—How media (openly and sneakily) defends the economic, social, and political agendas of privileged groups—
The Non-fiction Feature
Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of Mass Media
Author: Edward Herman & Noam Chomsky
Publisher: Pantheon Books
Pages: 480 | 2002
In contrast to the standard conception of the media as cantankerous, obstinate, and ubiquitous in their search for truth and their independence of authority, we have spelled out and applied a propaganda model that indeed sees the media as serving a ‘societal purpose,’ but not that of enabling the public to assert meaningful control over the political process by providing them with the information needed for the intelligent discharge of political responsibilities.
The Memoir Spot
We Are Bellingcat
by Eliot Higgins
“Scattered around the globe, we are an online collective, investigating war crimes and picking apart disinformation, basing our findings on clues that are openly available on the internet–in social-media postings, in leaked databases, in free satellite maps. Paradoxically, in this age of online disinformation, facts are easier to come by than ever.”
The Product Spot
Fact-checking websites
There’s a lot of words out there–some of it is factual, some of it is close to factual but not quite, and some of it is just wrong. The key is how to parse through it, especially when it never seems like any of us have the time. Fact-checking websites, for both political and non-political topics, are incredibly useful tools for discerning truth, from kind of truth, from fiction.