Slanted: How the News Media Taught Us to Love Censorship and Hate Journalism

Written by Sharyl Attkisson

Narrated by Sharyl Attkisson

New York Times bestselling author Sharyl Attkisson takes on the media’s misreporting on Black Lives Matter, coronavirus, Joe Biden, Silicon Valley censorship, and more.

When the facts don’t fit their Narrative, the media abandons the facts, not the Narrative. Virtually every piece of information you get through the media has been massaged, shaped, curated, and manipulated before it reaches you. Some of it is censored entirely. The news can no longer be counted on to reflect all the facts. Instead of telling us what happened yesterday, they tell us what’s new in the prepackaged soap opera they’ve been calling the news.

For the past four years, five-time Emmy Award–winning investigative journalist and New York Times bestselling author Sharyl Attkisson has been collecting and dissecting alarming incidents tracing the shocking devolution of what used to be the most respected news organizations on the planet. For the first time, top news executives and reporters representing every major national television news outlet—from ABC, CBS, NBC, and CNN to FOX and MSNBC—speak frankly, confiding in Attkisson about the death of the news as they once knew it. Their concern transcends partisan divides.

Most frightening of all, a broad campaign in the media has convinced many Americans not only to accept but to demand censorship over journalism. It is a stroke of genius on the part of those seeking to influence public opinion: undermine public confidence in the news, then insist upon “curating” information and divining the “truth.” The thinking is done for you. They’ll decide which pesky facts shouldn’t cross your desk by declaring them false, irrelevant, debunked, unsafe, or out-of-bounds.

We have reached a state of utter absurdity, where journalism schools teach students that their own, personal truth or chosen narratives matter more than reality. In Slanted, Attkisson digs into the language of propagandists, the persistence of false media narratives, the driving forces behind today's dangerous blend of facts and opinion, the abandonment of journalism ethics, and the new, Orwellian definition of what it means to report the news. 

Supplemental enhancement PDF accompanies the audiobook.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperAudio
• Release date: Nov 24, 2020
• ISBN: 9780063033405

Sharyl Attkisson

Sharyl Attkisson has been a working journalist for more than forty years and is host and managing editor of the nonpartisan Sunday morning TV program Full Measure with Sharyl Attkisson. She has covered controversies under the administrations of Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Donald Trump, emerging with a reputation, as the Washington Post put it, as a “persistent voice of news-media skepticism about the government’s story.” She is the recipient of five Emmy Awards and an Edward R. Murrow Award for investigative reporting. She has worked at CBS News, PBS, and CNN, and is a fifth degree blackbelt master in Taekwondo.

Reviews for Slanted

[Mark Weber · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

The author shone a bright light on the media telling a story look overdue. While I don’t doubt the accuracy of her stories regarding CNN and the major networks and their inherent bias against our current president, it would have been interesting to hear about journalists for FOX news also. It adds credibility when you cover both sides.

[Gregory Kipp · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Powerful. Should be required reading for journalism student in particular and consumers of information in general.

[Alisha · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Great book! Really explains what's dividing us as a country now. Most adults need yo read this, especially if they passively consume news from the major news outlets.

[Adedapo Ademola-Oresanya · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Brilliant education in the media operations in the current time circa 2015-2021 and beyond. A must read for everyone that wants to break free of the programming!

[Peter Bolton · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

One of the few "journalists" left on the planet, @SharylAttkisson opines on our biased MSM. Just how biased are they? Spoiler alert - it's worse than you think.

[Glenn Sinn · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

The author was Sharyl Attkisson! Check it out you won’t be sorry!

[Tobin Ewing · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Drags at times, longer than it needs to be, but it had me coming back for more. Nice to hear from an insider, without an axe to grind.

[Rob Fulton · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I will never see the media the same way again. I’m almost wishing I was ignorant of what I’ve learned about the media in this book. Now I understand how important it is to question and look a lot deeper at the propaganda surrounding me every day. This is a great addition to the understanding of journalism, celebrity opinions, and dark people.

