More resources for
alternative facts, fake news
With the events surrounding Inauguration Day comes a new journalistic concept, alternative facts. As we teach our students to be aware of fake news and now alternate facts, check out some additional resources that might lead to lessons and activities that rebuild trust in journalists – and journalism.
• Kellyanne Conway says Donald Trump’s team has ‘alternative facts.’ Which pretty much says it all
• Student journalists especially vulnerable to Trump’s press-as-enemy rhetoric
• Don’t let Trump get away with ‘alternative facts’
• What does a news organization optimized for trust look like
And, as a lead-in to JEA’s One Book reading for this this spring, 1984:
George Orwell on ‘alternative facts’
The links take you to our other posts to identify and combat varieties of fake news.:
• Censored news is fake news
• Addressing issues involved in fake news
• Our tasks for the future: Building a Tool Kit of Trust, Integrity
Censored news, including that created by prior-review limited outlets and insistence on alternative “facts,” leads to distortion and misinformation.
That is something we must address through leadership, enlightened publication and community education.
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Our tasks for the future:
Building a Tool Kit of Trust, integrity
Trust.
Trust in sources, information, journalists. Trust in audiences. Trust in education.
Ways to help student journalists and their audience fight fake news and bad journalism begin in middle and high school, and especially in journalism programs.
Helping journalism students and their audiences fight fake news and sloppy reporting should include understanding what type of journalism is involved. Bill Kovach and Tom Riosenstiel identified the four types in the book Blur.
Each type provides its own journalistic function and each can play roles in fake news:
• Journalism of Verification: “a traditional model that puts the highest value on accuracy and context.”
• Journalism of Assertion: “a newer model that puts the highest value on immediacy and volume and in so doing tends to become a passive conduit of information.”
• Journalism of Affirmation: “a new political media that builds loyalty less on accuracy, completeness, or verification than on affirming the beliefs of its audiences, and so tends to cherry-pick information that serves that purpose.”
• Interest-Group Journalism: “targeted Web sites or pieces of work, often investigative, that are usually funded by special interests rather than media institutions and designed to look like news.”
In the third deditiion of their book Elements of Journalism, Kovach and Rosestiel changed the last category to Journalism of Aggregation.
Studying the four types can help scholastic journalism prepare for a Tool Kit of Trust, preferably without censorship and prior review.
Our Toolkit of Trust would provide materials and journalism resources in at least these six areas:
• Fighting bad journalism
• Uncovering and educating about, then limiting the spread of fake news
• Preventing charges of fake journalism aimed at our student media
• Limiting impact of censored student media
• Uncovering sponsored news
• Building trust in journalistic values through gatekeeping that stresses journalistic responsibility
We feel these areas can be the focus for the war agains fake news and bad journalism.
Because of new-found attention directed toward critical news thinking and news literacy, including proposed California legislation, we hope to, by next fall, share educational materials that:
• Focus on answering the “why” news question to make the “what” meaningful.
• Help your communities understand the need for communications/sense making responsibilities as they question authorities.
• Once journalists have questioned authorities, question them about the quality, motive and detail of their information. Remain skeptical until all questions are answered.
• Double down and stress what speech is protected and why and its importance to the well-being of a democracy.
• Show diversity in all its meaning as a guiding light for scholastic journalism. Let all people and ideas be represented.
• Remember objectivity as a process remains the core of scholastic journalism. It’s a process rooted in truth, credibility and coherence as essential, even as reporters are skeptical and challenging of sources.
• Strive to focus on solutions (journalism) to the issues and problems coverage raises.
• Protect and empower the whole process of fighting fake and misleading news by supporting and becoming involved in states’ New Voices legislation.
• Stress journalists’ social responsibility in a factionalized media/political environment.
• Fight the spread and use of fake news in all its forms and assist student journalists and their communities understand, respond to and counter it.
If you or your students have other areas you feel would help your program and/or scholastic journalism, please use the comment form and let us know.
