Extra: The Inventions of Journalism

by Edward Jay Epstein

This book by Edward Jay Epstein, the author of News From Nowhere, explores the myths, fables, and other inventions of American Journalism. The project began forty-five years ago when William Shawn, the legendary editor of the New Yorker, asked him to investigate media reports that the US government had executed 28 members of the Black Panther party. After Epstein had demonstrated that the story was a myth of the press– and the list of the 28 deaths was an invention of a lawyer for the Black Panther party the Washington Post and Los Angeles Times issued editorial apologies for their stories perpetuating the myth.
In EXTRA, read about the inventions of journalism, including Deep Throat, Bin Laden’s fortress at Tora Bora, and the heroin epidemic of the 1960s. In EXTRA, read about for the tabloids subsumed the mainstream press. In EXTRA, read about how television became news from nowhere.

103 pages, Kindle Edition

First published December 10, 2014

About the author

Edward Jay Epstein (born 1935) was an American investigative journalist and a former political science professor at Harvard, UCLA, and MIT. While a graduate student at Cornell University in 1966, he published the book Inquest, an influential critique of the Warren Commission probe into the John F. Kennedy assassination. Epstein wrote two other books about the Kennedy assassination, eventually collected in The Assassination Chronicles: Inquest, Counterplot, and Legend (1992). His books Legend (1978) and Deception (1989) drew on interviews with retired CIA Counterintelligence Chief James Jesus Angleton, and his 1982 book The Rise and Fall of Diamonds was an expose of the diamond industry and its economic impact in southern Africa.