Why We Believe Bogus Stories

The Influencing Machine is a peppy book about the news media. The author, Brooke Gladstone, always wanted to write a comic book, and she does the program On the Media for National Public Radio. Bring those facts together and you get Machine, though only after a good deal of work and some uncertainty. (Gladstone hails her editor for his prowess with “difficult projects that have no real comparables in the book biz.”) Machine is a hardcover but features pictures and word balloons instead of text. The back cover calls it a “work of graphic nonfiction,” which shows that common sense has caught up with the term “graphic novel.” Gladstone wrote the script, and her co-creator, the comic artist Josh Neufeld, drew the pictures. They’ve come up with a tidy, fast-moving, but somewhat myopic look at how information is reported and what the mind does with it on delivery.