News And Culture Of Lying

Weaver maintains that news organizations regularly foster a haze of untruth that obscures the meanings of events and distorts our perception of reality. A revealing look at how news stories are assigned, reported, edited, published, and more.

Presents an analysis of the lying behavior of political leaders, discussing the reasons why it occurs, the different types of lies, and the costs and benefits to the public and other countries that result from it, with examples from the recent past.

The news media are often seen as a fourth branch of government, serving as a check on the other three. This text argues that this is a mistaken notion: the media's decisions affect the government's policy making, as well as the processes and outcomes of the political system.

Were shamed journalists Jayson Blair and Stephen Glass rare bad apples? Far from it, they were just the ones clumsy enough to get caught. Alexandra Kitty demonstrates how manufactured news is endemic in today's media and shows the reader how to spot suspicious stories.

From fibs in America's first newspaper about royal incest to social-media-driven conspiracy theories about Barack Obama's birthplace, Andie Tucher explores how American audiences have argued over what's real and what's not and why that matters for democracy.

Lying is an intrinsic part of our social fabric, but it is also a deeply problematic and misunderstood aspect of what makes us human. Ian Leslie takes us on a fascinating journey that makes us question not only our own relationship to the truth, but also virtually every daily encounter we have. On the way he dissects the history of the lie detector, how parents affect their children's attitude to lying (and vice versa), Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, the philosophical ambiguity of telling the truth, Bill Clinton's presentational prowess, Wonder Woman's lasso of truth, and why we should be wary of anyone with more than 150 Facebook friends.Born Liars is thought-provoking, anecdotally driven narrative nonfiction at its best. Ian Leslie's intoxicating blend of anthropology, biology, cultural history, philosophy, and popular psychology belies a serious central message: that humans have evolved and thrived in large part because of their ability to deceive.

Lying in Early Modern English Culture is a major study of ideas of truth and falsehood in early modern England from the advent of the Reformation to the aftermath of the failed Gunpowder Plot. The period is characterised by panic and chaos when few had any idea how religious, cultural, and social life would develop after the traumatic division of Christendom. While many saw the need for a secular power to define the truth others declared that their allegiances belonged elsewhere. Accordingly there was a constant battle between competing authorities for the right to declare what was the truth and so label opponents as liars. Issues of truth and lying were, therefore, a constant feature of everyday life and determined ideas of individual identity, politics, speech, sex, marriage, and social behaviour, as well as philosophy and religion. This book is a cultural history of truth and lying from the 1530s to the 1610s, showing how lying needs to be understood in action as well as in theory. Unlike most histories of lying, it concentrates on a series of particular events reading them in terms of academic theories and more popular notions of lying. The book covers a wide range of material such as the trials of Ann Boleyn and Thomas More, the divorce of Frances Howard, and the murder of Anthony James by Annis and George Dell; works of literature such as Othello, The Faerie Queene, A Mirror for Magistrates, and The Unfortunate Traveller; works of popular culture such as the herring pamphlet of 1597; and major writings by Castiglione, Montaigne, Erasmus, Luther, and Tyndale.

Defining lies as statements that are intended to deceive, this book considers the contexts in which people tell lies, how they are detected and sometimes exposed, and the consequences for the liars themselves, their dupes, and the wider society. The author provides examples from a number of cultures with distinctive religious and ethical traditions, and delineates domains where lying is the norm, domains that are ambiguous and the one domain (science) that requires truthtelling. He refers to experimental studies on children that show how, at an early age, they acquire the capactiy to lie and learn when it is appropriate to do so. He reviews how lying has been evaluated by moralists, examines why we do not regard novels as lies and relates the human capacity to lie to deceit among other animal species. He concludes that although there are, in all societies, good pragmatic reasons for not lying all the time, there are also strong reasons for lying some of the time.