Description
Book SynopsisJournalists hate the term fake news, but there's a troubling reality: spin doctors routinely try to dupe them into reporting misleading and distorted stories.
Check the news on any given day and here's what you'll find: Governments routinely lie. Companies inflate claims about their productsand practices. Institutions release studies with misleading data meant to deceive. Police departments, infected by systemic racism, downplay crimes against Indigenous and racialized people.
The public depends on the media to help them understand the world, but are journalists catching all the daily lies, omissions, and distortions? Shrinking newsrooms and an army of spin doctors mean journalists can get duped. Despite valiant efforts by a handful of investigative journalists, the truth is routinely left behind.
Award-winning journalist Cecil Rosner insists there is something we can do about this. We can pressure news organizations to stop blindly
Trade Review
An important, but also unexpectedly entertaining, unveiling of the behind-the-scenes battle of the powerful and a free press in a war for the truth
* Karyn Pugliese, Editor-in-Chief, Canadaland *
Manipulating the Message holds up the mirror to the faces of media who have been knowingly, and at times unknowingly, complicit to the harms caused by colonial biases against Indigenous people. This book serves as a hard-hitting reality check for journalists who wish to implement the TRC Calls To Action for themselves as storytellers. It will make you think, it will make you ask questions and even answer some of those questions. A must-read. * Sheila North, former Grand Chief of Manitoba Keewatinowi Okimakanak *
This is a brilliant book, written by one of Canada’s best investigative journalists and coming at a time of profound crisis in 21st-century journalism. With impressive detail, Rosner helps us understand the scale of the challenge, and he outlines how we can grab back control. * Tony Burman, former head of CBC News and Al Jazeera English *
Enriched by his own first-person stories as a veteran journalist, Rosner explains in clear and accessible prose that what’s at stake is nothing less than truth itself.
* Prof. Mark Feldstein, Richard Eaton Chair of Broadcast Journalism, University of Maryland *
Thought-provoking, mind-blowing … a must-read for anyone in the field of journalism, who has ever read a newspaper and has ever wondered about the greater picture. * The Miramichi Reader *
Table of Contents
- Preface
- Chapter 1: How Manipulation Works
- Chapter 2: Corporate Propaganda
- Chapter 3: Think Tanks or Spin Factories?
- Chapter 4: Political Lies
- Chapter 5: Thin Blue Lies
- Chapter 6: Military Lies
- Chapter 7: Spies and Their Lies
- Chapter 8:Science or Junk?
- Chapter 9: The Power of Polls
- Chapter 10:The Age of Influencers
- Chapter 11: Fighting Back
- Acknowledgments
- Select Bibliography
- Notes
- Index
