There’s Never Been a Better Time to Pick Up a Book About Media Literacy

This YA nonfiction book by journalist and physician Seema Yasmin also checks off task #15: Read a YA nonfiction book. According to your halfway check-in answers, “Read a book about media literacy” is one of the hardest tasks of the 2024 challenge, so this is an accessible starting point to learn how to spot misinformation, disinformation, clickbait, misleading headlines, and more. You can also check out Yasmin’s Viral BS: Medical Myths and Why We Fall for Them.

Richard L. Hasen is a Professor of Law and Political Science, and in this 2023 book, he discusses how to deal with mis- and disinformation in a way that aligns with the First Amendment right to free speech. For example, “What can we do to minimize disinformation campaigns aimed at suppressing voter turnout?” Hasen offers recommendations on strategies that are legally sound and socially beneficial.

Alex Edmans is a renowned economist who uses this new book to show how our biases lead us to believe misinformation, especially when it comes to misleading statistics. He uses examples like the mistakes that resulted in the Deepwater Horizon disaster to demonstrate how biases “cause us to mistake statements for facts, facts for data, data for evidence, and evidence for proof.” He then trains readers on how to think critically about statistics. You can also watch his 2018 TED talk, “What to trust in a ‘post-truth’ world.”

Annalee Newitz is a sci-fi author and a founding editor of io9. They also were editor-in-chief of Gizmodo and served as the tech culture editor at Ars Technic. In this 2024 book, they trace the history of misinformation and propaganda in the U.S. from fake newspapers during the Revolutionary War to domestic culture wars today, saying “America’s secret weapon has long been coercive storytelling.” Newitz interviews activists combatting these psyops campaigns and fighting for “psychological disarmament and cultural peace.”

It’s one thing to be able to spot bias, misinformation, and disinformation, but that’s only part of the picture. How do we combat mis- and disinformation, and how do we communicate effectively? In this book, award-winning journalist and co-founder of Media Diversity Australia Antoinette Lattouf teaches readers how to argue against racist talking points — and how to know which arguments aren’t worth having. She draws on research that is then summarized into lists of dos and don’ts at the end of each chapter.

Let’s be honest, the subject of media literacy, mis- and disinformation, and fake news is inextricably tied to the Trump era. In this 2018 book, Pulitzer Prize–winning critic Michiko Kakutani shows how we got to this “post-truth” age and where to go from here. Another option is the 2021 book What Were We Thinking: A Brief Intellectual History of the Trump Era by Carlos Lozada, which analyzes 150 books about the Trump era to illustrate how we talk about Trump — and what we leave out of this story.