The State of Journalism: Past, Present, and Future

by Marc Hochstein

This essay appears in Issue 3 of the Mars Review of Books. Visit the MRB store here.

---

Disinformation: The Nature of Facts and Lies in the Post-Truth Era

by Donald A. Barclay

Rowman & Littlefield, 281 pp., $30

The Gray Lady Winked: How the New York Times’s Misreporting, Distortions and Fabrications Radically Alter History

by Ashley Rindsberg

Midnight Oil Publishers, 284 pp., $14.99

HEIRESS STRANGLED IN MOLTEN CHOCOLATE AT NAZI SEX ORGY! A Memoir

by Peter Hochstein

Telemachus Press, 195 pp., $3.99

---

Editors and English teachers at their wits’ end, rejoice! Ashley Rindsberg has unearthed the perfect illustration for your writers and students of why they should use active verbs whenever possible.

The textbook how-not-to-write sentence appeared September 1, 1939, in The New York Times:

“The Gleiwitz incident is alleged here to have been the signal ‘for a general attack by Polish frantireurs [guerillas] on German territory.’” (Emphasis added.)

Perhaps the author of that page three article couldn’t have known that the men who attacked a radio station in the town of Gleiwitz the day before were German operatives in Polish uniforms. This was, to be fair, 17 years before the 1946 Nuremberg Trials, when a former SS officer testified that the incident was a false flag operation to give Hitler a pretext to invade Poland.