A keenly observed visit to a new world whose geography we can now better comprehend.
A journalism professor charts the advent and ubiquity of fact-checking in our polarized political present and the profoundly altered world of journalism.
Co-author of The Story So Far: What We Know About the Business of Digital Journalism (2011), Graves (Journalism and Mass Communication/Univ. of Wisconsin) returns with a reasoned and reasonable text that will appeal—due to its scholarly tone, diction, and format—mostly to an academic audience. Followed by more than 70 pages of notes and bibliography, the text employs the familiar format of introduction, conclusion, section introductions, and summaries—much repetition, much of it superfluous. Still, the author uses a personal voice at times, especially when recounting his volunteering at PolitiFact, one of the three fact-checking organizations on which he focuses (the others are FactCheck.org and the Washington Post’s Fact Checker). Graves chronicles his experience fact-checking a Glenn Beck claim, using his experience to clarify how fact-checkers operate, how they reach conclusions, how their organizational superiors must sanction the findings, and how vitriol invariably ensues. (To his credit, the author reproduces some unkind responses to his Beck research.) Readers on both sides of the political spectrum dislike findings that contradict what they believe—a very human reaction, as Graves demonstrates. The author spent a lot of time interviewing fact-checkers, helped organize a conference where fact-checkers discussed the issues facing their fairly recent profession, and raised issues of all sorts, some quite uncomfortable. Do, for example, fact-checkers focus more on one party or the other? No. Do they tend to label as false or misleading the claims made by one party? Yes—the GOP appears to suffer more. Graves also examines the 2016 primary season and the many challenges presented by Donald Trump.
A keenly observed visit to a new world whose geography we can now better comprehend.Pub Date: Sept. 6, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-231-17507-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Columbia Univ.
Review Posted Online: June 29, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2016
A Churchill-ian view of native history—Ward, that is, not Winston—its facts filtered through a dense screen of ideology.
Custer died for your sins. And so, this book would seem to suggest, did every other native victim of colonialism.
Inducing guilt in non-native readers would seem to be the guiding idea behind Dunbar-Ortiz’s (Emerita, Ethnic Studies/California State Univ., Hayward; Blood on the Border: A Memoir of the Contra War, 2005, etc.) survey, which is hardly a new strategy. Indeed, the author says little that hasn’t been said before, but she packs a trove of ideological assumptions into nearly every page. For one thing, while “Indian” isn’t bad, since “[i]ndigenous individuals and peoples in North America on the whole do not consider ‘Indian’ a slur,” “American” is due to the fact that it’s “blatantly imperialistic.” Just so, indigenous peoples were overwhelmed by a “colonialist settler-state” (the very language broadly applied to Israelis vis-à-vis the Palestinians today) and then “displaced to fragmented reservations and economically decimated”—after, that is, having been forced to live in “concentration camps.” Were he around today, Vine Deloria Jr., the always-indignant champion of bias-puncturing in defense of native history, would disavow such tidily packaged, ready-made, reflexive language. As it is, the readers who are likely to come to this book—undergraduates, mostly, in survey courses—probably won’t question Dunbar-Ortiz’s inaccurate assertion that the military phrase “in country” derives from the military phrase “Indian country” or her insistence that all Spanish people in the New World were “gold-obsessed.” Furthermore, most readers won’t likely know that some Ancestral Pueblo (for whom Dunbar-Ortiz uses the long-abandoned term “Anasazi”) sites show evidence of cannibalism and torture, which in turn points to the inconvenient fact that North America wasn’t entirely an Eden before the arrival of Europe.
A Churchill-ian view of native history—Ward, that is, not Winston—its facts filtered through a dense screen of ideology.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-8070-0040-3
Page Count: 296
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
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