Exhausted by the news? Here are 6 strategies to stay informed without getting overwhelmed − or misled by misinformation

  Political spin is nothing new, and identifying reliable news and information can be hard to do during any presidency. But the return of Donald Trump to the White House has reignited debates over truth, accountability, and the role of media in a deeply divided America.

  Misinformation is an umbrella term that covers all kinds of false and misleading content, and there is lots of it out there.

  During Trump’s chaotic first presidency, the president himself promoted false claims about COVID-19, climate change, and the 2020 election.

How you can tell propaganda from journalism − let’s look at Tucker Carlson’s visit to Russia

  Tucker Carlson, the conservative former cable TV news pundit, recently traveled to Moscow to interview Russian dictator Vladimir Putin for his Tucker Carlson Network, known as TCN.

  The two-hour interview itself proved dull. Even Putin found Carlson’s soft questioning “disappointing.” Very little from the interview was newsworthy.

  Other videos Carlson produced while in Russia, however, seemed to spark far more significant commentary. Carlson marveled at the beauty of the Moscow subway and seemed awed by the cheap prices in a Russian supermarket. He found the faux McDonald’s – rebranded “Tasty-period” – cheeseburgers delicious.

We are all propagandists now

  The U.S. is in an information war with itself. The public sphere, where Americans discuss public issues, is broken. There’s little discussion – and lots of fighting.

  One reason why: Persuasion is difficult, slow, and time-consuming – it doesn’t make good television or social media content – and so there aren’t a lot of good examples of it in our public discourse.

  What’s worse, a new form of propaganda has emerged – and it’s enlisted us all as propagandists.

10 ways to spot online misinformation

  Propagandists are already working to sow disinformation and social discord in the run-up to the November elections.

  Many of their efforts have focused on social media, where people’s limited attention spans push them to share items before even reading them – in part because people react emotionally, not logically, to information they come across. That’s especially true when the topic confirms what a person already believes.

Richard Cohen: Trump’s whisperer-in-chief is treading on dangerous ground

  The chief strategist in the White House, a man who rallied a growing white nationalist movement behind Donald Trump, is now telling the news media to “keep its mouth shut and just listen for a while.”

  We should all be outraged – and more than a little unnerved.

  We all know that conservative politicians have been trying to delegitimize the mainstream press for decades. And, indeed, conservatives have created a constellation of alternative media more to their liking – Fox News and Rush Limbaugh, to name the most obvious.

  But with Trump, we’re witnessing something different, something more insidious. Something that seems pathological.