Fighting Falsehoods

This book offers the reader tools to recognize, analyze, and fight back against the fake news, misinformation, and disinformation that come at us from every corner. This volume: - Uses real, lively examples to help readers detect fake news, false claims, suspicious information/data, biased reporting, and hate speech; - Demonstrates through case studies where to look for information, what to look for, how to analyze the logic/illogic involved, and uncover the truth value of a story; - Discusses fact-checking sites, what they examine, and their reliability; - Provides examples and analyzes the components, purposes, and consequences of conspiracy theories; - Illustrates the tricks of using numbers/data to mislead readers; - Explains what to look for to help decide whether to believe the conclusions of stories based on surveys; - Offers a range of concrete, effective responses to dangerous, exaggerated, distorted, and false narratives; - Examines policy responses to fake news, disinformation, and misinformation across the world. A key manual to negotiate the information age, this book will be essential reading for students, scholars, and professionals of journalism and mass communication, public policy, politics, and the social sciences. It will also be an indispensable handbook for the lay reader.

Irene Rubin is a retired professor from Northern Illinois University, U.S. Her BA is from Barnard College (Oriental Studies), and her MA is from Harvard (East Asian Studies). Her PhD is from the University of Chicago, in Sociology. She taught public budgeting, qualitative methods, and research design and has written many books. Professor Rubin's research used many of the techniques outlined in this book. Her single-authored books include Running in the Red, Balancing the Federal Budget: Trimming the Herds or Eating the Seed Corn, Class Tax and Power: Municipal Budgeting in the United States, and The Politics of Public Budgeting: Getting and Spending, Borrowing and Balancing. She has also coauthored Qualitative Interviewing: The Art of Hearing Data. Her hobbies include traveling, reading Harry Potter in Spanish, and birdwatching.

1. Suspicion, Analysis, and Response 2. Recognizing Exaggerations, Distortions, and Lies 3. Quick Checks 4. Analysis: Logic and Completeness 5. Analysis by Comparison 6. What Does a Cited Source Actually Say? 7. Conspiracy Theories 8. Problems with Numbers 9. Surveys 10. Response: Fighting Back 11. Afterword: The Responsibility is Ours