Journalism

Poet and critic Kevin Young tours us through a rogue's gallery of hoaxers, plagiarists, forgers, and fakers--from the humbug of P. T. Barnum and Edgar Allan Poe to the unrepentant bunk of JT LeRoy and Donald J. Trump. Bunk traces the history of the hoax as a peculiarly American phenomenon, examining what motivates hucksters and makes the rest of us so gullible. Disturbingly, Young finds that fakery is woven from stereotype and suspicion, race being the most insidious American hoax of all. ...

This edited collection is not a response to the 2016 United States Presidential Election so much as it is a response to the issues highlighted through that single event and since when incredibly smart, sophisticated, and intelligent members of our society were confused by misinformation campaigns. While media literacy and critical media literacy are ideas with long histories in formal education, including K-12 students and higher education, the need for increased attention to these issues has never reached a flash point like the present. The essays collected here are confrontations of post-truth, fake news, mainstream media, and traditional approaches to formal schooling. ...

Over the past decade, American outlets such as PolitiFact, FactCheck.org, and the Washington Post's Fact Checker have shaken up the political world by holding public figures accountable for what they say. Cited across social and national news media, these verdicts can rattle a political campaign and send the White House press corps scrambling. Yet fact-checking is a fraught kind of journalism, one that challenges reporters' traditional roles as objective observers and places them at the center of white-hot, real-time debates. ... Deciding What's True draws on Lucas Graves's unique access to the members of the newsrooms leading this movement. Graves vividly recounts the routines of journalists at three of these hyperconnected, technologically innovative organizations and what informs their approach to a story. ...

In the past decade, social media has become increasingly popular for news consumption due to its easy access, fast dissemination, and low cost. However, social media also enables the wide propagation of "fake news," i.e., news with intentionally false information. Fake news on social media can have significant negative societal effects. Therefore, fake news detection on social media has recently become an emerging research area that is attracting tremendous attention. This book, from a data mining perspective, introduces the basic concepts and characteristics of fake news across disciplines, reviews representative fake news detection methods in a principled way, and illustrates challenging issues of fake news detection on social media. ...

News is vital for a healthy democracy. Collective decision-making requires accurate, reliable information. Nevertheless, much of the information we encounter is inadequate for this task. And some - peddled by politicians, profiteers, bots and algorithms - is fake. Social media platforms and emerging technologies allow fake news to dominate our information landscape. An adequate understanding our current information landscape calls for a new discipline, the epistemology of fake news. ...

Fake News: Falsehood, Fabrication and Fantasy in Journalism examines the causes and consequences of the "fake news" phenomenon now sweeping the world's media and political debates. ...

This is a special themed issue from Communication Research. [50/6, 08/2023]

This is a special themed issue from Communication Research. [47/2, 03/2020]

This is a special themed issue from Communication Research. [49/2, 03/2022]

The Onion, with its unique brand of deadpan satirical humor, has become a familiar part of the American scene. The newspaper has a readership of over a million, and it reaches millions more with its spin-off books and 'The Onion News Network.' The Onion has shown us that standard ways of thinking about the news have their grotesque and silly side, and this invites philosophical examination. Twenty-one philosophers were commissioned to figure out just what makes The Onion so truthful and insightful. Are The Onion writers truly cynical, or just cynically faking it? Does The Onion really have a serious point of view on religion? On sex? On politics? Who cares what Area Man thinks? If everyone's so dumb, how come so many Onion readers keep on laughing at how dumb they are?

This book serves as an accessible critical introduction to the broad category of American political television content. Encompassing political news and scripted entertainment, Political TV addresses a range of formats, including interview/news programs, political satire, fake news, drama, and reality TV. From long-running programs like 'Meet the Press' to more recent offerings including 'Veep,' 'The Daily Show,' 'House of Cards,' 'Last Week Tonight,' and 'Scandal,' Tryon addresses ongoing debates about the role of television in representing issues and ideas relevant to American politics. Exploring political TV's construction of concepts of citizenship and national identity, the status of political TV in a post-network era, and advertisements in politics, Political TV offers an engaging, timely analysis of how this format engages its audience in the political scene. The book also includes a videography of key and historical series, discussion questions, and a bibliography for further reading.

'The Daily Show with Jon Stewart' and 'The Colbert Report' have attracted much interest in recent years from popular audiences as well as scholars in various disciplines. Both Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert have been named on Time magazine's list of the most influential people in the world. The ten essays in this interdisciplinary collection explore the issues engendered by the popularity of entertainment news, including the role of satire in politics, the declining level of trust in traditional sources of media, the shows' cathartic or informational function, and the ways in which these shows influence public opinion. Instructors considering this book for use in a course may request an examination copy here .

Fake news has been the subject of a rapid research response, from a range of fields, given its impact on multiple sectors, the public sphere, and everyday life. The most prominent areas and disciplines contributing research and academic writing on fake news have been journalism, media and cultural studies, media literacy, politics, technology, and education. Whilst the concept is part of a broader concern with misinformation, the term “fake news” came to widespread public attention during the 2016 US presidential election. ...

The Interactive Media Bias Chart is an interactive data visualization that displays measures relating to news value and reliability and political bias, generated by analysts and staff of Ad Fontes Media, of news (and “news-like”) articles as well as podcasts, radio, TV, and video-based sources.
Ad Fontes is Latin for “to the source,” because at the heart of what Ad Fontes Media does is look at the source—analyze the very content itself—to rate it. ...

Are the news media biased? This has long been a heated question in the public sphere, particularly in the American political setting. The question has drawn extensive attention from scholars as well as politicians and political partisans. The contentious nature of what constitutes biased and unbiased coverage—both conceptually and methodologically—has been a central concern for this literature. Indeed, a lack of commonly agreed-upon standards has limited the development of a coherent research tradition. This article focuses on media bias within the United States, which has seen the most robust debate and scholarly examination of the topic. ...