There are two sides to every news story. The one that your favorite media outlet prefers, and the other side, which is the one that they will mislead you about. Or, so it often turns out. This is unfortunate. Media institutions play an outsized role in the life and health of communities and nations, and [ Read More ]
Recently, the Pew Research Center published a study demonstrating Americans have difficulty distinguishing between fact and opinion. Only 26 percent of adults correctly identified five factual statements as such, and only 35 percent were able to do the same for five opinion statements. The research also found we’re significantly more likely to consider something “factual” rather than [ Read More ]
Kurt Anderson’s Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire is one of the bestselling and most discussed books of the year. In this fast-paced and provocative work of revisionist history and diagnostic journalism, Anderson argues that Americans have recently become untethered from reality and that Trump’s election represents the high point of our collective delusion. More importantly, Anderson argues Americans [ Read More ]
During the 2016 election, radio host Ira Glass interviewed his Uncle Lenny, an 81-year-old retired plastic surgeon who gets all his news from conservative outlets. During the interview Uncle Lenny made several, um, audacious claims about President Obama. Uncle Lenny started by boldly declaring that Obama has “played more rounds of golf than any president [ Read More ]
The past year in American politics has offered a veritable cornucopia of rotten political fruit, few of which are more putrid than “fake news.” During the election cycle a number of websites plagiarized the look of mainstream media outlets in order spread patently false stories. Readers were more likely to believe the stories because they [ Read More ]
The past year in American politics has put on full display the social, cultural, and political breakdown we are experiencing in the United States. Evangelicals, we need to find a way to make things right again, and we can’t count on talk show hosts or politicians to do this. It’s up to us—ordinary citizens of [ Read More ]