In a recent Student Press Law Center Ball of Rights promotion, the words “censorship is deplorable” appear. We would add to that “prior review is insidiously deplorable.” Both lead to misinformation and distortion. Both limit journalistic integrity.
Both are at the core of fake news we need to change.
Resources:
• When it comes to legal issues, journalism schools leave students unprepared, a new study argues
• Six skills every journalist should possess
• Truth, truthiness, triangulation: A news literacy toolkit for a “post truth” world
• Fake news? Bias? How colleges teach students not to be duped
Addressing issues involved in fake news
According to a study in a Pew Research Center report released recently, 88 percent of U.S. adults say they believe fake news is causing either a “great deal of confusion” or at least “some confusion” when it comes to people’s understanding of current events.
Categorically false lies-posing-as-breaking-news-stories often start as reportorial problems. Scholastic journalists can begin to address this issue by addressing the following problems:
- Lack of credibility (sources, information and author)
- Insufficient crap detection skills/no training in truth seeking
- Absence of identified sources
- Incomplete information
- Unclear or unknown author intent (as in satire/low harm fake news)
- Lack of context and explanation (of information and meaning of terms/concepts)
- Confirmation bias/filter bubbles/discrediting of mainstream media
- Inability to recognize native advertising
The Pew report also showed:
• 23 percent of Americans say they shared fake news at some point
• 14 percent reported they shared a story knowing it was false
• 45 percent said they were somewhat confident they could identify (39 percent said very confident) completely made up articles
Based on exercises I did with journalism students, and on a a recent national study, we think they might be overconfident.
Each year I would present journalism students with fake story assignments to see if they would think critically through story information. Students did not catch the questionable information, even though they had obvious opportunities to ask questions that would show the assignment’s flaws – and had been told at the beginning of the year we would do an assignment like this.
For example, the students interviewed the principal and assistant principal about the introduction of drug-sniffing ferrets that would go through student lockers at night because of recent evidence of increased drug use in school.
Ferrets, of course, could work through lockers more easily than dogs.
Administrators gave students detailed information about the need for such searches and how the ferrets would operate. They also shared information about a training center for ferrets in a nearby community and studies that showed why ferrets were better than dogs. They included a phone number so students could follow up with trainers. They shared the name of the police department contact.
The story, of course, was completely fake.
The phone number did not work. No such study existed and the local police contact had no knowledge of such a switch from drug-sniffing dogs to ferrets.
Fake news is not new. What is new is its ability to subvert the critical thinking abilities of even more people, especially students, because of the internet and social media, as a recent study showed.
“Overall, young people’s ability to reason about the information on the Internet can be summed up in one word: ‘bleak,'” the study reported.
From middle school to college students, the study’s authors reported, “we were taken aback by students’ lack of preparation.”
And these findings might not reflect the real problem in schools where censored media produce fake news.
The Pew report also asked who its study respondents think should be responsible for stopping fake news. Briefly, respondents listed the public, the government and elected officials, search engines and social media bear responsibility.
Solutions should start in journalism classrooms.
Call it news literacy, crap detection or just critical thinking skills, solutions lie with those students who either produce, evaluate or consume information. They then, as adults, might not make mistakes similar to those see in the Pew study.
We have no magic promise of internet filters to quickly tell us what is true and what is to be avoided. Those filters have not worked and may have contributed to the problems.
What we do have is a journalism foundation of news values and ethical guidelines.
And that is the subject of the next look at fake news.
Resources:
• Ten questions for fake news
• Skills and strategies: Fake news v real news: determining the reliability of sources
• Truth, truthiness, triangulation: A news literacy toolkit for a “post truth” world
• To fix fake news, look yellow journalism
• Fake news? Bias? How colleges teach students not to be duped
• Flawed news is not fake news
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Censored news is fake news
Censored news is fake news.
Frank LoMonte, executive director of the Student Press Law Center, wrote that in Fake News, Real Solutions recently. He said the first wave of responses to fake news does not cure the underlying problem.
We agree wholeheartedly.
