Red, White & Blind: The Truth About Disinformation and the Path to Media Consciousness
Tony Brasunas | Torchpost 422p, e-book, $9.99, ISBN 978-1-66788386-1
Brasunas (Double Happiness) delivers an unusually upbeat guide surveying media bias, misinformation, and manipulation. Billed as “a history, an exposé, a guide, and a pep talk,”
Red, White & Blind offers no shortage of alarming declarations—“If you can tell the people of a society what to fear and what to covet, whom to admire and whom to loathe, wealth and power will be yours”—and clear-cut examples, contemporary and historic, of bias, censorship, narrative control, and straightup propaganda from American media on behalf of a host of powerful stakeholders. At the same time, Brasunas contends that the situation could be much worse, declaring we’re in the thick of a “New Enlightenment,” a time of “rapidly broadening access to information.”
Brasunas persuasively backs up the positives and negatives that he sees in our current press, while shedding light on media manipulation of the past. His surveys of the history of “objectivity” in journalism are engaging and provocative, ranging from the dawn of the concept to the ways that media “fact-checkers” “play a powerful ‘meta’ role in reinforcing propaganda and censorship.” (Terms like “propaganda” and “bias” are rigorously defined.) Cases of the powerful narrative shaping that much of the U.S. believes are dished with striking detail, especially the outlandish early 20th-century manipulations of Edward Bernays, the self-described father of public relations.
Brasunas offers tools for readers to understand how media manipulation works and how to avoid conspiracy theories. (Brasunas’s critique of “corporate media” extends to its kid-gloves treatment of the Biden administration.) This polished, highly readable treatment makes a great entry point and adds a surprising injection of optimism for readers who find the situation gloomy.
This sweeping and persuasive introduction to media manipulation in the U.S. is surprisingly hopeful.
Great for fans of Daniel J. Levitin’s A Field Guide to Lies, Kevin M. Kruse and
Julian E. Zelizer’s Myth
America.