In an era in which journalists will stop at nothing to break a story, Henrich Böll's The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum has taken on heightened relevance.
A young woman's association with a hunted man makes her the target of a journalist determined to grab headlines by portraying her as an evil woman. As the attacks on her escalate and she becomes the victim of anonymous threats, Katharina sees only one way out of her nightmare.
Turning the mystery genre on its head, the novel begins with the confession of a crime, drawing the reader into a web of sensationalism, character assassination, and the unavoidable eruption of violence.
Plot Summary: The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum. (2016). In Goodreads Inc
Terrorism, which became a major international issue in the 1970s, refers to acts or threats of violence intended to intimidate political opponents or to publicize grievances. Modern terrorists use murder, bombing, airplane hijacking, kidnapping of hostages, and assassination to force the media, public opinion, and governments to address their demands. Groups most often accused of clandestine warfare or terrorism in the 1970s included the Irish Republican Army's Provisional Wing (IRA Provos), the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), the Red Brigades in Italy, and the Baader-Meinhof gang in Germany.
Terrorism in the 1970s. (1997). In DISCovering U.S. History. Detroit: Gale.
Tabloid journalism, type of popular, largely sensationalistic journalism that takes its name from the format of a small newspaper, roughly half the size of an ordinary broadsheet. Tabloid journalism is not, however, found only in newspapers, and not every newspaper that is printed in tabloid format is a tabloid in content and style. Notably, many free local publications historically have been printed in tabloid format, and in the early 21st century several traditional British broadsheet newspapers, such as The Independent, The Times, and The Scotsman, changed to the smaller size, preferring, however, to call it “compact” format. On the other hand, one of the most-popular tabloids in Europe, the German Bild-Zeitung, was long printed as a broadsheet before shifting, as did many German newspapers, to a format that was smaller than a broadsheet but bigger than the standard tabloid.
Tabloid journalism 2016. Britannica School.
http://ilarge.lisimg.com/image/5357952/740full-heinrich-boll.jpg
