Truth Decay

Truth Decay
Author: Kavanagh
Publisher: Rand Corporation
Total Pages: 326
Release: 2018-01-16
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1977400132

Political and civil discourse in the United States is characterized by “Truth Decay,” defined as increasing disagreement about facts, a blurring of the line between opinion and fact, an increase in the relative volume of opinion compared with fact, and lowered trust in formerly respected sources of factual information. This report explores the causes and wide-ranging consequences of Truth Decay and proposes strategies for further action.

What Americans Know about Politics and why it Matters

What Americans Know about Politics and why it Matters
Author: Michael X. Delli Carpini
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 420
Release: 1996-01-01
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 9780300072754

The authors explore how Americans' levels of political knowledge have changed over the past 50 years, how such knowledge is distributed among different groups, and how it is used in political decision-making. Drawing on extensive survey data, they present compelling evidence for benefits of a politically informed citizenry--and the cost of one that is poorly and inequitably informed. 62 illustrations.

Political Facts of the United States Since 1789

Political Facts of the United States Since 1789
Author: Erik W. Austin
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 548
Release: 1986
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 9780231060943

This book explores the puzzling phenomenon of new veiling practices among lower middle class women in Cairo, Egypt. Although these women are part of a modernizing middle class, they also voluntarily adopt a traditional symbol of female subordination. How can this paradox be explained? An explanation emerges which reconceptualizes what appears to be reactionary behavior as a new style of political struggle--as accommodating protest. These women, most of them clerical workers in the large government bureaucracy, are ambivalent about working outside the home, considering it a change which brings new burdens as well as some important benefits. At the same time they realize that leaving home and family is creating an intolerable situation of the erosion of their social status and the loss of their traditional identity. The new veiling expresses women's protest against this. MacLeod argues that the symbolism of the new veiling emerges from this tense subcultural dilemma, involving elements of both resistance and acquiescence.

Fact-Checking Journalism and Political Argumentation

Fact-Checking Journalism and Political Argumentation
Author: Jen Birks
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 116
Release: 2019-11-15
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 3030305732

This timely book examines the role of fact-checking journalism within political policy debates, and its potential contribution to public engagement. Understanding facts not to operate in a political vacuum, the book argues for a wide remit for fact-checking journalism beyond empirically-checkable facts, to include the causal relationships and predictions that form part of wider political arguments and are central to electoral pledges. Whilst these statements cannot be proven or disproven, fact-checking can, and sometimes does, ask pertinent critical questions about the premises of those claims and arguments. The analysis centres on the three dedicated national British fact-checkers during the UK’s 2017 snap general election, including their activity and engagement on Twitter. The book also makes a close political discourse and argumentation analysis of three key issue debates in flagship reporting from Channel 4 News and the BBC.

Deciding What’s True

Deciding What’s True
Author: Lucas Graves
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 337
Release: 2016-09-06
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 0231542224

Over the past decade, American outlets such as PolitiFact, FactCheck.org, and the Washington Post's Fact Checker have shaken up the political world by holding public figures accountable for what they say. Cited across social and national news media, these verdicts can rattle a political campaign and send the White House press corps scrambling. Yet fact-checking is a fraught kind of journalism, one that challenges reporters' traditional roles as objective observers and places them at the center of white-hot, real-time debates. As these journalists are the first to admit, in a hyperpartisan world, facts can easily slip into fiction, and decisions about which claims to investigate and how to judge them are frequently denounced as unfair play. Deciding What's True draws on Lucas Graves's unique access to the members of the newsrooms leading this movement. Graves vividly recounts the routines of journalists at three of these hyperconnected, technologically innovative organizations and what informs their approach to a story. Graves also plots a compelling, personality-driven history of the fact-checking movement and its recent evolution from the blogosphere, reflecting on its revolutionary remaking of journalistic ethics and practice. His book demonstrates the ways these rising organizations depend on professional networks and media partnerships yet have also made inroads with the academic and philanthropic worlds. These networks have become a vital source of influence as fact-checking spreads around the world.

Facts are Subversive

Facts are Subversive
Author: Timothy Garton Ash
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 510
Release: 2010-01-01
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0300161352

Timothy Garton Ash is well known as an astute and penetrating observer of a dazzling array of subjects, not least through his many contributions to the New York Review of Books. This collection of his essays from the last decade reveals his knack for ferreting out exceptional insights into a troubled world, often on the basis of firsthand experience. Whether he is writing about how “liberalism” has become a dirty word in American political discourse, the problems of Muslim assimilation in Europe, Ukraine’s Orange Revolution, Günter Grass’s membership in the Waffen-SS, or the angry youth of Iran, Garton Ash combines a gimlet eye for detail with deep knowledge of the history of his chosen subjects. Running through this book is the author’s insistence that, whatever some postmodernists might claim, there are indeed facts—and we have both a political and a moral duty to establish them. By practicing what it preaches, Facts Are Subversive shows why Timothy Garton Ash is one of the world’s leading political writers. “The best and most perceptive political writer of our time . . . This book shines the clearest of lights on an entire decade.”—John Simpson “One of the most reliable and acute observers of the past present, able to report on events as a witness and, simultaneously, assess them with a coolness of judgment that almost always holds up over time.”—George Packer, New York Times Book Review “One of the most enjoyable political books you’ll read this year.”—GQ

Super PACs

Super PACs
Author: Louise I. Gerdes
Publisher: Greenhaven Publishing LLC
Total Pages: 113
Release: 2014-05-20
Genre: Young Adult Nonfiction
ISBN: 0737768649

The passage of Citizens United by the Supreme Court in 2010 sparked a renewed debate about campaign spending by large political action committees, or Super PACs. Its ruling said that it is okay for corporations and labor unions to spend as much as they want in advertising and other methods to convince people to vote for or against a candidate. This book provides a wide range of opinions on the issue. Includes primary and secondary sources from a variety of perspectives; eyewitnesses, scientific journals, government officials, and many others.