15.08.2024.One of the regular columns of FakeNews Tragač is the “Reading Room”, where we introduce our readers to books dedicated to the topics of disinformation, manipulation, cognitive traps, and fact-checking. Our motivation for launching this column was not driven by the idea of increasing profits for publishing houses, but rather to present works that are truly worth reading, or at least worth considering their theses and conclusions.
At first glance, the book “Between Two Worlds” by Branimir Nestorović, published by Gnosis Lux, could be a candidate for the “Reading Room”: it is largely dedicated to the topic of “misconceptions” about medicine and pharmacy, with an effort to counter these misconceptions with substantiated arguments. However, upon closer inspection, and especially after a third and fourth look, we notice that Dr. Nestorović’s book itself offers or amplifies certain misconceptions, turning the reading of “Between Two Worlds” into a true research endeavor.
Between the worlds of “exact science and the world of spirituality”, Nestorović delves into topics such as human photosynthesis, healing with sound, proving the existence of parallel worlds, the matrix, the effects of grounding on human health (walking barefoot), psi-phenomena, morphogenetic fields, healing energy, and so on. Some of the claims presented set off alarm bells for a skeptical reader. Since a detailed verification of all the claims made across nearly 400 pages would require an army of experts from various fields, we focused on analyzing discourse strategies, supported by fact-checking, to better understand how Nestorović shapes the “message he wanted to send”.
The original analysis was released in November 2023 in Serbian, and its authors received the “Dragan Janjić” award for media literacy. As stated in the explanation, the jury believes that in a time when popular science is thriving, and modern media is giving space to various self-proclaimed experts and analysts, the analysis of FakeNews Tragač serves as an example of how media literacy can also serve as a survival guide in a world of pseudoscience and conspiracy theories.
You can download the English translation of the publication here.
Jelena Jovović and Stefan Janjić, FakeNews Tragač
