Journalism and Democracy Book

Written 10 years ago, before Trump and "fake news" and when Facebook and Twitter were still in their infancy, this book made the argument that we've become a nation of individuals that have barricaded ourselves into to our respective idealogical corners. We interact only with those who agree with us, we search for news that only fits our worldview, and when we find a divergent viewpoint we either ignore it or choose from an endless stream of online information that seemingly refutes it. Rather than clarify what is true and what is not, the author argues persuasively that with the glut of information available to us today, we can now start with a belief and scour the web until we find something that validates it, no matter how spurious the information we find may be. It's not truth in the end that matters as much as a desire to find something, anything, that says we are right. Since few of us travel outside of our idealogical echo chambers, fact becomes less important than belief.
If anything, America has become even more ideologically fragmented and distrustful of information from the mouths of "experts". Don't like what CNN or FOX tells you? You can find a guy holed up in a basement somewhere on the web who will tell you what you want to hear if you look hard enough.
Even if you were to strip the dated references to 9/11 conspiracy theory, Swift Boat Veterans, and the 2006 election from this book, the ideas presented here are arguably even more relevant than 10 years ago. It has become a nation where truth is what "I feel" rather than what can objectively shown to be fact. The author highlights some of the ways we've gotten to this point and the consequences but whole reading this book with horror, I can only imagine what he would think of the logical extension of his ideas in 2017.