Reality Bites

Lateral: Journal of the Cultural Studies Association, 2018

Dana Cloud's marvelous new book provides just the sort of deep understanding and practical guidance needed for thoughtful and effective political engagement in the Trump era. In three fascinating case studies, Cloud demonstrates the impotence of naked facts and the power of mediation. First, she compares the cases of Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden, both of whom leaked classified information in acts of patriotic resistance. Second, in a chapter on the 2014 television series Cosmos, Cloud seeks to explain the show's enormous rhetorical power. Third, Cloud compares the revolutionary rhetoric of Thomas Paine's Common Sense to that of the Black Lives Matter and Occupy movements. As we live through the devastation wrought by a Trump presidency, as we seek to make sense of it all in our scholarship and our classrooms, as we resist his attempt to reengineer of reality and search for ways to reassert our own reality, the reality of the people, Reality Bites comes not a moment too soon.

2010

paper on social movements to be read at the Euroacademy Forum in Prague

Journal of Language & Literacy Education, 2019

The Routledge Companion to News and Journalism, 2011

2018

The SAGE Handbook of Propaganda, 2020

Abstract: We begin by looking at definitions of fake news, taking ideas from science studies and philosophy to argue that the status of a news story as real or fake depends not on its truth content or on the intention of its producer but on the process by which it was constructed. We then document eight frames deployed by experts to explain fake news: as a weapon of war; a form of online dishonesty; a kind of state propaganda; a profitable business; an extreme form of media bias; a plot to delegitimate alternative media; a product of a post-truth society; and finally as a flaw in human nature. These different frames have naturally led to different proposed and attempted methods of fighting fake news. We document six of these weapons, tying each to the most relevant frames: fact checking & rebuttal; policing online platforms; counterpropaganda campaigns; censorship or regulation of media; media literacy training; and political reform. Throughout we take examples from Ukraine, on the frontline of the fight against fake news since 2014, as well as from the better known experiences of the United States.

2007

The Politics of Framing is part of the 2007 Annual Proceedings of The Association for the Study of the Cuban Economy.