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
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.
Maya Angelou is a natural writer with an inordinate sense of life and she has written an exceptional autobiographical narrative which retrieves her first sixteen years from "the general darkness just beyond the great blinkers of childhood."
Her story is told in scenes, ineluctably moving scenes, from the time when she and her brother were sent by her fancy living parents to Stamps, Arkansas, and a grandmother who had the local Store. Displaced they were and "If growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat." But alternating with all the pain and terror (her rape at the age of eight when in St. Louis With her mother) and humiliation (a brief spell in the kitchen of a white woman who refused to remember her name) and fear (of a lynching—and the time they buried afflicted Uncle Willie under a blanket of vegetables) as well as all the unanswered and unanswerable questions, there are affirmative memories and moments: her charming brother Bailey; her own "unshakable God"; a revival meeting in a tent; her 8th grade graduation; and at the end, when she's sixteen, the birth of a baby. Times When as she says "It seemed that the peace of a day's ending was an assurance that the covenant God made with children, Negroes and the crippled was still in effect."
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1969
ISBN: 0375507892
Page Count: 235
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1969
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