I'm not sure what I expected but this wasn't quite whatever I wasn't sure about. We learn here that there's nothing new under the sun. Bad news has been around since there first was news. Photo manipulation has been around since photos. People aren’t as gullible as we think, so who are the “we” that are falling for it? A little D-K, “Stories about the problem are usually about how someone else is falling for it.”, without mentioning Dunning or Kruger. And “But, to paraphrase Mark Twain commenting on his own alleged demise, rumors of the death of truth appear to be greatly exaggerated. People don’t generally believe things they don’t think are true.” But… they can and do believe things that aren’t true that they think are true. He doesn't make that distinction.

Mr. Brotherton say “Our negativity bias affects the stories we seek out and tell one another”, and in his conclusion,
“Fake news is one small niche within the much broader news ecosystem. Deliberately putting out misinformation dressed up as news is emphatically not the same as reputable news outlets making mistakes. Yet every perceived misstep puts a dent in the credibility of the media. Facts are relatively easy to correct. The perception of a media that fails to acknowledge routine sensationalism, negativity, oversimplification and the wide penumbra of uncertainty that surrounds every seemingly incontestable fact is more difficult to fix.
That’s the bad news.
The good news is that we don’t have to navigate these waters blind. Long before fake news, alternative facts, and post-truth became buzzwords, researchers in the fields of psychology, journalism, communications, political science, economics, sociology, and beyond were probing our complicated relationship with the news. Moreover, history provides a too-often-overlooked guide to the successes and failures of the news industry, its problems and its promise.”

But he doesn’t mention confirmation bias, or search engine algorithm feedback loops.

Lots of history, lots of psychology, not so much on the subtitled "why" part.

The text has a few Notes at the end of each chapter, and the annoying surprise-at-the-end-of-the-book list of references by page number and sentence fragment from the body. (Peeve of mine - I would so much rather have a superscript to ignore or not that leads me to a reference than having to go back and reread the book to see where the references cited are referring to.)

Curated highlights and notes:

A "1625 poem about falsehoods appearing in the newspapers of the day read, in part" (no reference to an actual paper, though:
“These shamefull lies, would make a man, in spight
Of Nature, turne Satyrist and write,
Revenging lines, against these shameless men,
Who thus torment both Paper, Presse, and Pen.”
{So, railing against fake news four hundred years ago. Cool}

“As for “the most trusted man in America,” that’s kind of fake news, too. The moniker was based on a 1972 poll that gauged the public’s trust in a handful of politicians including senators, governors, President Richard Nixon, and his vice president Spiro Agnew. “For reasons not entirely clear,” the political commentator Martin Plissner wrote later, the pollster had “added Cronkite’s name to the list.” Cronkite led the pack by a few percentage points, scoring 73 percent on the trust index compared to 67 percent for the average senator.
So “most trusted man in America” feels like a stretch, given that Cronkite was basically found more trustworthy than some politicians.”
{Nice to know the framing.}

“And when we’re presented with a string of anecdotes, we can’t help extrapolating, turning a handful of extreme and exceptional stories into an assumed reality.”

“It seems our interest is piqued most by ideas that are simultaneously intuitive and surprising. Specifically, the most appealing ideas are “minimally counterintuitive.” The term is a mouthful, but it basically means that we respond best to ideas that are neither too surprising, nor entirely unsurprising.
The idea was pioneered by Pascal Boyer, an anthropologist who specializes in the study of religion. ”
{Go for the anti-Occam. Right.}

“She found that the counterintuitive stories had stuck in people’s minds. The odds of someone remembering the gist of a story were boosted by 80 percent — a substantial increase — by the minimally counterintuitive content.
Interestingly, while the counterintuitive stories were better remembered, it wasn’t because people believed the stories. ”
{Now that is interesting.}

“Eli Pariser, a tech entrepreneur and author, coined a related term in his 2011 book, The Filter Bubble. Whereas echo chambers are ideological enclaves of our own choosing, filter bubbles are the result of technology imposing sameness upon us.”
{Okay, a tangential mention of search engine feedback.}

“Surely, if technology offers to filter information according to our beliefs and preferences, we’d be only too happy to settle into its bubble. The technical term here is selective exposure, or the only slightly catchier congeniality bias, meaning we pick infor­mation based on how compatible it is with our existing beliefs.”
{No. Not “too happy” to be manipulated. I takes effort to filter the filtered content of searches. The price we pay to have near-immediate access to exabytes of information.}

“If we tend to pick and choose information that fits our existing worldview, of course we’d be happy to let algorithmic filter bubbles present us only with what we want to see.”
{Okay, … "if". And yes, many are quite happy to.}

{I like this British slang}: “boffins”

“More broadly, Newman argues, looking at a picture just makes it feel easier to process a claim.
[...]
So a real photograph accompanying a real news article can lead to false memories of what it reported. Another of Garry’s studies demonstrated that real photos can help make people believe fake news.”
{This was interesting to me. A photo anchors, even if the photo and the "news" aren't directly related.}

[on publishing clarification/corrections after the original article]
“One story, for example, concerned allegations that Iraq had been harboring weapons of mass destruction in the early 2000s. The correction pointed out, “The Central Intelligence Agency released a report that concludes that Saddam Hussein did not possess stockpiles of illicit weapons at the time of the U.S. invasion in March 2003, nor was any program to produce them under way at the time.” A pretty definitive correction, you would think. After reading the article and the accompanying correction, however, some people, particularly conservatives, became more confident that Saddam Hussein had been hiding WMDs than people who hadn’t read the correction. About a third of the conservatives who read the story without the correction agreed that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction before the US invasion. That almost doubled, to just under two-thirds, among conservatives who saw the correction. Agreement among liberals fell from around a fifth without correction to a tenth after correction.
Likewise, conservatives presented with evidence that President George W. Bush’s tax cuts did not increase government revenues ended up more convinced about the benefits of Bush’s tax plan than people who read the article without correction. On the other side of the aisle, liberals who read a story claiming that Bush had banned research on stem cells accompanied by a correction clarifying that no such ban existed believed the claim no more and no less than people who didn't read a correction. The correction didn't backfire, but it might as well not have been there at all.”
{Well, well, well... "cons" double down (so-called librul media is lying? that's not address by the way) while "libs" revise to the correction. Huh.

But he says a few pages after that different, later research found}
“Conservatives were just as open to correction as liberals, in general - though moderates were generally the most responsive.”
{With the conclusion that corrections are good. Shouldn't that be obvious? I guess not.} ( )