Between the Lines: How to Detect Bias and Propaganda in the News and Everyday Life

Between the Lines is organized along the lines of an instruction manual that attempts to provide a critical look at the content and structuring of the broad range of messages produced by the mass media. Although the accent is on Canada, the global character of communications means that sources and examples are drawn from other than Canadian media. The discussion is concerned primarily with news, but takes in other forms of communication such as advertising, corporate publicity, and commentary journalism. The general theme tying this together is a desire to instruct the reader in ways to detect bias and what is referred to a "unclear thinking" in the continuous stream of communication that we are typically subject to in modern society. The moral purpose informing this goal is classically liberal: the assumption that people need to be well-informed about what is going on around them, and equipped with the capacity for critical thinking and independent judgement.