A damning and depressing indictment sure to incite controversy.
A veteran journalist decries a lack of responsible reporting.
Investigative journalist Attkisson, winner of five Emmy Awards, mounts a hard-hitting, if hardly novel, critique of the media, which she sees as manipulated and manipulative. Right now, “versions of history and current events are being written and revised in real time according to what powerful interests wish them to say.” Facts that support “The Narrative” are deemed newsworthy while other facts are buried. Instead of doing research and presenting opposing views, writes the author, “a new breed of reporter” aims “to convince you to believe whatever they personally believe.” Attkisson reports her own frustrating experiences at CBS, where her stories were repeatedly quashed and her reporting attacked; although executives wanted her to stay, she left before her contract expired in 2014. Areas where the author identifies egregious bias include the #MeToo movement, the Russia investigation, and biased pollsters; regarding the last, if results “are off trend,” the media discount them. Trump, however, has become “the vehicle that the media at large has used to unleash its furor and redefine journalism in a way it was never defined before,” and Attkisson finds much evidence for ways in which news outlets misquote or misconstrue Trump’s statements. Rarely, though, does she take Trump to task for his many proven lies. The author appends a long list of “major mistakes” about Trump propagated by news sources. These include “photos of immigrant children in cages as if they were new photos taken during the Trump administration” when they were “from 2014 during the Obama administration.” The media condemned Trump for saying, “It’s not our problem,” when referring to Turkey’s assault on Syria, when he said, “It’s not our border.” Attkisson reveals that in 1999, “Gallup found trust in mass media at 55 percent. It had plummeted to 40 percent in 2014.” To counter an even greater dip, the author includes a list of outlets and reporters that she considers trustworthy.
A damning and depressing indictment sure to incite controversy.Pub Date: Nov. 24, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-06-297469-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Sept. 7, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
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
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