Kenneth Newton is Professor Emeritus at Southampton University. He served as Executive Director of the ECPR and as a member of the Executive of IPSA and the PSA UK. His research publications cover social and political trust, democratic innovations, city politics and media politics and he is the co-author of Foundations of Comparative Politics (4th edition, with Jan van Deth, Cambridge 2021).

• 1. Massive and minimal media effects; 2. The news landscape; 3. News diets; 4. Avoiding, rejecting, ignoring and accepting; 5. Digital pessimism; 6. Newspapers, voting and agenda-setting; 7. Media malaise and the mean world effect; 8. Personal experience as a reality check; 9. Pluralism and democracy; 10. Practical lessons.

'Real News about the News examines the conventional wisdom about the role of the media in contemporary British politics - and often shows the conventional wisdom is inaccurate. Newton uses diverse evidence to test claims of citizens' limited information, media silos, the impact of fake news, media agenda-setting, media malaise and other topics. This is a thoughtful, well-written and well-documented study that should make us rethink many of our views about the contemporary mass media in Britain and other affluent democracies.' Russell J. Dalton, University of California, Irvine