A review by jedwardsusc
Network Propaganda: Manipulation, Disinformation, and Radicalization in American Politics by Robert Faris, Hal Roberts, Yochai Benkler

4.0

This book advances two major arguments. First, fake news is not the recent product of social media or foreign interference. While both were factors in the 2016 election, neither had the kind of outsized influence that they've been portrayed as having. The second, related, argument is that liberal and conservative media consumption has been diverging since the 1980s. While self-indentifying liberal and independent voters tend to follow a variety of news sources and not hold overwhelming trust in any particular source, conservative voters follow a much narrower group of news "propaganda" sources--from Rush Limbaugh in the 1980s to Sean Hannity and Breitbart today--and they tend to place much greater relative trust in these sources--viewing others news sources as part of the deceptive "mainstream media."

The authors argue that it is this systematic divergence between conservative media consumption and everyone else that is responsible for many of our media and political dilemmas. It's a data-rich and nuanced account that clearly articulates the problem without offering up overly easy or optimistic solutions.