About

The Media Myth Alert blog calls attention to the appearance and publication of media-driven myths — stories about and/or by the news media that are widely believed and often retold but which, under scrutiny, prove to be apocryphal or wildly exaggerated.

Media Myth Alert also seeks to promote Getting It Wrong, which was published in July 2010 by University of California Press. An expanded second edition of the book was published in October 2016.

Getting It Wrong is a past winner of the Sigma Delta Chi award for research about journalism, a national award of the Society for Professional Journalists.

WJC

The author of Media Myth Alert is W. Joseph Campbell, a tenured full professor in the School of Communication at American University in Washington, D.C. He is a former professional journalist, having reported for the Cleveland Plain Dealer, Hartford Courant, and the Associated Press in a 20-year career that took him across North America to Europe, West Africa, and parts of Asia.

Including Getting It Wrong, Campbell is the author of seven books. His most recent work, Lost in a Gallup: Polling Failure in U.S. Presidential Elections, was published in August 2020. The book considers prominent cases of polling failure since 1936 and has been praised as “well-written, impressively researched, and detailed.”

FAQs about Lost in a Gallup may be accessed here.

Campbell’s well-received year-study, 1995: The Year the Future Began, was published in 2015. (Please visit his 1995 Blog.)

His other books include Yellow Journalism: Puncturing the Myths, Defining the Legacies (2001) and The Year That Defined American Journalism: 1897 and the Clash of Paradigms (2006).

In a world of fake news and fights over what's real and fake, @wjosephcampbell's Media Myth alert is a natl treasure https://t.co/hjU7MBA14h pic.twitter.com/j7Cu496bDe

— Nick Gillespie (@nickgillespie) June 24, 2017