Media Literacy-
How do I know what I’m reading is real? How do I find the difference between real and fake news? How bad is the bias?
A good place to start is Media Bias Fact Check website, mediabiasfactcheck.com. They have analysis on hundreds of different news outlets assessing how bad their bias is, how it manifests and whether it can be trusted in terms of science or conspiracy theories.
After identifying where an outlet sits on the political spectrum and how they rank in pseudoscience and conspiracy peddling, it’s time to check the website’s main page. Starting with headlines, check for emotive or loaded words, question marks or exclamation points.
Loaded words consist of things like buzzwords that pertain to groups of people, inflammatory language or simple phraseology heavily laced with strong emotions. Question marks or exclamation points are indicative of clickbait or propaganda.
The most valuable aspect to media literacy is what’s known as “lateral reading” This is the process of reading multiple sources on one subject or issue. Preferably, from across the political spectrum. It is important to understand how the same story is being reported by different outlets. This will help identify misinterpreted facts or erroneous reporting. If you find a story only being reported in one outlet, or find the same article copy and pasted in multiple outlets, you are probably looking at fake news.
Bias-
It is also important to remember, knowing that something is biased is not the same thing as knowing how something is biased.
Bias is human, but not all bias is created equal. Story selection is the most common type of bias since no one can publish everything. Omission and loaded headlines are also very common manifestations. These don’t always indicate false reporting though. Something can be biased and still be true, or something can be true, but deceptive.
Additionally, opinion/editorials are NOT the same thing as news reporting and journalists are not scientists. Seek out professional science-based outlets for scientific reporting.
Fact Checking-
Tactics for fact checking pieces often vary depending on the piece.
For memes and infographics, Snopes is a great place to start. For political quotes, politifact, and for conceptual analysis, factcheck.org or the Washington Post Fact Checker for current events.
Images can usually be checked with a quick reverse google image search which can determine the original publication of an image. This allows for understanding proper context of web posting and will determine if an image has been miscaptioned or misattributed. This also works for finding original context or fabrication for quotes.
To conduct a reverse image search, you can right click on an image and choose “search Google for image.” You can also directly upload an image into the Google Image search bar.
(Note: this also works for quotations.)
Fake News-
Identifying fake news requires a combination of fact checking and media literacy. It is important to know that fake news is not the same thing as unfavorable or even error ridden journalism. Fake news is a website that is made to look like a news outlet but is actually run by an individual making money off advertising. There is no actual journalism taking place, ergo, it is literally fake. Read more about that here.
Real journalism: mistakes are corrected.
Bad journalism: mistakes are ignored.
Fake News: mistakes are the point.
More recently, fake news creators have begun to create “hybrid fakes.” These occur when a content creator copy and pastes pieces from real media reports and then dresses them up with fabricated and false bits, before loading it with fear based language to invoke emotional reasoning. You may find the real pieces while lateral reading which then creates a perception of legitimacy, at the same time the reader is being deeply manipulated.