Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. “False Reports, Maliciously Made”
2. “Important If True”
3. “Not Exactly Lying”
4. “I Believe in Faking”
5. “We Did Not Call It Propaganda”
6. “Nothing That Is Not Interesting Is News”
7. “Why Don’t You Guys Tell the Truth Once in a While?”
8. “So Goddamn Objective”
9. “The Bastards Are Making It Up!”
10. “Fake but Accurate”
Conclusion: “A Degenerate and Perverted Monstrosity”
Notes
Bibliography
Index

About the Author

Andie Tucher is the H. Gordon Garbedian Professor and the director of the Communications PhD Program at the Columbia Journalism School. She is the author of Froth and Scum: Truth, Beauty, Goodness, and the Ax Murder in America’s First Mass Medium (1994) and Happily Sometimes After: Discovering Stories from Twelve Generations of an American Family (2014). Tucher previously worked in documentary production at ABC News and Public Affairs Television.

Reviews

In this artfully written account, Andie Tucher offers a sweeping history of misinformation and the American press. Most strikingly, Not Exactly Lying reveals that the present panic surrounding so-called “fake news” has missed the point: It’s the modern profusion of “fake journalism”—the appropriation of journalistic standards to serve up puffery, propaganda, and hyperpartisan fare—that is more concerning for the future of media and public life.
*Seth C. Lewis, Shirley Papé Chair in Emerging Media at the University of Oregon*

Not Exactly Lying provides a beautifully written and deeply researched history of “fake news” and “fake journalism” in the United States, offering deep context for understanding our contemporary democratic crisis and the role of journalism in that crisis. Tucher takes on one of the most urgent issues of our day.
*Kathy Roberts Forde, coeditor of Journalism and Jim Crow: White Supremacy and the Black Struggle for a New America*

In exploring the various ways that fakes and falsehoods have made their way to the public as “journalism” and “news,” Tucher follows a number of trends: the evolving internal conventions of and boundaries around journalism, the introduction of new media technologies, the waxing and waning of partisan influence on and control over key news outlets, and changing public appetites for news. Not Exactly Lying shows that the enemy of good journalism is not slant but untruth.
*Michael Stamm, author of Dead Tree Media: Manufacturing the Newspaper in Twentieth-Century North America*

Tucher’s expansive history of fake journalism and fake news makes a compelling read and a powerful argument for the importance of truth in news.
*American Journalism*

An illuminating and extremely timely exposé.
*H-Journalism History*

Professional journalists and historians would be well-served to explore Not Exactly Lying to gain a greater understanding of the origins, role, and impact of fake news on the past and present.
*LSE Review of Books*