The News as Myth: Fact and Context in Journalism
(Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1990)

In plain, non-technical language, this book argues that "the myth of the news is its supposed objectivity" and that the very forms which presumably guarantee veracity ultimately lead to consistently incomplete and misleading news reports. It draws a distinction between "true fictions", articles whose general accuracy is demonstrable, even when the standards of contemporary reportage are not met, and 'false truths' in which a correctly attributed and formally appropriate news story is so incomplete or unbelievable as to constitute a demonstrable falsehood. Its analysis begins with the most basic of reportorial tasks, obituary writing, and then proceeds to issues of investigative reportage. Since its publication it has been used not only in journalism courses, but also as a text in basic writing at the college level.

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  1. "It is a critical, iconoclastic book, but thought-provoking rather than a mindless broadside. . . definitely worth reading." The IRE Journal
  2. "A sincere attempt to help reporters ask more probing questions. It is well written and features interesting notes at the end of each chapter." Choice, 1990
  3. "A clear, lively book, one that is enthusiastically recommended." ALRB, 1990
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Ethics in Everyday Places

In Ethics in Everyday Places, ethicist and geographer Tom Koch considers what happens when, as he puts it, “you do everything right but know you've done something wrong." The resulting moral stress and injury, he argues, are pervasive in modern Western society. Koch makes his argument "from the ground up," from the perspective of average persons, and through a revealing series of maps in which issues of ethics and morality are embedded.

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WICN Interview

CKNW Interview

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In Disease Maps: Epidemics on the Ground (University of Chicago Press, 2011) medical geographer Tom Koch makes a new, and important argument: It is in the mapping of individual cases of illness as group events that we have come to understand disease as a public thing affecting general populations. Maps become, in this telling, the workbench on which a collection of individual cases are combined to create a single health event, seen in place. It is thus in the mapping, and the environmental thinking that mapping promotes, that theories about this or that disease (and health in general) are first formulated and then tested.

New Republic Review

Haggett Review

CMAJ Published Review

Go To Tom Koch's Artist Page

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