Research: Fake News and News Bias: Researching this Topic

Chomsky

"The Five Filters of the Mass Media Machine" based on the book Manufacturing Consent Mugar Stacks P96.E25 H47 2002.

Chomsky's Propaganda Model says American media have "filters" which together emphasize institutional memory, limited debate and media content emphasizing the interests of those in control.

Article Databases

Communication & Mass Media Complete This link opens in a new window CMMC indexes journals covering communication, mass media, linguistics, discourse, rhetoric, sociolinguistics, communication theory, language, logic, organizational communication and other closely related fields of study.
Humanities Full Text / Humanities & Social Sciences Index Retrospective This link opens in a new window These combined databases provide access to journal articles, book reviews, performance reviews, interviews, bibliographies and more from a broad range of humanities and social sciences journals.
PAIS Index This link opens in a new window The PAIS International database covers current public policy issues and areas of potential legislation. Cited articles, books and documents can date back to 1910 and are listed in the original language. While some full text is included, the index primarily links to full text articles available through existing BU subscriptions.
Worldwide Political Science Abstracts This link opens in a new window Indexes and abstracts international relations, political science, and foreign affairs literature. May include references to dissertations, books, or scholarly articles. Some full text included; links provided to BU content.
Business Source Complete This link opens in a new window Provides bibliographic and full text content, including indexing and abstracts for scholarly business journals back to 1886 and full text journal articles in all disciplines of business, including marketing, management, accounting, finance and economics. The database full text content includes investment research reports, industry reports, market research reports, company profiles, SWOT analyses. Sources covered by this database include Economist Intelligence Unit country reports.
ProQuest One Business This link opens in a new window ProQuest One Business combines multiple ProQuest business information databases including ABI-Inform, Accounting, Tax & Banking and Entrepreneurship and contains more than 130 million documents. Content in this database also covers over 2,400 journals and magazines, several hundred news sources, thousands of ebooks, videos and company, industry and country reports.
APA PsycInfo This link opens in a new window Provides access to articles, books and book chapters, and dissertations that cover the scholarly literature in the psychological, social, behavioral, and health sciences. Includes material of relevance to psychologists and professionals in related fields such as psychiatry, management, business, education, social science, neuroscience, law, medicine, and social work.
Sociological Abstracts This link opens in a new window Sociological Abstracts indexes and abstracts the international literature of sociology and related disciplines in the social and behavioral sciences. The database provides abstracts of journal articles and citations to book reviews. It also provides abstracts of books, book chapters, dissertations, and conference papers. Forty percent of the content is published outside of North America.
Social Sciences Full Text This link opens in a new window Social Sciences Full Text provides access to hundreds of English language journals in the social sciences. About two-thirds of the journals are peer-reviewed.

