Fake News Nation

James W. Cortada, Research Fellow at the Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota. Author of dozens of books on computers, information, and technology, has written for Oxford University Press, Princeton University Press, MIT Press, John Wiley & Sons, Financial Times, and McGraw-Hill.William Aspray, professor of information science, University of Colorado Boulder. Author or editor of more than 25 books on the history of computing, mathematics, and information, has written for such presses as MIT Press, Basic Books, and Springer.

Highly Recommended: This book offers a sweeping and powerful historical corrective to those who claim we are in a new "post-truth" era. [Cortada and Aspray] thoroughly document how deliberate lies, half-truths, and misinformation have long been part and parcel of American democracy. Through a set of carefully constructed historical case studies, the authors show how misinformation is often a strategic tool for both individual and institutional political actors, and that it takes on different casts in harmony with the contemporary expressive styles of its day. By finding such analogues in the past, from scenarios of assassination to those of war, Cortada and Aspray leave us clear-eyed about the challenges of the present while providing a set of historical cases that those looking to correct misinformation can learn from, precisely because they arose in a radically different media era. In the end, this text reveals that we are not in a new era at all, and that the problem of misinformation, and its at times far-reaching consequences, has been ever-present during American self-rule.