School of Social and Political Science

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Professor Kate Wright and her co-authors have won the Outstanding Monograph of the Year Award from the Media, Communication and Cultural Studies Association (MeCCSA).

Their winning book – Capturing News, Capturing Democracy: Trump and Voice of America – examines what happened to the oldest and largest US-funded media network during the final months of the first Trump administration. It spans the period from the Black Lives Matter protests in the summer of 2020 to the attempted insurrection on January 6 2021.

Using rare interviews and declassified documents from Freedom of Information archives, it explains why VOA became very rapidly politicised, despite having its editorial independence supposedly guaranteed by law. It also models how media capture relates to broader patterns of democratic backsliding in the USA. In so doing, it predicts the intense crackdown on VOA and other journalistic outlets that has characterised the early months of the second Trump administration. 

Professor Wright, Personal Chair in Media and Communications at the University of Edinburgh, co-authored the book with Professor Martin Scott (University of East Anglia) and Professor Mel Bunce (City St George’s, University of London).

Each year, the MeCCSA honours outstanding research in the fields of media, communication and cultural studies. The judges said the book is ‘a fascinating and important account of the way in which public service media has been captured by anti-democratic forces’ and that it is ‘brave and important’.

Capturing News, Capturing Democracy also won runner-up prizes in two international awards:

• The Best Book Award from the Journalism Studies Division of the International Communication Association
• The Tankard Award from the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication

Learn more about the MeCCSA Awards.

Learn more about Professor Wright’s work.