Fake News: Understanding Media and Misinformation in the Digital Age

Melissa Zimdars — the media studies professor whose 2016 list of unreliable news sources went viral after the US election — teams with Kembrew McLeod to produce this MIT Press collection that examines fake news from multiple disciplinary angles: journalism studies, political science, communication, cultural studies, and media literacy education. The contributors address the history of hoaxes and propaganda, the economics of clickbait journalism, the psychology of misinformation acceptance, the role of social media platforms, and the pedagogical approaches that have proved most effective in building critical media literacy.

The interdisciplinary approach means the volume covers more ground than any single-author treatment, at the cost of analytical coherence. But the MIT Press imprimatur and the quality of individual contributions make this a reliable reference work for practitioners who need to engage with the academic literature across multiple disciplines. The chapters on media literacy pedagogy are particularly practical for organisations developing training programmes, and the historical perspective provided by several contributors usefully contextualises contemporary fake news as a persistent feature of media ecosystems rather than a novel digital-age phenomenon.