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Author: C. John Sommerville
Publisher: InterVarsity Press
ISBN: 083087559X
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 156
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Book Description
We who live at the end of the twentieth century are better informed--and more quickly informed--than any people in history. So why do we also seem more confused, divided and foolish than ever before? Some pundits criticize the news media for political bias. Other analysts worry that up-to-the-minute news reports on radio and television oversimplify complex realities. Still more critics point out that today's reporters can't possibly be experts on the wide variety of subjects they cover. Historian C. John Sommerville thinks the problem with news is more basic. Focusing his critique on the news at its best, he concludes that even at its best it is beyond repair. Sommerville argues that news began to make us dumber when we insisted on having it daily. Now millions of column inches and airtime hours must be filled with information--every day, every hour, every minute. The news, Sommerville says, becomes the driving force for much of our public culture. News schedules turn politics into a perpetual campaign. News packaging influences the timing, content and perception of government initiatives. News frenzies make a superstition out of scientific and medical research. News polls and statistics create opinion as much as they gauge it. Lost in the tidal wave of information is our ability to discern truly significant news--and our ability to recognize and participate in true community. This eye-opening book is for everyone dissatisfied with the state of the news media, but especially for those who think the news really informs them about and connects them with the real world. Read it and you may never again know the tyranny of the daily newspaper or the nightly news broadcast.
Author: C. John Sommerville
Publisher: InterVarsity Press
ISBN: 083087559X
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 156
Get Book Here
Book Description
We who live at the end of the twentieth century are better informed--and more quickly informed--than any people in history. So why do we also seem more confused, divided and foolish than ever before? Some pundits criticize the news media for political bias. Other analysts worry that up-to-the-minute news reports on radio and television oversimplify complex realities. Still more critics point out that today's reporters can't possibly be experts on the wide variety of subjects they cover. Historian C. John Sommerville thinks the problem with news is more basic. Focusing his critique on the news at its best, he concludes that even at its best it is beyond repair. Sommerville argues that news began to make us dumber when we insisted on having it daily. Now millions of column inches and airtime hours must be filled with information--every day, every hour, every minute. The news, Sommerville says, becomes the driving force for much of our public culture. News schedules turn politics into a perpetual campaign. News packaging influences the timing, content and perception of government initiatives. News frenzies make a superstition out of scientific and medical research. News polls and statistics create opinion as much as they gauge it. Lost in the tidal wave of information is our ability to discern truly significant news--and our ability to recognize and participate in true community. This eye-opening book is for everyone dissatisfied with the state of the news media, but especially for those who think the news really informs them about and connects them with the real world. Read it and you may never again know the tyranny of the daily newspaper or the nightly news broadcast.
Author: Walter T. Davis, Jr.
Publisher: Westminster John Knox Press
ISBN: 9780664226961
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 364
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Book Description
Offers counsel on how to address messages of popular culture as reflected on television today, explaining how to view programs in light of faith, values, and belief systems as a means of identifying appropriate broadcasts. Original.
Author: Scott Dikkers
Publisher: Crown
ISBN: 0609804618
Category : Humor
Languages : en
Pages : 178
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Book Description
The Onion has quickly become the world's most popular humor publication, misinforming half a million readers a week with one-of-a-kind social satire both in print (on newsstands nationwide) and online from its remote office in Madison, Wisconsin. Witness the march of history as Editor-in-Chief Scott Dikkers and The Onion's award-winning writing staff present the twentieth century like you've never seen it before.
Author: David Moscrop
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781773100418
Category : POLITICAL SCIENCE
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
Bad decisions down to a science. D'oh-mocracy at its finest. Brexit. Trump. Ford Nation. In this timely book, David Moscrop asks why we make irrational political decisions and whether our stone-age brains can process democracy in the information age. In an era overshadowed by income inequality, environmental catastrophes, terrorism at home and abroad, and the decline of democracy, Moscrop argues that the political decision-making process has never been more important. In fact, our survival may depend on it. Drawing on both political science and psychology, Moscrop examines how our brains, our environment, the media, and institutions influence decision-making. Making good decisions is not impossible, Moscrop argues, but the psychological and political odds are sometimes stacked against us. In this readable and provocative investigation of our often-flawed decisions, Moscrop explains what's going wrong in today's political landscape and how individuals, societies, and institutions can work together to set things right.