LoMonte blamed part of the problem on an educational system that tells students across the country to “publish only news that flatters government officials and reflects favorably on government policies.”
Censored news is fake news.
Such censored news at least partly stems from the 1988 U.S. Supreme Court’s Hazelwood decision.
LoMonte suggested the way to fight the fake news epidemic is to ensure educational institutions inoculate their students and don’t spread the virus.
That inoculation comes from more freedom, not less; more journalistic responsibility, not less; and from solid practice of ethical journalism.
As journalism groups strive to fight fake news in many ways, let’s begin in our schools by identifying at least four types of fake news:
• Information meant to deceive
• Information generated through sloppy and incomplete reporting
• Information not clearly identified as sponsored news
• Information spread by censored media
Follow JEA’s Scholastic Press Rights Committee and others over the next several months as we examine the issue of fake news, identify the problems it creates and seek solutions so scholastic journalism can lead in the fight against fake news and its impact.
Noteable resources:
• Evaluating information: The cornerstone of civic online reasoning
• Students have ‘dismaying’ inability to tell fake news from real, study shows
• A guide to spotting fake news
• The dangers of crying wolf with ‘post-truth’
• How to spot fake news
• A savvy news consumer’s guide: How not to get duped
• Many Americans believe fake news is sowing confusion
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What our tech-savvy kids don’t know
by Candace Bowen, MJE
They may be digital natives with instincts that allow them to use the latest app and easily share photos and video on social media platforms, but when it comes to evaluating information they access on the web, those from middle school through college aren’t nearly as knowledgeable as some might think.
In fact, they can’t tell an ad from a news story or hate group propaganda from factual material from a respected news outlet. In fact, the Stanford History Education Group described students’ reasoning ability when it comes to Internet information as “bleak.”
The group’s 18-month project, “Evaluating Information: The Cornerstone of Civic Online Reasoning,” looked at “the ability to judge the credibility of information that floods young people’s smartphones, tablets and computers.”
From January 2015 to June 2016, the researchers developed and administered assessments to 7,804 students in 12 states, from inner-city LA to suburban Minneapolis, and at six different universities from those with tough admission standards to state schools that accept most applicants.
[pullquote]As the group’s recently released report states, “For every challenge facing this nation, there are scores of websites pretending to be something they are not. Ordinary people once relied on publishers, editors, and subject matter experts to vet the information they consumed. But on the unregulated Internet, all bets are off.”[/pullquote]
As the group’s recently released report states, “For every challenge facing this nation, there are scores of websites pretending to be something they are not. Ordinary people once relied on publishers, editors, and subject matter experts to vet the information they consumed. But on the unregulated Internet, all bets are off.”
To get an idea of just how much these students really know about the Internet, the researchers tested their understanding of a range of information that appears on social media and other Internet venues. For instance, they showed middle school students “sponsored content” and news articles to see if they could recognize an ad. They showed high school students studying about gun laws a chart from a gun owners’ political action committee to see if they would accept it at face value. And they showed college students a tweet to see if they might use it as an eventual source in an article.
Perhaps even more intriguing – especially for education nerds – are the sample questions the report contains, along with a rubric for each and sample responses that show mastery (the student answers correctly and provides coherent reasoning for the response), emerging (the student answers correctly but provides limited or incoherent reasoning) and beginning (the student answers incorrectly).
The results the group reports are indeed bleak, but this shows the kind of media literacy journalism teachers might be able to help promote. Much of it deals with concepts we teach all the time: “Question Authority.” And of course there’s “verify” and “be transparent.” At least we hope our students would do better on this group’s assessment.
Also, the report ends with “Next Steps,” which include a promise to pilot lesson plans to use with these assessments and an awareness of the problem that is far worse than the researchers originally thought.
“Many assume that because young people are fluent in social media they are equally savvy about what they find there. Our work shows the opposite,” the researchers say. They hope to produce web videos to show how digital literacy is vital for a country like ours that relies on an informed electorate.
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