Language Loses; 2: The Equality of Sentences; 3: The Slang of an In-Lingo; 4: Sort of Suspicious, Kind of Guilty; 5: Of Plastic Prose, in Bits and Pieces; 6: Life-Style Crosses the Ocean and Returns; 7: Teutonics, or Refighting World War II; 2: The Art of Quotation; 8: The Little Goose Feet; 9: Television and Press "War"; 10: Mailer's Tales of Oswald; 11: Citations Sown; 12: Words, Words, Words...; 13: The Strategy of Misquotation; 14: The Interviewer and the Interviewee; 3: The Quest for Meaning; 15: Race and the Color of Things; 16: The N-Word and the J-Word; 17: The Art of Punditry; 18: In the Pseuds' Corner; 19: Pop Kulcher; 20: The Art of Explanation; 21: Keeping Up with the Avant-Garde; 22: Hard Words and Generation Gaps; 4: The F-word and Other Obscenities; 23: Skirmishes in the Sex War; 24: World War II, Fifty Years After; 25: A Trio of As*ter*isk*s; 26: Gender in the Combat Zone; 27: Remembering the Founding Fathers