March 23, 2021
2021 Goldsmith Book Prize Winners
The Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard Kennedy School is pleased to announce the 2021 winners of the Goldsmith Book Prize. The annual Goldsmith Book Prize is awarded to the trade and academic book published in the United States in the last 24 months that best fulfills the objective of improving democratic governance through an examination of the intersection between the media, politics and public policy. This year’s winners are:
Trade
Stephen Bates, Yale University Press
An account of the 1940s Commission on Freedom of the Press, the most extraordinary collaboration of American thinkers in the 20th century, and its classic study of journalism and democracy, “A Free and Responsible Press.”
Academic
Manipulating the Masses: Woodrow Wilson and the Birth of American Propaganda
John Maxwell Hamilton, LSU Press
Manipulating the Masses is a timely, pathbreaking work about a profound and enduring threat to American democracy that arose out of World War I: the establishment of pervasive, systematic propaganda as an instrument of the state and the difficulties that persist in fencing back this power of the presidency.