This was really great and I was pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoyed this! I've only been to Raleigh once before and had never heard of the News & Observer, but I still found this book compelling and hard to put down. This newspaper's rippling impact across American culture and politics makes this book relevant to any American and this books makes you appreciate what we have lost in the decline in local journalism.

Characterizing the modern news landscape as the era of "fake news" seems like an exaggeration compared to the outright lies and openly biased news of the late 1800s and early 1900s. Christensen's account of the journalistic intentions of the time makes it very plain how generations of white Americans were riled up into a violently racist frenzy post-Civil War and into the twentieth century. I had never really thought about how much access people had to presidents and politicians in the early twentieth century or how newspapers had such a chokehold on how ordinary folks understood their own situation and the world around them. (We take the dozens of available news sources and perspectives available for granted.) The impact of one regional newspaper and its larger-than-life publishers across North Carolina and American politics is boggling and Christensen does a great job relating this impact.

The author is a very seasoned journalist, and it really shows in the storytelling. Christensen explains and relates the very ugly racism so that you can understand why or how someone would be so hateful without Lost Cause or modern "it was a different time" apologisms. The cognitive dissonance of the newspaper being so racist and yet champions of women's suffrage, fighting anti-semitism, and other progressive to modern standard opinions was very surprising. This newspaper's story is told in chronological order from the late 1800s to present day with a lot of focus on the individual publishers of the Daniels family and their hires who shaped the paper. You don't need an a lot of background on the time to understand the narrative because Christensen provides useful but concise historical context, which is very helpful to make this a pretty straightforward read. I also imagine due to the immense research and nearly half a century experience Christensen has with the News & Observer that this book could have been much longer, but Christensen made this very digestible.

If you are interested in turn of the 20th century politics, the rise and fall of newspapers and journalism, or the white supremacist narratives that spawned the Jim Crow policies, you will find this book very interesting. I think North Carolinians and NC university students and alumni will especially appreciate this.

Thank you, University of North Carolina Press, for the arc!