A Brief History of Michelle Bachman’s Lies

Today on the list: The virtual world where Muslims, Christians and Jews all get along, Bob Woodward defends his journalistic integrity, and is Michelle Bachman a compulsive liar?

On a regular basis, Truthdig brings you the news items and odds and ends that found their way to Larry Gross, director of the USC Annenberg School for Communication. A specialist in media and culture, art and communication, visual communication and media portrayals of minorities, Gross helped found the field of gay and lesbian studies.

The links below open in a new window. Newer ones are on top.

Why TNR Publishes ‘Consistently Negative’ Book Reviews These pages are more stringent than not. They are not always negative, but they are often negative. You see, I pride myself on this negativism. I would like my friend to understand why.

Steve Jobs In Email Pissing Match with College Journalism Student Steve Jobs is known for replying to random emails sent to his personal Apple email address. Well, a college journalism student from Long Island emailed him about a problem she had with Apple’s PR department. Jobs’ response? “Leave us alone.”

Another Indication the Tea Party Is Being Overblown Back in June we learned that the much hyped Tea Party Unity convention was being canceled and rescheduled to October 14-16 in Las Vegas. This barely registered a blip with the media at the time and I called them out on it and set the record straight on what this was really about.

Media Hypes Tea Party, Blacks Out the Left When it comes to covering activist gatherings, corporate media have established clear standards: Numbers don’t count nearly as much as politics do.

CIA Guard Challenges Bob Woodward’s Account Washington Post editor Bob Woodward on Monday dismissed the allegation of a former CIA security officer that his famous account of interviewing CIA Director William Casey on his hospital deathbed was “fabricated.”

Why Rhee, Gates and Guggenheim Are Full of It Propaganda is a form of communication that is aimed at influencing the attitude of a community toward some cause or position.

The Truth-O-Meter report card on Michele Bachmann Bachmann has scored five Pants on Fire ratings, plus six False ratings. After 11 encounters with the Truth-O-Meter, Bachmann continues to hold the rare distinction of an all-False/Pants on Fire record.

Hooray for Nollywood! Inspired by Bollywood musicals and Brazilian soap operas, the Nigerian film industry is now the second largest in the world.

Who’s more easily conned by reality TV and fake movies like ‘I’m Still Here’: The media or the public? Casey Affleck and Joaquin Phoenix’s much-debated mock documentary, “I’m Still Here,” now revealed to be an utter fake, is just the latest example of a tsunami of entertainment that it is not at all what it seems. In fact, when you watch movies or TV today, it’s hard to decide whether what you’re seeing is real, fake or somewhere in the dramatic netherworld in between.

A virtual world that breaks real barriers In Second Life’s Al-Andalus, a virtual world patterned after medieval Andalus in Spain, avatars of Muslims mix with avatars of Jews and Christians to strive for a more perfect union.

Music Videos Spark a Literacy Boom in India Tiny, sun-soaked Khodi on the western coast of India’s Gujarat state is the kind of village where cattle still plough the fields and women fill clay pots with water from the village well. In the past few years, however, the town has been changing: Thatched mud huts are slowly giving way to sturdy, single-story concrete blocks; farmers conduct their business on cellphones. The state buses, which until a decade ago were only filled with men, are now crammed with women. Enrollment in the local school has soared.