Highly Recommended: This book offers a sweeping and powerful historical corrective to those who claim we are in a new "post-truth" era. [Cortada and Aspray] thoroughly document how deliberate lies, half-truths, and misinformation have long been part and parcel of American democracy. Through a set of carefully constructed historical case studies, the authors show how misinformation is often a strategic tool for both individual and institutional political actors, and that it takes on different casts in harmony with the contemporary expressive styles of its day. By finding such analogues in the past, from scenarios of assassination to those of war, Cortada and Aspray leave us clear-eyed about the challenges of the present while providing a set of historical cases that those looking to correct misinformation can learn from, precisely because they arose in a radically different media era. In the end, this text reveals that we are not in a new era at all, and that the problem of misinformation, and its at times far-reaching consequences, has been ever-present during American self-rule.

Choice Reviews

This volume makes a useful contribution to the literature on disinformatics. Deceit has always been a constant companion to the tyrant, propagandist and missioner. What is new to our post-truth era is the digital weaponization of deceit, particularly under the rubric of social media.

Hal Berghel, PhD, author of the Out of Band column in IEEE Computer

While smart phones and social networking have brought "fake news" to the forefront of today's politics and discourse, Cortada and Aspray brilliantly examine the much longer political, cultural, and technological history of misinformation and false facts through elegant cases on elections, climate science, advertising, and in other realms.

Jeffrey R. Yost, author of Making IT Work: A History of Computer Services Industry (MIT Press, 2017).

This book provides a context for qualifying our current national angst about fake news. It does not promise speculative solutions but situates the reader in a long history of information use and misuse and urges us to think critically and reflectively about a fundamentally human-information phenomenon rather than a contemporarily unique condition.

Gary Marchionini, Cary C. Boshamer Professor, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Using the 2016 United States presidential election as a touchstone, this book looks at how information has long been weaponized in American public life. Grounded in more than two centuries of historical examples, and replete with details, Cortada and Aspray tell a tale of fake facts and fake news and all types of information prevarications in-between. Unafraid to call a lie a lie, the authors take us on a journey through history to show how information has been yielded in the political, business, and policy realm in the pursuit of specific, often nefarious, goals. In the process the book reveals patterns, insights, and understandings to help the reader navigate a past, present, and future in which people behave badly and lies and misrepresentations are unfortunately the norm.

Ciaran Trace, Associate Professor at the School of Information at the University of Texas at Austin, Editor of Information & Culture: A Journal of History

Cortada and Aspray’s brilliantly selected and crafted case studies are must reads, which bring historical insight to issues of fake news, disinformation and conspiracy theories of our digital age.

William H. Dutton, University of Southern California and Oxford University