The Influencing Machine

“I wanted to write a comic book long before I wanted to write a book about the media,” Brooke Gladstone explains in The Influencing Machine, her new book about the news business. The host of NPR’s “On the Media,” Gladstone makes what could have been a chewy book on media theory – snooze – more fun with the help of something unavailable at her day job: pictures.

“I thought writing in bubbles would be easier, more like radio,” Gladstone writes. “It was more like radio, but it wasn’t easier.”

Although writing it wasn’t easier for the radio host, “The Influencing Machine” will prove easier on her readers than most of the inside-baseball navel-gazing done by media personalities. As digital publishing buries newspapers and books, writers either wax nostalgic for dead trees (like former Sunday Times editor Harold Evans in his memoir “My Paper Chase”) or drool over the possibilities of the Internet age (like Cory Doctorow, publisher of the tech blog BoingBoing, who blurbed “The Influencing Machine”).

Gladstone, more level-headed, charts a middle course.

“Everything we hate about the media today was present at its creation,” she writes. “Also present was everything we admire – and require – from the media: factual information, penetrating analysis, probing investigation, truth spoken to power. Same as it ever was.”

Of course, as any newspaper editor will tell you, “Same as it ever was” isn’t a great headline. “The Influencing Machine” doesn’t break new ground. Starting with ancient Guatemala, where she says Mayan scribes wrote “primordial P.R.,” Gladstone takes us through touchstones familiar to any Journalism 101 student: the explosion of newspapers after the American Revolution, William Randolph Hearst’s yellow journalism, Watergate, and the invasion of Iraq. She also offers tired Jon Stewartesque gripes about partisan cable-news bloviators.

Here’s where the illustrations help. Josh Neufeld, veteran illustrator of topical graphic novels such as “A.D.: New Orleans After the Deluge” and “9-11: Emergency Relief,” makes Gladstone’s arguments about, for example, the unreliability of polls, more memorable. Poll-hating isn’t novel – John Allen Paulos, for one, outlined arguments against surveys almost 20 years ago in “A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper.” Still, it’s easier to wade through a statistical discussion accompanied by Gladstone’s curly-haired avatar, which Neufeld supplies with a Sherlock Holmes cap and magnifying glass in one panel where she takes on NBC’s Chris Hansen.

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