By Cindy L. Otis
A former CIA analyst tells the long history of deliberate lies, from Ramses II to the 2020 election, then teaches teenagers how to check what's true for themselves.
Cindy Otis spent about a decade as a CIA analyst, work that came down to figuring out whether things were true, and she wrote this for teenagers. The first half is history, and it's the part most people don't expect. Fake news turns out to be older than writing: it opens with Ramses II carving a victory into a temple wall in 1274 BCE for a battle he didn't actually win. From there it runs through yellow journalism and the Hearst and Pulitzer papers learning that a war sells copies, wartime propaganda, racist conspiracy theories and the damage they did, and doctors on television swearing that cigarettes were good for you. Then it goes digital and the pace picks up, through social media, viral rumors, and elections up to 2020. The second half is the toolkit, and it gets specific: how to tell a fact from an opinion, how to read a poll, how to spot a doctored photo or video, what a real newsroom does that a content mill doesn't, why a meme isn't news, and how your own bias shapes what you believe before you've finished reading. There are exercises along the way. It runs 336 pages, and it's a real read, not a picture book.
What Otis has that most people writing this kind of book don't is the actual job. She was paid to work out whether things were true, under real pressure, and she teaches it as a craft you practice rather than a warning to heed. The history is what makes the method land. A teenager who's been told fake news is a recent internet problem finds out it's ancient, and that the techniques behind it have barely changed in three thousand years. She also spends real time on your own teenager's bias being the weak point, not other people's foolishness, and she backs that up with exercises instead of advice. A 14-year-old who finishes it can do something practical they couldn't before: take a claim apart and check it.