Slick Spins and Fractured Facts Author:Caryl Rivers "P.M.S. Affects Millions." "More Blacks in Prison Than in College." "Working Women Stressed Out." "Campus Thought Police Vs. Free Speech." "Asian Influx Raises Questions On Campus." We read headlines like these in newspapers and magazines every day, or hear them on television and radio broadcasts, and we're expected to take them at face value. B... more »ut can we really believe that the media are giving us "just the facts"? Veteran journalist Caryl Rivers investigates the story behind "All the News That's Fit to Print." In Slick Spins and Fractured Facts, she demonstrates that "the news" is whatever the homogenous clan that runs America's print and broadcast media says it is. In this witty, persuasive, on-target book, Rivers turns the camera back on the media, taking a hard look at the players who shape the news. She shows how this group--upper-middle-class whites--filters the news through their barely recognized self-interest and ideologies. Slick Spins and Fractured Facts presents a raucous wealth of examples showing how the interests, values and viewpoints of this close-knit group inform the stories that appear again and again in the American media. The result is the perpetuation of gender, race, and class stereotypes from one generation to the next, as the media focus on problems of the present while paying scant attention to history and the mistakes of the past. Other perspectives, she contends, are usually considered "biased": a gay journalist, for instance, must go to great lengths to prove that he or she can be impartial. Drawing on a rich array of news stories, Rivers explores the media's typical treatment of women, African Americans, welfare recipients, immigrants, crime and criminality, and multiculturalism. From the media war on Hilary Clinton to the media blitz that accompanied Charles Murray's The Bell Curve, from the sordid details of Tonya Harding's working-class upbringing to the media-sponsored character assassination of the alleged "quota queen" Lani Guinier, Slick Spins and Fractured Facts analyzes the ways the media put their own spin on the news items of our sound-bite generation. With as much humor as indignation, Rivers shows how the media pursue a deeply biased agenda, ignoring the currents of prejudice and primal fear that inform their version of reality. Slick Spins and Fractured Facts pierces the cultural myths that inform the media, compelling us to question our assumptions and offering hope for coming generations of journalists to promote a more inclusive understanding of "the news."« less