Selected Books

Books about Fake News

Detecting Fake News on Social Media by Kai Shu; Huan Liu; Jiawei Han (Editor); Lise Getoor (Editor); Wei Wang (Editor); Johannes Gehrke (Editor); Robert Grossman (Editor) In the past decade, social media has become increasingly popular for news consumption due to its easy access, fast dissemination, and low cost. However, social media also enables the wide propagation of "fake news," i.e., news with intentionally false information. Fake news on social media can have significant negative societal effects. Therefore, fake news detection on social media has recently become an emerging research area that is attracting tremendous attention. This book, from a data mining perspective, introduces the basic concepts and characteristics of fake news across disciplines, reviews representative fake news detection methods in a principled way, and illustrates challenging issues of fake news detection on social media. In particular, we discussed the value of news content and social context, and important extensions to handle early detection, weakly-supervised detection, and explainable detection. The concepts, algorithms, and methods described in this lecture can help harness the power of social media to build effective and intelligent fake news detection systems. This book is an accessible introduction to the study of detecting fake news on social media. It is an essential reading for students, researchers, and practitioners to understand, manage, and excel in this area. This book is supported by additional materials, including lecture slides, the complete set of figures, key references, datasets, tools used in this book, and the source code of representative algorithms.
Location: e-book
Publication Date: 2019
Disinformation, Misinformation, and Fake News in Social Media by Shu Kai (Editor); Wang Suhang (Editor); Lee Dongwon (Editor); Liu Huan (Editor) This book serves as a convenient entry point for researchers, practitioners, and students to understand the problems and challenges, learn state-of-the-art solutions for their specific needs, and quickly identify new research problems in their domains. The contributors to this volume describe the recent advancements in three related parts: (1) user engagements in the dissemination of information disorder; (2) techniques on detecting and mitigating disinformation; and (3) trending issues such as ethics, blockchain, clickbaits, etc. This edited volume will appeal to students, researchers, and professionals working on disinformation, misinformation and fake news in social media from a unique lens.
Location: e-book
Publication Date: 2020
Fake News by Melissa Zimdars (Editor); Kembrew McLeod (Editor) New perspectives on the misinformation ecosystem that is the production and circulation of fake news. What is fake news? Is it an item on Breitbart, an article in The Onion, an outright falsehood disseminated via Russian bot, or a catchphrase used by a politician to discredit a story he doesn't like? This book examines the real fake news: the constant flow of purposefully crafted, sensational, emotionally charged, misleading or totally fabricated information that mimics the form of mainstream news. Rather than viewing fake news through a single lens, the book maps the various kinds of misinformation through several different disciplinary perspectives, taking into account the overlapping contexts of politics, technology, and journalism. The contributors consider topics including fake news as "disorganized" propaganda; folkloric falsehood in the "Pizzagate" conspiracy; native advertising as counterfeit news; the limitations of regulatory reform and technological solutionism; Reddit's enabling of fake news; the psychological mechanisms by which people make sense of information; and the evolution of fake news in America. A section on media hoaxes and satire features an oral history of and an interview with prankster-activists the Yes Men, famous for parodies that reveal hidden truths. Finally, contributors consider possible solutions to the complex problem of fake news--ways to mitigate its spread, to teach students to find factually accurate information, and to go beyond fact-checking. Contributors Mark Andrejevic, Benjamin Burroughs, Nicholas Bowman, Mark Brewin, Elizabeth Cohen, Colin Doty, Dan Faltesek, Johan Farkas, Cherian George, Tarleton Gillespie, Dawn R. Gilpin, Gina Giotta, Theodore Glasser, Amanda Ann Klein, Paul Levinson, Adrienne Massanari, Sophia A. McClennen, Kembrew McLeod, Panagiotis Takis Metaxas, Paul Mihailidis, Benjamin Peters, Whitney Phillips, Victor Pickard, Danielle Polage, Stephanie Ricker Schulte, Leslie-Jean Thornton, Anita Varma, Claire Wardle, Melissa Zimdars, Sheng Zou
Location: e-book
Publication Date: 2020
Information Literacy and Libraries in the Age of Fake News by Denise E. Agosto (Editor) Going beyond the fake news problem, this book tackles the broader issue of teaching library users of all types how to become more critical consumers and sharers of information. As a public, school, or academic librarian or educator, you can help library users to become more conscious and responsible consumers of information. As you read, you'll gain a better understanding and appreciation of the core concepts involved in promoting critical information literacy, such as information ethics, media literacy, and civic education. You'll also learn the history of fake news and come away with practical ideas in mind for strategies to apply in your library. Chapters contributed by leading experts in public, academic, and school library services are written in plain, everyday language that librarians and library school students can easily understand and relate to their own experiences as information users, especially their experiences in social media and other online venues where sharing false information takes only a click. Offers a means to learn how to step into their vital role as leaders helping their communities to more critically evaluate information Features ways to master the concept of critical information literacy, information ethics related to online information sharing, and other core concepts related to information literacy, fake news, and teaching users about source evaluation Encourages readers to view libraries as the ideal institutions for combating the fake news problem
Location: e-book
Publication Date: 2018
The Press in American Politics, 1787-2012 by Patrick J. Novotny From the Constitutional Convention in 1787 and the fight for ratification of the Constitution in the pages of America's newspapers through the digital era of 24/7 information technologies and social media campaigns, this book tells the story of the press as a decisive and defining part of America's elections, parties, and political life. * Provides a compelling and unique perspective of American politics through the early adoptions of technology by the press, especially in the era of electronic broadcasting and information technology in the 20th century * Thoroughly documents the early emergence of the uses of radio, television, and the Internet across history * Offers up-to-date accounts of some of the latest campaigning for elective office in the past decade, up to and including the 2012 presidential election
Location: e-book
Publication Date: 2014
Reality Lost by Vincent F. Hendricks; Mads Vestergaard This open access book looks at how a democracy can devolve into a post-factual state. The media is being flooded by populist narratives, fake news, conspiracy theories and make-believe. Misinformation is turning into a challenge for all of us, whether politicians, journalists, or citizens. In the age of information, attention is a prime asset and may be converted into money, power, and influence - sometimes at the cost of facts. The point is to obtain exposure on the air and in print media, and to generate traffic on social media platforms. With information in abundance and attention scarce, the competition is ever fiercer with truth all too often becoming the first victim. Reality Lost: Markets of Attention, Misinformation and Manipulation is an analysis by philosophers Vincent F. Hendricks and Mads Vestergaard of the nuts and bolts of the information market, the attention economy and media eco-system which may pave way to postfactual democracy. Here misleading narratives become the basis for political opinion formation, debate, and legislation. To curb this development and the threat it poses to democratic deliberation, political self-determination and freedom, it is necessary that we first grasp the mechanisms and structural conditions that cause it.     
Location: e-book
Publication Date: 2018
Unpacking fake news : an educator's guide to navigating the media with students by Journell, Wayne
Location: e-book
Publication Date: 2019