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Teaching fact checking and verification is an essential part of journalism education. Detecting Deception applies the concepts of logical argumentation to supplement standard verification techniques. This text is essential for training future journalists to build impeccable stories.
List of contents
Preface: Detecting Deception and Why It Matters
Section 1: Distractions and Deceptions
1. The Personal Attack: "We Shouldn't Listen to Dummies"
2. Poisoning the Well: "Nothing to See Here"
3. The Straw Man: "Said No One Ever"
4. The Appeal to Hypocrisy: "She Did It First!"
5. The Red Herring: "Look! Squirrel!"
6. The Black and White: "There Are Only Two Things That Could Happen"
7. The Slippery Slope: "And You'll End up Living in a Van by the River"
8. The Fallacy of Fallacies: "One Rotten Apple Spoils the Grocery Store"
9. The Faulty Analogy: "Comparing Oranges to Falsehoods"
10. The Irrelevant Conclusion: "Cool. Don't Care"
11. The Hasty Generalization: "I Saw a Thing Once"
12. The Division Fallacy: "All the Children Are Above Average"
13. The Composition Fallacy: "Great Players Must Make a Great Band"
14. Begging the Question: "The Blue Sky Is Blue"
15. The Appeal to Purity: "Real Men Don't Eat Haggis"
16. Equivocation: "I Mean, I Am Nice"
17. The Sunk Cost: "We've Already Invested so Much"
Section 2: Unrelated Evidence
18. The Appeal to Pity: "If You Really Cared About Me"
19. The Appeal to Force: "Agree-or Else"
20. The Appeal to Ignorance: "No One Has Proved You Can't"
21. The Appeal to Authority: "I'm Not a Doctor But . . ."
22. The Appeal to Tradition: "We've Always Done It This Way"
23. The Appeal to Popularity: "A Lot of People Agree"
24. The Big Lie and Conspiracy Theories: "The Sky Is Green. The Sky Is Green. The Sky Is Green"
Section 3: Issues with Numbers and Data
25 Ignoring the Base Rate: "100 Percent of People Die"
26 The False Cause: "Spider Bites and Spelling Bees"
27 The Hidden Variable: "Rabbit Feet and Lucky Rocks"
28 Unnecessary Precision: "The Difference That Doesn't Matter"
29 Naive Probability and the Audience It Confuses: "This Slot Machine Is Hot"
30 Deception with Charts: "A Picture Is Worth 1,000 Lies"
31 Misrepresenting Polls and Surveys: "Four out of Five Dentists Surveyed Agree"
Appendix 1: Possible Answers to Section 1 Exercises
Appendix 2: Possible Answers to Section 2 Exercises
Appendix 3: Possible Answers to Section 3 Exercises
About the author
Amanda Sturgill is a professor at Elon University, where she teaches courses in journalism, media analytics, and digital strategy. She has built a 20-plus year career studying the ways people communicate online, including how breaking news is covered on Twitter, how people learn from digital media, how media work and don’t work for poor people and those with disabilities, and how people form online communities around their interests. Her research and teaching have been featured on CBC Radio, KABC Radio, and in The Washington Post.
Summary
This accessible text covers the most common issues with claims newsmakers use to try to shape the stories about them along with examples and chances to practice for yourself using real-life cases of deceptive communication.
