If you are getting most of your news from evening cable shows or podcasts, you're not alone. But you're also probably not as well-informed as you think you are. In this episode, Dr. Sturg breaks down curation of news and how it affects your knowledge about what's going on.

Letting other people decide what stories are important can be useful or even necessary sometimes. But especially for things you care about a lot, it's important to look for first-hand reports. Learn how to create your own curated news feed in this week's UnSpun.

Do high-profile debates truly shift opinions or votes? On this episode, Dr. Sturg gets into the studies to see if debates produce real changes. From Kennedy-Nixon to Romney-Obama, she looks at famous debates and explores what the research says about impacts on voters.

She also looks the logical flaw of hasty generalization, using debate slip-ups as case studies. See how speakers and listeners both frequently overgeneralize from single examples.

Plus, she talks about polling with political scientist, Dr. Ken Fernandez. Can polls be trusted after 2016? We separate polling facts from fiction on topics like margin of error. Ken shares his insider take on how campaigns use polls and why solid polling matters for a functioning democracy.

Find out whether debates live up to the hype. Learn how to catch hasty generalizations. Get an expert take on improving polling for future elections. Get UnSpun.

Why did it seem like everyone in the media thought Biden's debate performance concerned democrats? And how does telling a good story get in the way of the truth? In this episode, Dr. Sturg goes over the cozy relationship between politicians and the journalists who cover and explains the narrative bias.

It's a tendency to fit facts into a story, and this bias explains why early accounts of breaking news are often wrong.

Link to the article from Poynter.

Follow Dr. Sturg

Twitter - Prof. Amanda Sturgill (@DrSturg) / X
Websites - Sturg says | Unspun’s Substack

Questions and Tips

TheUnspunPodcast@gmail.com

We are #AltGov

https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781538162095/We-Are-#ALTGOV-Social-Media-Resistance-from-the-Inside

Detecting Deception: Tools to Fight Fake News

https://www.amazon.com/Detecting-Deception-Tools-Fight-Fake/dp/1538141027