Reddit mentions of Blur: How to Know What's True in the Age of Information Overload

Blur

http://www.amazon.com/Blur-Know-Whats-Information-Overload/dp/1608193012/ref=sr_1_7?ie=UTF8&qid=1371066436&sr=8-7&keywords=blur

I've read a few books that might cover these:

• Bad Science by Ben Goldacre
  
• Blur by Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel
  
• True Enough by Farhad Manjoo
  
• Age of Propaganda by Anthony Pratkanis and Elliot Aronson
  
• Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely
  
  They all deal with belief systems and logical reasoning in different ways. Some of the focus on the message, others focus on the perception of the message.

> It also has a tinge of contempt for political reporters--which is fair sometimes.

I have a significant amount of contempt for institutionalized White House reporters, and really a lot of the folks covering national politics in DC. It's a broken system that values maintaining access more than relaying the truth to the audience. It values balance and a false sense of festishized "objectivity" over the weight of facts and evidence.

There's three books I can recommend for a deeper level of criticism. One is Robert McChesney's "Our Unfree Press" which has an entire chapter on the brokenness of White House-based political reporting. It's a little more challenging of a read, as it is coming at the journalistic process from a heavy cultural/critical approach.

The other two are the two books I use when I teach our News Literacy course, which is a course all about teaching journalism students and non-journalism students alike how to be the best, most responsible, most critical consumers of news they can be. One is McManus's "Detecting Bull," and the other is Kovach and Rosenstiel's "Blur: How to know what's true in the age of information overload."

The former is a little more fun of a read, but it's also from 2012, so a lot of the examples are getting aged out.