IN 2006, the investigative journalist Seymour Hersh was informed that the CIA was torturing suspected terrorists with fire ants. Over the next five months he interviewed more than 50 people before deciding that the evidence wasn鈥檛 up to his standards. Confident that the story was true, but wanting definitive proof, he didn鈥檛 report it.
As veteran newspapermen Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel observe in Blur, journalistic integrity doesn鈥檛 get better than that, yet in the sensationalist new media environment, standards are rare. Blur is foremost an attempt to compensate for unreliable information by teaching the 鈥渢radecraft of active skepticism鈥�. The idea of giving laypeople a crash course in basic journalism is smart, even if this needlessly dry and simplistic primer is unlikely to awaken much interest, let alone train the next Seymour Hersh.
Blur: How to know what鈥檚 true in the age of information overload
Bloomsbury