[Brendan Lewis · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

The problem with this book is that she lumps the entire media into national media coverage that she chooses specifically and, as a past reviewer says, is sometimes widely out of date and comparing apples and oranges. Yes this does happen, but she leading people to believe that represents the all media. Do know what would happen if journalist tried to do some of this stuff even on a state level, nevermind a city or town level? The sharper people following the news or just people working in state politics or city politics would make sure they were laughed out of town. And yes those people, who aren’t bought by anyone and just want the truth, do truly exist; and they exist in more places than you’d think. This is sensational reporting meant to rile people up and sell books, and is harmful for fixing this problem in the places where it really does exist in national media outlets. And the same techniques used by those media companies to spin news is used by this authors to convince readers of her own narrative. I get it, big brother is coming down on us, we’re being deceived, that’s true but not in the way she says. This argument, by 2023 standards, is officially trite.

[bonniebomahane · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Everyone should read this book. It will help you understand how much false news you are feed by main stream media.

[Julie Jane Watson · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Everyone should read this book! Will open your eyes on how the media is controlling the narrative in what we think. We need to wake up to what is really going on and be able to separate out news from propaganda. Excellent book by an excellent journalist.

[sethwilpan · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

I read the first 50 pages last night and there are a few problems. The author's premise is that the news is manipulated to serve the purposes of a given news organization. The tenor of that purpose is what's referred to in the business as the Narrative. Her intention is to show, through anecdotes of her own experience, how news is thus manipulated. She is an award-winning journalist whose work is held in high esteem, but right at the outset she has roused my suspicion.One of her first observations is that there is often implicit bias in the way stories are assigned to reporters. The reporter is often asked to justify a presumed premise. She cites an assignment she was given in which she was asked to document the hardships faced by parents who are trying to raise a family while working jobs that pay the minimum wage. After a diligent search, she could find no families that were operating on minimum wages. As a last resort, she visited a McDonald’s where she figured she would be able to find people working for the minimum wage, but she found that every three months workers were given a raise of .25 an hour, so virtually no one was being paid the minimum wage. She notes the fact that in many places the local minimum wage is higher than the federal mandate. And here, only five pages in, she betrays my trust. As an example of the difference between the local and federal minimum wage she cites the fact that “(In 2020, for example, the Washington D.C. minimum wage was $15.00, more than double the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour.)” The problem with that little factoid is that she worked on this story in the late 1990’s, at which time the federal minimum wage was $5.15 and the DC wage was $6.15 an hour. Her conclusion was that what was interesting about the story was that it was “difficult to find anyone raising children on minimum wage”. It may have been equally interesting to find out whether people were struggling despite making more than the minimum wage; to find out what kind of wage it actually takes to rise out of poverty. There is a certain arrogance in not acknowledging her own bias in this regard, and I suspect that that arrogance may have contributed in part to the dissension between her and here producers.A little further on she defends Trump against accusations of racism and misogyny by saying that he is equally offensive to members of his own race and gender. What an embarrassing argument. It’s not a long book and a breezy read, so I’ll continue with it for the sake of the inside story of the news business and the promised attestations of other journalists, I have no doubt that the news is influenced by monied interests. It’s not useful though to make specious claims and faulty arguments that arise from a surprisingly facile intellect motivated in no small part by retribution for what she perceives as her victimization. She is outraged that editors get to decide what will or will not be reported. That is, in fact, the definition of an editor. It would be more useful if she focused her outrage on the corrupt influences.Somehow she thinks that the corruption she has encountered in the news business justifies Trump’s claims that the mainstream media is all “fake news”. There is an important distinction between quashing a story for political reasons and claiming that the press lied about you having had the largest inauguration crowd in history. How can I trust her if she can’t or won’t see that difference?

