Ocean State Libraries

"In this characteristically turbocharged new book, celebrated Rolling Stone journalist Matt Taibbi provides an insider's guide to the variety of ways today's mainstream media tells us lies. Part tirade, part confessional, it reveals that what most people think of as "the news" is, in fact, a twisted wing of the entertainment business. In the Internet age, the press have mastered the art of monetizing anger, paranoia, and distrust. Taibbi, who has...

"Discusses bias in the American media, including its historical development and the effects of new technologies. Includes discussions of different types of bias, government regulations, politics, and public relations, and how they shape the media"--Provided by publisher.

"[C]olumnist Robert J. Samuelson explains why our political, economic, and cultural debates so routinely traffic in misinformation--popular fads that, like meteors, momentarily burn brightly and fizzle out...Untruth is the first collection of Samuelson's insightful assaults on the conventional wisdom. Included are columns arguing that campaign contributions have not corrupted politics, that the 'service economy' is not turning America into a nation...

"Fake news is not new but, thanks to the Internet and social media, it is spreading faster and farther than ever before. Fabricated stories are creating doubt and confusion and easing the way for the manipulation of public opinion. In some cases, websites and news articles are designed to confuse people into thinking that they are looking at trusted sources and factual stories. In other cases, the label fake news serves as a tool for discrediting...

"Late on the night of October 6, 1998, Matthew Shepard, a twenty-one-year-old gay college student, left a bar in Laramie, Wyoming with two alleged 'strangers,' Aaron McKinney and Russell Henderson. Eighteen hours later, Matthew was found tied to a log fence on the outskirts of town, unconscious and barely alive. He had been pistol-whipped so severely that the mountain biker who discovered his battered frame mistook him for a Halloween scarecrow. Overnight,...

"For almost a decade, journalists and pundits have been asking why we don't see successful examples of political satire from conservatives or of opinion talk radio from liberals. This book turns that question on its head to argue that opinion talk is the political satire of the right and political satire is the opinion programming of the left. They look and feel like two different animals because their audiences are literally, two different animals....