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Reference

Michelle A. Amazeen (2025). Content Confusion: News Media, Native Advertising, and Policy in an Era of Disinformation. MIT Press. https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/15644.001.0001

Youtube channel link

https://www.youtube.com/@weekendresearcher

Connect on linkedin

https://www.linkedin.com/in/mayukhpsm/

Welcome to “Revise and Resubmit”, and to this episode of “Weekend Book Review”! 🎙️✨ Today we are diving into a book that pokes right at the soft underbelly of our media diets, a book that asks whether what we are reading is news, noise, or something far more carefully engineered: “Content Confusion: News Media, Native Advertising, and Policy in an Era of Disinformation” by Michelle A. Amazeen. 📚🧠

Michelle Amazeen is not just a commentator on media, she is one of the scholars who actually maps how persuasion and misinformation seep into our everyday information feeds, drawing on years of research as an Associate Dean of Research, Associate Professor of Mass Communication, and Director of a major Communication Research Center. Her work on mediated persuasion, misinformation, and fact checking has shaped policy conversations and helped journalists, educators, and policymakers understand how people can recognize and resist subtle forms of influence. That deep, empirical lens is what she brings into “Content Confusion”, making this more than a media rant and closer to a field guide for anyone who cares about democracy and an accurately informed public.​

In this episode, we will unpack how native advertising quietly blurs the line between journalism and marketing, how even sophisticated readers can be fooled, and why regulatory responses in the US and beyond have struggled to keep up with the harms this hybrid content creates for public trust and democratic participation. We will walk through the historical shift from subsidy and patronage to ad driven media, look at how news organizations rationalize these practices, and ask what happens when generative AI accelerates this blending of fact, framing, and sponsored spin. 🤖📰

So, stick around as we flip through the pages of “Content Confusion”, test our own ability to spot disguised persuasion, and think about what ethical, transparent media might look like in the next decade. Huge thanks to Michelle A. Amazeen for writing this vital book, and to MIT Press for publishing it and pushing this conversation into the mainstream. 🙏📖

If you enjoy this review, please subscribe to the podcast “Revise and Resubmit” on Spotify, listen and follow on Amazon Prime Music and Apple Podcast, and hit subscribe on the Weekend Researcher YouTube channel so you never miss a new Weekend Book Review. 🎧🔥 Now, as we turn to the first chapter, ask yourself: when you scroll through your favourite news site, are you really reading journalism… or are you reading someone’s very expensive wish disguised as the truth? 🤔📲