Detecting Bull: How to Identify Bias and Junk Journalism in Print, Broadcast and on the Wild Web

Designed for university and advanced high school classes, this book helps students think critically and systematically about news and purportedly factual information in any medium from face-to-face to Facebook to Fox, from the Huffington Post to the Washington Post. With easy-to-remember mnemonics, the book builds habits of mind to serve the student long after the class has ended. Detecting Bull explores the nature of truth and bias -- individual, corporate and audience. It rejects objectivity as an impossible method of inquiry that obscures more than it reveals. In its place, the book advocates a more demanding, but reachable standard, empiricism. As news moves from paper to pixels, the book explains the "language" of images and video. Four theories of news selection are examined to show why some events make headlines and others receive little or no coverage. The book exposes many of the tricks of the misinformation trade and ends with a full chapter on using the full power of the Web to check facts and separate the reliable from the rest. An appendix shows students how to grade news from A to F.

A former journalist and communication professor, John McManus writes and lectures about changes in news media and their impact on democracy. His 1994 book, "Market-Driven Journalism: Let the Citizen Beware?" won the annual research award from the Society of Professional Journalists. So did his 2009 college textbook, "Detecting Bull: How to Identify Bias and Junk Journalism in Print, Broadcast and on the Wild Web." In 2000, he founded GradeTheNews.org. Using Consumer Reports as a model, the project scientifically sampled the most popular newspapers and newscasts in the San Francisco Bay Area and rated them head-to-head on seven yardsticks of journalism quality. Grade the News was funded by the Gerbode, Knight and Ford Foundations and received both national and regional awards.