Teaching fact checking and verification is an essential part of journalism education. When a confusing media environment includes statements like Truth is not truth and The president offered alternative facts, students need to go beyond traditional reporting standards. They need to be trained to consider the presentation of reality in deciding if a statement is misleading or patently false.Detecting Deceptionapplies the concepts of logical argumentation to supplement the verification techniques that are the stock and trade of any media professional.

Pithy and practical, Amanda Sturgill draws from present day news examples to help students recognize the most common bad arguments people make.Detecting Deceptionis an essential tool for training future journalists to build stories that recognize faulty arguments and hold their subjects to a higher standard.

Amanda Sturgill is an associate professor of journalism at Elon University, where she teaches classes in writing, copy editing, media analytics and digital strategy to undergraduate and graduate students. A self-described critical thinking maven, her students leave the university with a strong appreciation for the vital role of accurate and honest communication in free societies. Amanda was trained in the doctoral program at Cornell University and has gone on to publish communication technology and media and religion work in a variety of outlets. She was an editor on the two-volumeReligion Online: How Digital Technology Is Changing the Way We Worship and Pray and an associate editor forThe Golden Age of Data: Media Analytics in Study and Practice. She has a special interest in the scholarship of teaching and learning and, in particular, the integration of high-impact teaching practice in professional fields like journalism. She has run an international pedagogy research seminar, co-editedMind the Gap: Global Learning at Home and Abroad and is an active member and presenter with the International Society for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning. She presently chairs the Standing Committee on Teaching and sits on the board of directors of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication.

Preface: Detecting Deception and Why It Matters

Section 1: Distractions and Deceptions

1. The Personal Attack: We Shouldnt Listen to Dummies

2. Poisoning the Well: Nothing to See Here

3. The Straw Man: Said No One Ever

4. The Appeal to Hypocrisy: She Did It First!

5. The Red Herring: Look! Squirrel!

6. The Black and White: There Are Only Two Things That Could Happen

7. The Slippery Slope: And Youll End up Living in a Van by the River

8. The Fallacy of Fallacies: One Rotten Apple Spoils the Grocery Store

9. The Faulty Analogy: Comparing Oranges to Falsehoods

10. The Irrelevant Conclusion: Cool. Dont Care

11. The Hasty Generalization: I Saw a Thing Once

12. The Division Fallacy: All the Children Are Above Average

13. The Composition Fallacy: Great Players Must Make a Great Band

14. Begging the Question: The Blue Sky Is Blue

15. The Appeal to Purity: Real Men Dont Eat Haggis

16. Equivocation: I Mean, I Am Nice

17. The Sunk Cost: Weve Already Invested so Much

Section 2: Unrelated Evidence

18. The Appeal to Pity: If You Really Cared About Me

19. The Appeal to Force: Agreeor Else

20. The Appeal to Ignorance: No One Has Proved You Cant

21. The Appeal to Authority: Im Not a Doctor But . . .

22. The Appeal to Tradition: Weve Always Done It This Way

23. The Appeal to Popularity: A Lot of People Agree

24. The Big Lie and Conspiracy Theories: The Sky Is Green. The Sky Is Green. The Sky Is Green

Section 3: Issues with Numbers and Data

25 Ignoring the Base Rate: 100 Percent of People Die

26 The False Cause: Spider Bites and Spelling Bees

27 The Hidden Variable: Rabbit Feet and Lucky Rocks

28 Unnecessary Precision: The Difference That Doesnt Matter

29 Naive Probability and the Audience It Confuses: This Slot Machine Is Hot

30 Deception with Charts: A Picture Is Worth 1,000 Lies

31 Misrepresenting Polls and Surveys: Four out of Five Dentists Surveyed Agree

Appendix 1: Possible Answers to Section 1 Exercises

Appendix 2: Possible Answers to Section 2 Exercises

Appendix 3: Possible Answers to Section 3 Exercises