ake News, Propaganda, and Plain Old Lies explains how to identify deceptive information and seek out the most trustworthy information to inform decision making in your personal, academic, professional, and civic lives. Barclay takes an objective, non-partisan approach to the topic of sorting deceptive information from trustworthy information.

Award-winning poet and critic Kevin Young traces the history of the hoax as a peculiarly American phenomenon

This book explores the long tradition of fake facts, in their various guises, in American history. It is one of the first historical studies to place the long history of lies and misrepresentation squarely in the middle of American political, business, and science policy rhetoric. In Fake News Nation, James Cortada and William Aspray present a series of case studies that describe how lies and fake facts were used over the past two centuries in important instances in American history. Cortada and Aspray give readers a perspective on fake facts as they appear today and as they are likely to appear in the future.

Bob Schieffer examines today's journalism and those who practice it -- how they see their profession, how it has been changed by new technology, and how well they believe they are carrying out their responsibility to provide American with the information they need to be good citizens. Based on interviews with over forty media leaders from television, print media, and the Internet, Schieffer surveys the perils and promises of journalism's rapidly changing landscape.

A Matter of Facts: The Value of Evidence in an Information Age highlights the critical value of records and archives as sources of evidence: as vital tools for supporting human rights and enforcing public responsibilities across society.

While the public believes that journalism remains crucial for democracy, there is a general sense that the news media are performing this role poorly. In The Social Fact, John Wihbey makes the case that journalism can better serve democracy by focusing on ways of fostering social connection. Wihbey explores how the structure of news, information, and knowledge and their flow through society are changing, and he considers ways in which news media can demonstrate the highest possible societal value in the context of these changes.

Analyzing millions of news stories together with Twitter and Facebook shares, broadcast television and YouTube, the book provides a comprehensive overview of the architecture of contemporary American political communications. Through data analysis and detailed qualitative case studies of coverage of immigration, Clinton scandals, and the Trump Russia investigation, the book finds that the right-wing media ecosystem operates fundamentally differently than the rest of the media environment. The authors argue that longstanding institutional, political, and cultural patterns in American politics interacted with technological change since the 1970s to create a propaganda feedback loop in American conservative media. This dynamic has marginalized centre-right media and politicians, radicalized the right wing ecosystem, and rendered it susceptible to propaganda efforts, foreign and domestic.

In an age riven by "fake news," "alternative facts," and disputes over the validity of everything from climate change to the size of inauguration crowds, the authors argue that social factors, not individual psychology, are what's essential to understanding the persistence of false belief and that we must know how those social forces work in order to fight misinformation effectively.

Almost all the statistics in the news, on social media or in scientific reports are based on just a few core concepts, including measurement (ensuring we count the right thing), causation (determining whether one thing causes another) and sampling (using just a few people to understand a whole population). By explaining these concepts in plain language, without complex mathematics, this book prepares students to meet the statistical world head on and to begin their own quantitative research projects. Ideal for students facing statistical research for the first time, or for anyone interested in understanding more about the numbers in the news, this textbook helps students to see beyond the headlines and behind the numbers.