Don't Believe It!: How Lies Become News
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About this ebook
In the last few years, the journalism industry has cut costs by eliminating important safeguards: companies have reduced the number of fact-checkers, editors, and journalists. What this means is that editors and reporters cannot spend time verifying information. Moreover, journalists are not required to have professional experience or training to cover their beats. Fierce competition to get a scoop may lead to journalists making careless errors or not double-checking information.
To maintain audiences and readership, journalists, editors and producers will choose sensational stories that “shock.” Combined with time and budget constraints, journalists may unwittingly or deliberately disseminate false or misleading information to the public. It is important to get a story, interview a subject or nab a scoop first—the accuracy of these elements is secondary. Competition from other media outlets also means the goal of a journalist is to get the scoop first—how it makes it on the air (flawed, inaccurate, questionably obtained) is unimportant.
In Don’t Believe It!, Alexandra Kitty demonstrates with example upon example how manufactured news is endemic in our media and shows the reader how to spot suspicious stories and evaluate sources, eyewitnesses and data. This is a comprehensive bible to information verification from a logical standpoint, showing how to be skeptical without being jaded, step by step, with case studies and a classification manual.
Alexandra Kitty
Alexandra Kitty is an award-winning author, educator, and artist whose work has appeared in Presstime, Quill, Current, Elle Canada, Maisonneuve, Critical Review, and Skeptic. She was a relationships columnist for the Hamilton Spectator and an advice columnist for the Victoria Times Colonist. She taught language studies at Mohawk College, writing at the Sheridan Institute, communications at Conestoga College, metalwork arts at Niagara College, and art at the Dundas Valley School of Art. She was the first female recipient of the Arch Award from McMaster University, and is the author of a number of books, including Don’t Believe It!: How Lies Become News; OutFoxed: Rupert Murdoch’s War on Journalism; A New Approach to Journalism; The Art of Kintsugi; and The Dramatic Moment of Fate: The Life of Sherlock Holmes in the Theatre, among others.
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Reviews for Don't Believe It!
7 ratings2 reviews
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5This book looks at how, and why, so many scams, hoaxes and other falsehoods seem to make it into the news.If there is such a thing as The Reason for such a state of affairs, it is that, in general, journalists don’t bother to check a story’s accuracy. In this 24-hour-news world, there is little, or no, time to be thorough. It is better to be first than right. If a story has been covered by some other media outlet, it must automatically be legitimate. Also, an increasing number of scam artists have learned to package their scams in a media-friendly way.All of us have seen such stories in the news. Some people claim to have found disgusting things in their food, like needles in soda cans, or fingers in chili. During Gulf War I, there was the widely reported accusation that Iraqi soldiers burst into Kuwaiti maternity wards, took the babies out of incubators, left them to die on the floor, and took the incubators. A popular story is the one about a crime victim, or someone, especially a child, fighting some major disease. Whether or not the poor individual actually exists tends to be forgotten. What if the reporter is the one who says they are sick, but then it turns out to be a lie. How many of these stories turn out to be true?Included are a list of questions that the media consumer can ask to help weed out the hoaxes. How well is the story sourced? Is the story over hyped? Is the rumor inflammatory or slanderous? Does this interview subject have something to gain by lying? Was a “friend of a friend” the origin of the rumor? Does the story rely on unnamed sources? In war zones, does one of the warring sides seem to have media training or have hired a public relations firm?This book belongs in every home in America. It does a fine job of showing just how easily scams and hoaxes can become news, and helping the consumer to distinguish them from legitimate news. The writing is first-rate and it is really easy to read.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Largely common sense, which isn't common, this is a manual on how to be critical about news stories and how to examine them for truth, or if a company or person or who or whatever is trying to hoax, fake or PR their way through the news. Very informative, a bit Amerocentric but I'm pretty sure fairly universally applicable.