New York Times bestselling author Sharyl Attkisson takes on the media’s misreporting on Black Lives Matter, coronavirus, Joe Biden, Silicon Valley censorship, and more.
When the facts don’t fit their Narrative, the media abandons the facts, not the Narrative. Virtually every piece of information you get through the media has been massaged, shaped, curated, and manipulated before it reaches you. Some of it is censored entirely. The news can no longer be counted on to reflect all the facts. Instead of telling us what happened yesterday, they tell us what’s new in the prepackaged soap opera they’ve been calling the news.
For the past four years, five-time Emmy Award–winning investigative journalist and New York Times bestselling author Sharyl Attkisson has been collecting and dissecting alarming incidents tracing the shocking devolution of what used to be the most respected news organizations on the planet. For the first time, top news executives and reporters representing every major national television news outlet—from ABC, CBS, NBC, and CNN to FOX and MSNBC—speak frankly, confiding in Attkisson about the death of the news as they once knew it. Their concern transcends partisan divides.
Most frightening of all, a broad campaign in the media has convinced many Americans not only to accept but to demand censorship over journalism. It is a stroke of genius on the part of those seeking to influence public opinion: undermine public confidence in the news, then insist upon “curating” information and divining the “truth.” The thinking is done for you. They’ll decide which pesky facts shouldn’t cross your desk by declaring them false, irrelevant, debunked, unsafe, or out-of-bounds.
We have reached a state of utter absurdity, where journalism schools teach students that their own, personal truth or chosen narratives matter more than reality. In Slanted, Attkisson digs into the language of propagandists, the persistence of false media narratives, the driving forces behind today's dangerous blend of facts and opinion, the abandonment of journalism ethics, and the new, Orwellian definition of what it means to report the news.
Sharyl Attkisson has been a working journalist for more than forty years and is host and managing editor of the nonpartisan Sunday morning TV program Full Measure with Sharyl Attkisson. She has covered controversies under the administrations of Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Donald Trump, emerging with a reputation, as the Washington Post put it, as a “persistent voice of news-media skepticism about the government’s story.” She is the recipient of five Emmy Awards and an Edward R. Murrow Award for investigative reporting. She has worked at CBS News, PBS, and CNN, and is a fifth degree blackbelt master in Taekwondo.
Table of Contents
Introduction 1
Chapter 1 CBS Tales: "Death by a Thousand Cuts" 11
Chapter 2 The Narrative by Proxy 47
Chapter 3 Weaponizing The Narrative: The #MeToo Poison Pen 71
Chapter 4 When Narratives Collide 85
Chapter 5 The New York Times: All the Narratives Fit to Print 113
Chapter 6 The Verbiage of The Narrative: Lies, Evidence, and Bombshells 138
Chapter 7 The Mother of All Narratives: Russia, Russia, Russia. 169
Chapter 8 CNN: The Cable Narrative Network 192
Chapter 9 Pundits and Polls: Hard to Believe 207
Chapter 10 Media vs. Media 220
Chapter 11 Media Mistakes 240
Chapter 12 There's Hope 256
Conclusion 268
Appendix: Major Media Mistakes in the Era of Trump 273