[samsattler · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Never have I worked harder to keep myself informed as to what is happening in this country and around the world. And never in my adult life have I been so misinformed about what is happening in this country and the rest of the world. I know whose fault that is - and it is not mine. Sharyl Attkisson’s Slanted: How the News Media Taught Us to Love Censorship and Hate Journalism does an admirable job of explaining the problem. What she has to say in Slanted will horrify any reader who is concerned about the future of this country, but the scariest thing about the current state of journalism in this country and the rest of the world is that it has been so bad for so long that a whole generation of young adults now considers it all to be normal. But, of course, the first thing that readers need to know about the book is exactly who its author is. Is Sharyl Attkisson an honest broker of the book’s message or does she have an axe of her own to grind? So, let’s begin with Attkisson’s background. She is a veteran news reporter who has won five Emmy Awards and an Edward R. Murrow Award for her investigative reporting at networks like CNN, CBS, and PBS. She is an old-school journalist who believes in following the truth no matter where it leads her or whom it embarrasses. She most definitely does not believe, and never has, in mixing her personal opinions into the news she reports. And that’s why she walked away from a successful career at CBS News when she discovered that her producers were more interested in pushing an approved “narrative” than they were in telling the truth. Gradually, over a number of months, she came to the realization that her stories were being censored out of existence because of pressure from politicians and corporate sponsors. She had the courage - and the support of her family - to walk away from a job she found as humiliating as it was frustrating. Now, she has a nonpartisan Sunday-morning news show on the Sinclair network called Full Measure with Sharyl Attikisson and produces some of the most informative podcasts anywhere. In other words, her bonafides are the real deal.As Attkisson sees it, journalists “have blended opinion and reporting. We’ve self-censored people and topics. We’ve stepped in to try to shape public opinion rather than report the facts. It is only with this recognition of the fact that we have a problem that well-intended, serious journalists can begin to solve it.” The problem is that the vast majority of the news media have an agreed upon narrative to sell to the public and they get away with lying or distorting the truth all too easily. So why should they reform themselves when their propaganda is so successful? And they have been so successful that Attkisson says, “The information landscape becomes ever narrower, squashing diversity of thought and facts. Pretty soon, we won’t know what we don’t know. And that will be that.” And it gets worse because pollsters have now transformed a once-enlightening tool into just another propaganda technique to sell the “The Narrative.” According to the author, “Just as The Narrative calls upon the news to codify certain story lines, political polls are now widely used for the same purpose. Polls have morphed from providing a snapshot of pubic opinion at a moment in time into being an indispensable tool used to shape voter opinion.” They simply cannot, and should not be trusted, any longer.I’m going to end this with a long quote from Chapter 10 of Slanted because I believe that it perfectly captures the dangerous world we are living in today, a world in which we can no longer trust the news that we hear all day long, every day of the year - those same two or three stories that are pushed at us over and over again so steadily that we cannot avoid them even if we want to. Even if they are largely little more than outright lies, distortions, and omissions:“The trend of mainstream media outlets actings as police and enforcers over other media is a shocking change in our news landscape. Reporters are now less concerned with facts and more with demanding adherence to The Narrative. They determine the position that is to be taken on issues or the facts that can be written about. They use their platform to insist that theirs is the only right and correct view. They convince their colleagues that the job of a reporter is not to be neutral or fair but to take the ‘correct’ position. They define the parameters of the language deemed acceptable or unacceptable for the media to use when covering an issue. They punish, cajole, and threaten those who do not comply. In other words, instead of covering the news, they attack those who are off narrative and cover that as if it is big news. Their goal is to stop the freethinking, independent interlopers. To make it where nobody dares to go off script or disclose the facts or ask questions that the media bullies want to keep hidden.”Thank God, they could not “stop” Sheryl Attkisson.On a more hopeful note, Attkisson closes Slanted with a list of reporters and organizations that also refuse to be stopped. The list includes reporters from NBC, CBS, ABC, the Wall Street Journal, Fox News, Sinclair, and ESPN. Among them are people like Howie Kurtz, James Rosen, Pete Williams, David Martin, Peter Schweizer, Lara Logan, Greg Jarrett, and John Solomon. Listed organizations include: The Epoch Times, RealClearPolitics, Just the News, The Hill, Wikileaks, the Wall Street Journal, and business news channels like CNBC, Fox Business, and Bloomberg. Conspicuous by their absence are the New York Times, CNN, PBS, and the Washington Post.If you’ve had the patience to read to this point, this book is for you. You are someone willing to make the required commitment to thinking for yourself. You are not one of the millions who have simply tuned out because the static is just too much to deal with. Sharyl Attkisson is a name you need to remember, a journalist who will help you find the truth. You need to read this book.