A brisk, well-informed, and urgent message.
A deep dive into the muck of fake news.
In the latest book in a growing genre, journalist Brill, author of The Teamsters and America’s Bitter Pill, examines the “toxic mix” of misinformation, disinformation, myths, alternative “facts,” and conspiracy theories that have proliferated online, leading to a lack of belief in shared truths, distrust in the legitimacy of science and expertise, and an erosion of our sense of community. He traces the current chaos to Section 230, a 1995 law allowing internet providers to police their own platforms and granting them immunity over content, no matter how ill informed or harmful. Although the intent of the law was “to maintain the robust nature of Internet communication,” Brill gives ample evidence to prove that, instead, it vastly undermined truth. In 2018, he and Gordon Crovitz founded NewsGuard to rate the trustworthiness of the most-visited sites, using criteria such as transparency of ownership and correction of mistakes. Although providers said that they supported the effort, Brill and Crovitz realized they had been naïve and clueless: “The problem,” Brill sees, “was their business plan,” which was to encourage engagement on their sites. Sensational, angry, polemic content drives engagement and therefore attracts advertising money. Because of the layers of people involved in placing ads, the companies advertised don’t know where their ads appear, so they end up supporting toxic sites that promote mis- and disinformation. While providers hired dedicated employees to staff their trust and safety teams, Brill found them to be “marginal mitigators” at best. Underscoring the acute need for reform, the author offers suggestions, including amending Section 230 to account for dangerous algorithms, ending online anonymity, directing the Federal Trade Commission to enforce providers’ contracts with users to protect them from harmful content, and bolstering online news and information literacy for K-12 students.
A brisk, well-informed, and urgent message.Pub Date: June 4, 2024
ISBN: 9780525658313
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: April 4, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2024
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.
Words that made a nation.
Isaacson is known for expansive biographies of great thinkers (and Elon Musk), but here he pens a succinct, stimulating commentary on the Founding Fathers’ ode to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” His close reading of the Declaration of Independence’s second sentence, published to mark the 250th anniversary of the document’s adoption, doesn’t downplay its “moral contradiction.” Thomas Jefferson enslaved hundreds of people yet called slavery “a cruel war against human nature” in his first draft of the Declaration. All but 15 of the document’s 56 signers owned enslaved people. While the sentence in question asserted “all men are created equal” and possess “unalienable rights,” the Founders “consciously and intentionally” excluded women, Native Americans, and enslaved people. And yet the sentence is powerful, Isaacson writes, because it names a young nation’s “aspirations.” He mounts a solid defense of what ought to be shared goals, among them economic fairness, “moral compassion,” and a willingness to compromise. “Democracy depends on this,” he writes. Isaacson is excellent when explaining how Enlightenment intellectuals abroad influenced the founders. Benjamin Franklin, one of the Declaration’s “five-person drafting committee,” stayed in David Hume’s home for a month in the early 1770s, “discussing ideas of natural rights” with the Scottish philosopher. Also strong is Isaacson’s discussion of the “edits and tweaks” made to Jefferson’s draft. As recommended by Franklin and others, the changes were substantial, leaving Jefferson “distraught.” Franklin, who emerges as the book’s hero, helped establish municipal services, founded a library, and encouraged religious diversity—the kind of civic-mindedness that we could use more of today, Isaacson reminds us.
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781982181314
Page Count: 80
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2025
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SEEN & HEARD
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
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