"Cracked Coverage" weaves together an impressive range of social and cultural developments in order to reconstruct the political context of 1980s America and the place of television within it. By starting with and focusing on television news' coverage of the 'drug crisis' and the 'war on drugs, ' the book is able to draw into the argument everything from debates over modernity and new economic developments to questions of surveillance and spectacle, from narrative theory to Foucault, from the nuclear family and feminism to Nancy Reagan. The result is one of the most compelling and original analyses of the rise of the New Right and of the role of the media in this campaign."--Lawrence Grossberg, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign