From Publishers Weekly
The dawn of the Internet and cable TV has upped the competition among news providers, who, in turn, have found that the more sensational they make the news, the better their ratings, explains syndicated columnist and author Robert J. Samuelson (The Good Life and Its Discontents). In Untruth: Why the Conventional Wisdom Is (Almost Always) Wrong, Samuelson, who has been described (and derided) as both a conservative and a liberal, shares some of his columns that refute common wisdom about politics, business, economics and the environment, offering inquisitive readers what he believes is the unbiased, unfettered truth. Agent, Rafe Sagalyn.
Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
From the Inside Flap
In
Untruth,
Newsweek and
Washington Post columnist Robert J. Samuelson explains why our political, economic and cultural debates so routinely traffic in misinformation--popular fads that, like meteors, momentarily burn brightly in public consciousness and then fizzle out. Advocacy groups, politicians and their unwitting allies in the media instinctively create agendas of problems that afflict society and must be "solved".The problems are often exaggerated and oversimplified, and the result is that the public is misled about what is wrong and how easily it can be made right.
Untruth is the first collection of Samuelson's insightful assaults on the conventional wisdom. Included are columns arguing that campaign contributions have not corrupted politics, that the "service economy" is not turning America into a nation of hamburger flippers, and that the Internet isn't the most important invention since the printing press.