Author: Mark Bauerlein
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1440636893
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 280
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Book Description
This shocking, surprisingly entertaining romp into the intellectual nether regions of today's underthirty set reveals the disturbing and, ultimately, incontrovertible truth: cyberculture is turning us into a society of know-nothings. The Dumbest Generation is a dire report on the intellectual life of young adults and a timely warning of its impact on American democracy and culture. For decades, concern has been brewing about the dumbed-down popular culture available to young people and the impact it has on their futures. But at the dawn of the digital age, many thought they saw an answer: the internet, email, blogs, and interactive and hyper-realistic video games promised to yield a generation of sharper, more aware, and intellectually sophisticated children. The terms “information superhighway” and “knowledge economy” entered the lexicon, and we assumed that teens would use their knowledge and understanding of technology to set themselves apart as the vanguards of this new digital era. That was the promise. But the enlightenment didn’t happen. The technology that was supposed to make young adults more aware, diversify their tastes, and improve their verbal skills has had the opposite effect. According to recent reports from the National Endowment for the Arts, most young people in the United States do not read literature, visit museums, or vote. They cannot explain basic scientific methods, recount basic American history, name their local political representatives, or locate Iraq or Israel on a map. The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future is a startling examination of the intellectual life of young adults and a timely warning of its impact on American culture and democracy. Over the last few decades, how we view adolescence itself has changed, growing from a pitstop on the road to adulthood to its own space in society, wholly separate from adult life. This change in adolescent culture has gone hand in hand with an insidious infantilization of our culture at large; as adolescents continue to disengage from the adult world, they have built their own, acquiring more spending money, steering classrooms and culture towards their own needs and interests, and now using the technology once promoted as the greatest hope for their futures to indulge in diversions, from MySpace to multiplayer video games, 24/7. Can a nation continue to enjoy political and economic predominance if its citizens refuse to grow up? Drawing upon exhaustive research, personal anecdotes, and historical and social analysis, The Dumbest Generation presents a portrait of the young American mind at this critical juncture, and lays out a compelling vision of how we might address its deficiencies. The Dumbest Generation pulls no punches as it reveals the true cost of the digital age—and our last chance to fix it.
Author: Jeff Myers
Publisher: David C Cook
ISBN: 1434711080
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 628
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Book Description
Addressing issues such as gender identity, abortion, technology, and poverty, Dr. Myers challenges readers to ask: How can an authentic Christian worldview provide a compassionate, effective witness in culture today? Dr. Myers first shows readers what they can learn from Christian history—and why today’s issues might not be as new as they seem. Then he takes them through the significant topics that affect them every day, offering biblical ideas for conversing with others in an increasingly hostile culture. This capstone book to a groundbreaking worldview trilogy equips readers to apply a bold Christian witness to their relationships with loved ones, neighbors, and colleagues.
Author: Mike Walker
Publisher: Thomas Nelson
ISBN: 1418577596
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 207
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Book Description
Using Rather as a touchstone, Mike Walker rips into the arrogance and presumption of the news media-the elitist, agenda-driven mentality that allows its journalists and editors to ignore basic rules of journalism. Walker uses this short, blisteringly humorous book to personally kick Rather in the shins and also, more importantly, explain how real news is properly gathered and vetted, how it's properly written and reported, and why some journalists and editors think they're above such things. For years the mainstream media has stared down its collective nose at publications like the National Enquirer, but as Walker shows in scorching detail and irreverent humor, it is the gatekeepers and news elitists who need a trip to the woodshed, starting with Dan Rather.
Author: Michael K. Baranowski
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN:
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 190
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Book Description
This is the book for anyone who aspires to the title "informed citizen." It clearly explains how political news works, how the media influences readers—and how to sort through it all to be a better, smarter consumer of political news. In a perfect world, political news would be objective and fact-based. Instead, it is biased and unreliable. This engaging book was written to help readers master the media. Combining insight and humor, it exposes the bias, irrationality, bad arguments, and misleading numbers that abound in political media. It shows readers how to take advantage of available news sources, and it guides them in developing the skills needed to sort through the flood of hype and misinformation. Specifically, the book examines types of political media and why it matters whether one gets political news from television, radio, newspapers, or the Internet, including social media. It discusses the latest developments in political behavior, economics, media studies, and neuroscience to explain why the political media does what it does to systematically distort consumers' view of politics—and it looks at ways consumers tend to be irrational in choosing and interpreting news. Finally, it offers concrete suggestions that will enable readers to become more critical of what they read, see, and hear.
