This book first caught my attention with its cover—styled like a Soviet newspaper—and then with its blurb, which promised an analysis of a whole bunch of dubious “facts” in modern social and classical media, carried out by “Russia’s most famous team of fact-checkers.”
A lot of people really are used to believing everything they read or hear from supposedly competent sources. But we know that in politics, there’s never the whole truth—even if nobody is lying on purpose. You can still tell only part of the truth and emphasize the facts you need. And if propaganda doesn’t even have the goal of not lying, then pretty much any method “goes.”
That’s why even when you’re just reading something online, it’s always better to at least double-check that the alleged fact is real. Otherwise, you’ll sometimes read some nasty thing and, in righteous anger, come down on someone—or start spreading the news yourself. And then it suddenly turns out it was a fake, and you helped it spread. Awkward, if your conscience isn’t just an empty word.
So reading about fakes—and about things that only seem like fakes—along with a solid breakdown by fact-checkers (which is basically a new profession: checking whether a news story is lying) sounded like an insanely interesting idea.
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