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The Lie Detectives:
In Search of a Playbook for Winning Elections in the Disinformation Age

By Sasha Issenberg

A follow-up to the enduring 2012 book The Victory Lab
Sasha's last book The Engagement was a New York Times Book Review Notable Book of the Year.
Learn more & get your copy here.
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About "The Engagement"
ABOUT THE BOOK

A decade after The Victory Lab: The Secret Science of Winning Campaigns, which Politico called “Moneyball for politics,” journalist Sasha Issenberg returns to the cutting edge of political innovation to reveal how campaigners are navigating the era’s most pressing new challenge: how to deal with disinformation.

 

The Lie Detectives is a lively and deep secret history of Democratic politics in the Trump years, told through a cast of strategists and tacticians on the front lines. There’s Jiore Craig, a globetrotting young digital expert who invented the job of counter-disinformation operative for American campaigns despite never having worked on one, and Cheri Bustos, a congresswoman from a Trump-supporting district who struggled to convince her colleagues that not every lie targeting them online amounted to an electoral problem. There’s Silicon Valley investor Reid Hoffman, whose emergence as one of the American left’s biggest donors has forced his adviser Dmitri Mehlhorn into the role of moral compass for a movement still wrestling with whether it should counter fake news by producing its own, and David Goldstein and Jehmu Greene, who are confronting “the Big Lie” in the vernacular of online conspiracy theories, with gifs, memes, and ugly graphics of their own. The Lie Detectives presents a vivid snapshot of a political class trying to come to terms with an exploding social media landscape, and using every weapon in its arsenal to counter the biggest threat it has ever faced to its way of doing business and winning power.

About
ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Sasha Issenberg is a journalist and author of four previous books, most recently The Engagement: America’s Quarter-Century Struggle Over Same-Sex Marriage. He teaches in the UCLA Department of Political Science and is a correspondent for Monocle. His work has also appeared in New York, The New York Times Magazine and George, where he was a contributing editor. His first book for Columbia Global Reports, Outpatients: The Astonishing New World of Medical Tourism, was published in 2016. Read his magazine, newspaper, and other published work here.

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photo by Carlos Chavarría

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Praise for The Lie Detectives

“Sasha Issenberg is a journalist as prophet. He consistently identifies the next important thing in politics--and then explains it with vivid characters and irresistible narrative. I thought that I couldn't be more alarmed about the future of democracy, but this book, unnervingly, proved me wrong."

Franklin Foer

author of The Last Politician: Inside Joe Biden's
White House and the Struggle for America's Future

SASHA'S PREVIOUS BOOKS

The Sushi Economy
Globalization and the Making of a Modern Delicacy

The Victory Lab

The Secret Science of
Winning Campaigns

Outpatients

The Astonishing New World
of Medical Tourism

The Engagement

America's Quarter-Century Struggle Over Same-Sex Marriage

My Books
Contact

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