Author: David McRaney
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101621788
Category : Self-Help
Languages : en
Pages : 227
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Book Description
The author of the bestselling You Are Not So Smart shares more discoveries about self-delusion and irrational thinking, and gives readers a fighting chance at outsmarting their not-so-smart brains David McRaney’s first book, You Are Not So Smart, evolved from his wildly popular blog of the same name. A mix of popular psychology and trivia, McRaney’s insights have struck a chord with thousands, and his blog--and now podcasts and videos--have become an Internet phenomenon. Like You Are Not So Smart, You Are Now Less Dumb is grounded in the idea that we all believe ourselves to be objective observers of reality--except we’re not. But that’s okay, because our delusions keep us sane. Expanding on this premise, McRaney provides eye-opening analyses of fifteen more ways we fool ourselves every day, including: The Misattribution of Arousal (Environmental factors have a greater affect on our emotional arousal than the person right in front of us) Sunk Cost Fallacy (We will engage in something we don’t enjoy just to make the time or money already invested “worth it”) Deindividuation (Despite our best intentions, we practically disappear when subsumed by a mob mentality) McRaney also reveals the true price of happiness, why Benjamin Franklin was such a badass, and how to avoid falling for our own lies. This smart and highly entertaining book will be wowing readers for years to come.
Author: Mark W. Durm, Ph.D.
Publisher: Dorrance Publishing
ISBN:
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 376
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Book Description
This book is not like most books. Whereas, most books will quote research to prove or disprove a point, this book offers you the actual research. In the peer-reviewed section, you have the actual research study that asks, “Is the Belief in a Just World Rational?”; a study about the relationship between “Children of Divorce and its Effect on their Self Esteem”; one about “Relation of Self-acceptance and Acceptance of Others”; another about the moon “Lunar Phase and Acting Out Behavior,” and many more. In another section named “Book Appendices,” there are two actual studies that answer the question “Psychics! Do Police Departments Really Use Them?” In the “Book Review” section are published critiques on books entitled: “The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules our Lives” by Leonard Mlodinow; “Crimes Against Logic: Exposing the Bogus Arguments of Politicians, Priests, Journalists, and other Serial Offenders” by Jamie Whyte; C. John Sommerville’s “How the News Makes us Dumb: The Death of Wisdom in an Information Society”. Ennis C. Almer’s “Statistical Tricks and Traps: An Illustrated Guide to the Misuses of Statistics”; “The Myth of Repressed Memory” by Elizabeth Loftus and Katherine Ketcham; Marilyn Vos Savant’s and Leonore Fleischer’s “Brain Building; Exercising Yourself Smarter”; and many more. In the section entitled “Non- Peer Reviewed Journal Articles” there is one entitled, “The Four R’s of a College Education: A Rubber Band, A Rubber Ball, A Razor, and The Pearson R;” One of the Durm family; one on the size of schools entitled “Is Bigger Better”; and others. Finally in the “Magazine Publications Section” there are four publications on the debunking of ghosts and one concerning the military, “Testing Tomorrow’s Tacticians: A Survey of the States’s Military Academies.” About the Author Mark W. Durm, Ph.D. is a Professor Emeritus of Athens State University in Athens, Alabama where he taught 38 years of his 47 years in higher education. His primary areas of instruction were critical thinking, statistics and physiological psychology. Dr. Durm has over 50 professional publications and has authored approximately 100 newspaper columns. His research has been quoted in books, peer-reviewed journals, magazines and national newspapers such as the New York Times and the Washington Post. He has been interviewed by different television stations in the Alabama area and his research (co-authored by Jane Sweat) concerning the use of psychics by police departments was the centerpiece of a documentary on Japanese television. Furthermore, he has received requests for copies of his research from over 15 foreign countries and many universities in the United States. Dr. Durm served in the Tennessee Army National Guard primarily at the Tennessee Military Academy and the 300th Mobile Army Surgical Hospital. He is a veteran of Desert Storm. Mark now heads his own company that invests in real estate in Alabama and other states. He resides on his farm in Athens and continues to research and write. Mark is the father of three children who are the joys of his life: Spencer, Sydni, and Sophia.
