“The Curious Person’s Guide to Fighting Fake News” (Pitchstone Publishing) lays out an ambitious goal in its title. Author David G. McAfee is a journalist who has written extensively about atheism, and seems earnest in his desire to help readers think critically about what they read. Unfortunately, a disorganized approach to the subject and uneven writing undermine that objective.
In the interest of full disclosure, the copy I read was an electronic advance reader’s copy, or eARC. Best practices would require an editor to track down a copy of the finished book and check my citations and claims against it, something that’s not possible here. So my complaints about inconsistent use of scare quotes around “fake news,” italics overused for emphasis, and sentences that just don’t flow well are sincere, but you can take them with a grain of salt and a prayer for stringent last-minute edits. It will be hard to fully rein in a tendency toward dull generalizations and clunky writing, though: “Whatever we all think about politics, religion, etc., most people can agree on one thing: there’s a … problem with the mainstream media (that is not to say the fringe media is any better — it is absolutely not).” This feels like a lot of vamping to bulk up word count, and it happens repeatedly. The pattern seems to be: Make a statement, provide a long, indented quote from a source restating what was just said, then follow up with a quick repetition of the same concept. It gets old fast.
It’s a shame, because there are a few sections of the book that shine. The best by far, and very timely, is a discussion of what “anonymous sources” really means. Many readers think these are simply fictional accounts made up by writers, a misunderstanding that has weakened public trust in journalism, when in fact those sources are real people who are known to many in the newsroom, and who have their statements verified by fact checkers. (Not mentioned here is the way President Trump’s history of being an “anonymous source” to shill on his own behalf, either by calling himself John Barron or filtering leads through Fox News, has added to the confusion.) There’s a nice breakdown of the acronym SIFT (stop, investigate, find, trace), that readers can use to vet articles they find online, and a chunky list of websites offering education around fake-spotting. A discussion of social media and the moral dilemma of valuing “likes” over actual lives was a bit muddled and hard to follow, but still a valuable addition.
McAfee’s personality comes through when he veers into the tangentially related subject of alternative health. “(R)eiki … (is) a type of ‘therapy’ that purportedly uses a ‘healing energy’ of the hands. In other words, it’s nothing.” This book spends a lot of time on Dr. Oz, Marianne Williamson, and Goop, all of which McAfee is clearly disgusted with, but he never draws a clear connection between what he calls “big bulls**t” and fake news. His dislike clouds his ability to write about it usefully.
The introduction describes a book signing event where a boy who was 12 years old or so confronted McAfee with a critique of journalism and the media that ultimately changed his entire approach to this book; his intent was to focus on the problem of reader ignorance, believing journalists were the main victims of fake news. McAfee himself is in his early 30s, and it’s to his credit that he engaged this young reader respectfully, but the resulting book feels scattershot and like he did not fully reorganize it after this major shift in thinking.
More than once, I tried to figure out who the intended audience for this book is; I’m a curious person, but put it down feeling unsatisfied. Would his 12-year-old sparring partner like it? At times it reads like a textbook, with lengthy quotes indented on the page, but then it devolves into opinion with little supporting research. Fake news is a deadly serious topic, but also one that can be a lot of fun to learn about, since it requires readers to literally play detective. Not pulling us into the fight was a missed opportunity.
Last year, I reviewed Lisa Loving’s book “Street Journalist” (Microcosm Publishing), and in just one 15-page chapter it offers an accessible, engaging overview of the problem, along with exercises to develop critical thinking skills as both a reader and reporter. There are seedlings of those same ideas in this “Guide,” but they feel like prisoners of an early draft that’s far from complete.
Heather Seggel is a writer living in Northern California. Email heatherlseggel@gmail.com.
From The Progressive Populist, November 15, 2020
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