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
The value of this book is the context it provides, in a style aimed at a concerned citizenry rather than fellow academics,...
A provocative analysis of the parallels between Donald Trump’s ascent and the fall of other democracies.
Following the last presidential election, Levitsky (Transforming Labor-Based Parties in Latin America, 2003, etc.) and Ziblatt (Conservative Parties and the Birth of Democracy, 2017, etc.), both professors of government at Harvard, wrote an op-ed column titled, “Is Donald Trump a Threat to Democracy?” The answer here is a resounding yes, though, as in that column, the authors underscore their belief that the crisis extends well beyond the power won by an outsider whom they consider a demagogue and a liar. “Donald Trump may have accelerated the process, but he didn’t cause it,” they write of the politics-as-warfare mentality. “The weakening of our democratic norms is rooted in extreme partisan polarization—one that extends beyond policy differences into an existential conflict over race and culture.” The authors fault the Republican establishment for failing to stand up to Trump, even if that meant electing his opponent, and they seem almost wistfully nostalgic for the days when power brokers in smoke-filled rooms kept candidacies restricted to a club whose members knew how to play by the rules. Those supporting the candidacy of Bernie Sanders might take as much issue with their prescriptions as Trump followers will. However, the comparisons they draw to how democratic populism paved the way toward tyranny in Peru, Venezuela, Chile, and elsewhere are chilling. Among the warning signs they highlight are the Republican Senate’s refusal to consider Barack Obama’s Supreme Court nominee as well as Trump’s demonization of political opponents, minorities, and the media. As disturbing as they find the dismantling of Democratic safeguards, Levitsky and Ziblatt suggest that “a broad opposition coalition would have important benefits,” though such a coalition would strike some as a move to the center, a return to politics as usual, and even a pragmatic betrayal of principles.
The value of this book is the context it provides, in a style aimed at a concerned citizenry rather than fellow academics, rather than in the consensus it is not likely to build.Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5247-6293-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 12, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
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