I Read the News Today

In I Read the News Today, Fred Fogo examines the ways in which John Lennon's brutal killing in 1980 and the commentary on it are part of a larger context of social disturbance that calls into question fundamental social meanings and relationships and sets visibly into conflict forces of stability and change. Fogo analyzes the print media responses to Lennon's death in the theoretical contexts of anthropologist Victor Turner's paradigm of social drama and mass communication scholar James Carey's ritual view of mass communication. Fogo suggests that Present day conflicts may be understood better by examining the way a particular segment of American society, the sixties generation, has made sense of its collective experience and its relation to society in the process of attributing symbolic meaning to one of its major icons, John Lennon.