News and How to Use It: What to Believe in a Fake News World

by Alan Rusbridger

Overview

A society that isn’t sure what’s true can’t function, but increasingly we no longer seem to know who or what to believe. We’re barraged by a torrent of lies, half-truths and propaganda: how do we even identify good journalism any more? At a moment of existential crisis for the news industry, in our age of information chaos, News and How to Use It shows us how. From Bias to Snopes, from Clickbait to TL;DR, and from Fact-Checkers to the Lamestream Media, here is a definitive user’s guide for how to stay informed, tell truth from fiction and hold those in power accountable in the modern age.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781838851620
Publisher:	Canongate Books
Publication date:	11/26/2020
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	336
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Alan Rusbridger is editor of Prospect. Previously he was Editor-in-Chief of Guardian News&Media from 1995 to 2015. He launched the Guardian in the US and Australia as well as building a website which today attracts more than 100 million unique browsers a month. The paper’s coverage of phone hacking led to the Leveson Inquiry into press standards and ethics. Guardian US won the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for public service for its leading global coverage of the Snowden revelations. He is the author of Play It Again and Breaking News. He lives in London. He was for six years Principal of Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, and chairs the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. He is a member of the global Facebook Oversight Board, which regulates content on the social media platform. @arusbridger | arusbridger.com
Alan Rusbridger is editor of Prospect. Previously he was Editor-in-Chief of Guardian News & Media from 1995 to 2015. He launched the Guardian in the US and Australia as well as building a website which today attracts more than 100 million unique browsers a month. The paper’s coverage of phone hacking led to the Leveson Inquiry into press standards and ethics. Guardian US won the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for public service for its leading global coverage of the Snowden revelations. He is the author of Play It Again and Breaking News. He lives in London. He was for six years Principal of Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, and chairs the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. He is a member of the global Facebook Oversight Board, which regulates content on the social media platform.

@arusbridger | arusbridger.com

Editorial Reviews

11/08/2021

Former Guardian editor Rusbridger (Breaking News) delivers a brisk and well-informed study of the issues affecting journalism in the form of a dictionary. Noting that public trust in the U.K. press plummeted during the coronavirus pandemic, Rusbridger blames controversies such as the 2011 phone-hacking scandal, when it was revealed that British journalists had illegally accessed the voice messages of public figures; journalism’s struggle “to describe itself honestly, if at all”; and a flood of “politically motivated” disinformation. Throughout, he explains how the rise of the internet and social media disrupted print journalism, discussing, for instance, how allowing content to appear on news aggregators such as Facebook and Apple News has its pluses (“traffic, marketing, visibility”) and minuses (“cannibalisation, lack of transparency and data, loss of direct relationship with the reader”). He also contends that British newspaper owners’ business interests affected their journalists’ coverage of Brexit, and critiques media figures including Daily Telegraph opinion writer Christopher Brooks, who was lauded as a “Fleet Street titan” even though his columns were riddled with factual errors and “thuggish attacks on climate scientists with whom he disagreed.” Though Rusbridger’s diagnoses are keen, his prescriptions are less persuasive; at one point, he suggests it’s up to the public to develop “a herd immunity to false information.” Still, this a rich compendium of the tensions roiling journalism in Britain and the U.S. (Jan.)

Publishers Weekly

It was my good luck - and the world's - that Alan Rusbridger was the Guardian's editor when powerful governments tried to prevent the paper from revealing that they had deceived and disempowered their citizens. Alan is a fearless defender of the public interest who has had a singular career in journalism. His book is an urgent reminder that there is still a place for real journalism - indeed, our democracies depend on it

EDWARD SNOWDEN

The book [Rusbridger] has written is eloquent in its argument for well-resourced journalism, and never better than in its central narrative of how an old profession struggled to cope with a new technology that threatened it with obsolescence

Guardian - IAN JACK

If you are interested in the mechanics of the news, especially related to the times we are living in, going through and set to go through, then this book is a must

NIHAL ARTHANAYAKE

Praise for Breaking News: [Rusbridger] has written a book of breathtaking range . . . The brilliant Breaking News is essential - and entertaining - reading

Observer - SIR HAROLD EVANS

Well written and unskimped, this will be a painful document when we wake up one morning with nothing to read at breakfast except our smartphones

Times Literary Supplement, Best Books of the Year - TOM STOPPARD

Just when we were feeling lost in the dark labyrinth of fake news and journalism in crisis, Alan Rusbridger lights his torch and leads the way. Essential

STEVE COOGAN

I particularly enjoyed Alan Rusbridger's Breaking News - in places it's as exciting as a thriller (and the good guys win) but it also gave me a new understanding of the difficulties that now confront good journalism

New Statesman, Best Books of 2018 - HENRY MARSH

A fascinating book and an important one

Scotsman

Engaging . . . We love a good newspaper yarn, and Rusbridger provides a dandy

Financial Times

The portrait of Rusbridger that emerges is that of the rarest of newsroom species - someone with genuine bona fides as a journalist and an unassailable commitment to the profession's enduring values, who also possesses the curiosity, nimbleness of mind and openness to change necessary to navigate the relentless, shape-shifting challenges that lie ahead for media companies today. The cascading crises afflicting journalism are now, rightly, understood to be threats to American democracy. It is hardly an overstatement, then, to say that the health of our society depends, in part, on future Rusbridgers emerging to take the reins of our news organisations

New Yorker

Alan Rusbridger is one of the most important journalists of his generation . . . this book needs to be read

Independent Whig.

Smart, relevant and punchy . . . a powerful light in the darkness

Evening Standard

Given that Rusbridger is, in my opinion, one of the two great newspaper editors of the past half-century (the other is the late Harry Evans), anything he writes about the press is going to be worth reading . . . Many of the mini-essays are useful distillations of his experience in, and knowledge of, the industry

Guardian