Skewed: A Critical Thinker’s Guide to Media Bias

I’m writing this review on election night, which seems wholly appropriate given that the subject of Skewed is media bias, and that has been a hot-button issue all election.

Skewed is an in-depth study of the evolution of journalism in America, from political papers and penny-press outlets to the blogging revolution and the modern 24-hour news cycle, exploring what journalism meant then and means today. And it’s pretty eye-opening to consider just how much the idea of journalism has changed in just a few hundred years.

Atkins delves into fact-checking organizations, media literacy, and how to recognize media bias, even posing a grand debate of the pros and many, many, MANY cons of advocacy journalism. This is not only a history of journalism, it’s a treatise on how it’s up to us as consumers of media to be better filters because we can’t trust the news to be unbiased (whether the bias is there or not).

Atkins, like most great teachers, gives us the tools and allows us to develop them ourselves, hopefully breeding smarter media consumers. Skewed feels like a solid first step toward building better media literacy, something we desperately need.