The Internet age is giving residents of the free world direct access to information and more responsibility in consuming it. Are modern media consumers smart, savvy, and well-informed enough for the responsibility? Dr. Edward Caudill holds us accountable in his discussion of the graphic book The influencing machine : Brooke Gladstone on the media by Brooke Gladstone. (Recorded July 16, 2014)

“Brooke Gladstone offers the most engaging and insightful critique of modern media since Walter Lippmann,” Caudill says. “She spares no one, including herself and the standards of her profession.”

Dr. Edward Caudill is a professor of Journalism and Electronic Media at the University of Tennessee. His most recent book is Intelligently designed: how creationists built the campaign against evolution. Earlier this year, Brooke Gladstone interviewed him about the book as part of National Public Radio’s “On the Media.” He and Paul Ashdown have co-authored a trilogy of books on Civil War figures and the myths around them: William Tecumseh Sherman, Nathan Bedford Forrest, and John Mosby. They are working on a volume about George A. Custer and the Little Bighorn.