As the journalist Walter Lippmann noted nearly a century ago, democracy falters “if there is no steady supply of trustworthy and relevant news.” Today’s journalists are not providing it. Too often, reporters give equal weight to facts and biased opinion, stir up small controversies, and substitute infotainment for real news. Even when they get the facts rights, they often misjudge the context in which they belong.Information is the lifeblood of a healthy democracy. Public opinion a...

Americans are losing touch with reality. On virtually every issue, from climate change to immigration, tens of millions of Americans have opinions and beliefs wildly at odds with fact, rendering them unable to think sensibly about politics. In How America Lost Its Mind, Thomas E. Patterson explains the rise of a world of “alternative facts” and the slow-motion cultural and political calamity unfolding around us.We don’t have to search far for the forces that are misleading...

Thomas E. Patterson’s monumental biography of Huey Long is a profound reevaluation of his life and legacy, recognizing him as an inspirational progressive thinker, populist hero, and radical influence on the New Deal before an assassin’s bullet ended his life in 1935. First as governor and then as U.S. senator, Long transformed the politics of Louisiana by standing for the interests of citizens whom state officials had historically ignored. He eased suffrage restrictions so that more peopl...

Why are our politicians almost universally perceived as liars? What made candidate Bill Clinton's draft record more newsworthy than his policy statements? How did George Bush's masculinity, Ronald Reagan's theatrics with a microphone, and Walter Mondale's appropriation of a Wendy's hamburger ad make or break their presidential campaigns?Ever since Watergate, says Thomas E. Patterson, the road to the presidency has led through the newsrooms, which in turn impose their own values on ...

From the award-winning author of Out of Order—named the best political science book of the last decade by the American Political Science Association—comes this landmark book about why Americans don’t vote.Based on more than 80,000 interviews, The Vanishing Voterinvestigates why—despite a better educated citizenry, the end of racial barriers to voting, and simplified voter registration procedures—the percentage of voters has steadily decreased to th...

The classic, New York Times-bestselling book on the psychology of racism that shows us how to talk about race in America.“An unusually sensitive work about the racial barriers that still divide us in so many areas of life.” ―Jonathan Kozol, author of Amazing GraceWalk into any racially mixed high school and you will see Black, White, and Latino youth clustered in their own...

WINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD, THE LOS ANGELES TIMES BOOK PRIZE, THE MARK LYNTON HISTORY PRIZE, THE AMERICAN HISTORY BOOK PRIZEOne of the New York Times’s 100 Best Books of the 21st Century • A Kirkus Reviews Best Nonfiction Book of the CenturyBook Four of Robert A. Caro’s monumental The Years of Lyndon Johnson displays all the narrative energy and illuminating insight that led the Times

In a book that has become a modern classic of social movement organizing, Mark and Paul Engler explain that there is a craft to uprising—and that this craft can change the world.From protests around climate change and immigrant rights, to #BlackLivesMatter and movements to defend democracy, a new generation is unleashing strategic nonviolent action to shape public debate and force political change. While mass movements are often portrayed as spontaneous and unpredi...

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The knockdown, drag-out, untold story of the other scandal that rocked Nixon’s White House, and reset the rules for crooked presidents to come—with new reporting that expands on Rachel Maddow’s Peabody Award–nominated podcast“Both a thriller and a history book, Bag Man is a triumph of storytelling.”—Preet Bharara, New York Times bestselling author of Doing Justice

In July 1997, twenty-five of America's most influential journalists sat down to try and discover what had happened to their profession in the years between Watergate and Whitewater. What they knew was that the public no longer trusted the press as it once had. They were keenly aware of the pressures that advertisers and new technologies were putting on newsrooms around the country. But, more than anything, they were aware that readers, listeners, and viewers — the people who use the news —...

#1 New York Times BestsellerNAACP Image Award WinnerFrom Joy-Ann Reid, a triumphant work of social justice biography that repositions slain Civil Rights pioneer Medgar Evers at the heart of America's struggle for freedom, and celebrates Myrlie Evers's extraordinary activism after her husband's assassination in the driveway of their Mississippi home.“Medgar Evers deserves a place alongside Malcolm X and Dr. King in our historical memory. Evers, with Myrlie as his par...

The symptoms of the crisis of the U.S. media are well-known-a decline in hard news, the growth of info-tainment and advertorials, staff cuts and concentration of ownership, increasing conformity of viewpoint and suppression of genuine debate. McChesney's new book, The Problem of the Media, gets to the roots of this crisis, explains it, and points a way forward for the growing media reform movement.Moving consistently from critique to action, the book explores the po...