The Lie Detectives

Dear Reader,

As another presidential election year approaches, few issues feel as pressing as the spread of political misinformation. It wasn’t so terribly long ago that we lived in a country with a top-down media ecosystem dominated by professional news organizations. The advent of first cable television, then broadcast deregulation, then the Internet, and then social media platforms all seemed liberating when they emerged, and in many ways they were—but they opened the way for anybody to publish anything and for anybody to read anything, whether or not it was true. For the last ten years, political professionals have been grappling with this problem, and realizing that it was much more difficult than they originally believed.

Sasha Issenberg is our premier political reporter who focuses on the highly consequential, and rarely seen or understood, behind-the-scenes mechanics of politics. His 2012 book The Victory Lab is a classic—and has been in need of an update for the social media age. The Lie Detectives is the story of hitherto unknown high-level political operatives who have been grappling, not always successfully, with the problem of how to handle online misinformation. His main character, Jiore Craig, is a young but battle-hardened veteran of the misinformation wars, and she leads a memorable cast of others who have to decide how—and whether—to respond to outrageous falsehoods as they emerge, sometimes from government and party officials at home and abroad, sometimes from amateurs posting from their basements, and ricochet around cyberspace.

The Lie Detectives is a fascinating look at an unfamiliar world, reported from behind the front lines.

Best,

Nicholas Lemann
Director, Columbia Global Reports