Written by: Katherine Starrett
This was written in 2016 after Katherine had earned her Masters’ Degree from King’s College London. We continue to include it, because it remains relevant.
Would You Eat Fake Food?
Choosing what sources of news to consume is like ordering food at a restaurant. No one wants to eat something that’s poorly prepared with substandard ingredients. Nor would you want to bite into the wax fruit on display, no matter how delicious it looks. The first won’t be very nourishing, and the second could be downright poisonous. If you’re going to nourish your mind like you nourish your body, you need fresh, healthy ingredients and a competent person to prepare them.
The label “fake news” has mostly been a result of people trying to discredit those with whom they disagree; people misunderstanding satire; or people trying to make a profit by creating “clickbait”.
Politics
Some fake news is created with political or ideological motivations, to turn the public against those who disagree with the writer. In these cases, completely fictitious stories are written with the hope that people will read them, believe them, and rally against their supposed antagonists. This is not a new phenomenon. These stories are basically a form of information warfare or propaganda, a technique commonly used by:
- Rulers in despotic countries to demonize their enemies
- Or by political rivals trying to win popular support in a democracy,
- Or individuals guilty of misconduct attempting to escape discovery or misdirect public attention onto something other than their own wrongdoing.
Satire
There are numerous websites that publish satirical articles that look like ridiculous news stories. One example is a recent article in The Onion entitled “James Dyson Meets In Secret With Alien Ambassador To Receive Technology For New Hand Dryer.” Of course, that title, to most people, looks like either a piece of satire or something posted on a conspiracy theorist’s blog. However, recently, many conservative websites relayed a story about President Obama’s mother-in-law receiving a $160,000 government pension for the rest of her life. The story was widely shared around the internet and drew outrage. The source of the story was a satirical news site called the Boston Tribune. Apparently, no one attempted to check if it was fiction before they declared it as fact.
Clickbait
For those of you not familiar with internet colloquialisms, clickbait refers to an internet posting that has a scandalous or beckoning title that makes you want to click on it. Clickbait is distinguished from content with actual value by the fact that it is created with the sole purpose of getting as many people as possible to click on it, therefore increasing the site’s advertising revenue. The point of clickbait is to generate profit from increased website traffic, not to inform you of anything, so any useful or truthful information contained in such a page is likely to be scant.
Poor Journalism
Professional journalists start with the five Ws: Who, What, When, Where and Why and often add an H (How). If the article you are reading is leaving out one or more of these ingredients, then the recipe is incomplete and probably indigestible. In addition to completely “fake” news, which has no more substance than a wax apple, one can sometimes run across “junk” news, the information equivalent of a fried Twinkie: it might be appetizing, but there’s no nutritional value. This news can be poorly prepared and sometimes recklessly misleading.
Take the example of a story one of my friends posted on Facebook almost two years ago. The title of this article was “Senate Republicans Vote To Sell Off Our Public Lands to Private Industry”. This article asserted that the Senate had voted in favor of an amendment to a budget resolution that would allow it to sell off public land. The author said that this would threaten areas such as the Grand Canyon and Yellowstone National Park, which would soon be the property of oil and mining companies that have wanted to drill there for years.
Nowhere in the article did the author mention that congressional budget resolutions and their amendments are non-binding, meaning that this amendment had no more legal authority than the personal budget I scribbled on the back of a Chinese take-out menu. The entire tone of the article made it seem as though the Grand Canyon would be the property of Exxon within a week. This is an example of poor journalism, where the author, who is trying to give you a point of view, goes too far and leaves out crucial details.
Natural Bias
All journalism gives a point of view or interpretation of events. That is the purpose of journalism, not just to inform, but to make connections between one event and another so that the public can see patterns and links. All journalists do this, but good journalists do it in a way that sticks to the facts (and by facts, I mean truth) and also allows one to draw their own conclusions by presenting everything that is relevant.
There is a natural bias in journalists just like there’s a natural bias in readers. We are all informed by our own beliefs and experiences, which will lead us to interpret different events in different ways. That doesn’t mean we necessarily discount or create facts that challenge or reaffirm our views respectively, it just means that we view them from different angles.
Journalists who have been trained in legitimate journalism programs have been taught how to identify their own biases, how to identify facts and perspectives different from the ones most comfortable to them personally, and to present their findings in a way that does justice to the complexity of the world they’re covering.
How to Spot Fake News
There is a difference between slight natural bias and lying or omitting important and relevant facts from reporting. Here are some tips on how to spot fake news.
- Read beyond the headline. Never draw conclusions from a headline alone. The purpose of a headline is to grab your attention, not give you the whole story. Examining the content of a story is the first step to determining whether it’s true.
- Look at the source. If you are suspicious that a story might be false, look at the sources being cited. Are they real? (As in real people or organizations). Is the author’s one and only source another website or perhaps a satirical news site? Does the source being cited have none of the information conveyed in the article on their own site? Do the sources being cited have vested interests in the story, such as a candidate’s campaign manager, an industry trade group, or a lobbying firm?
- Is it satire? In order to see if the source of a story or the story itself is meant to be satire, look at other articles on the website. While satirical websites have some stories that sound like they could be real, a lot of their content will probably make you laugh.
- Search the photo. Photos add a veneer of legitimacy to a story because they give you the impression that you are looking at actual proof that the reported events happened. However, it’s really easy to find a photo from an old story and slap it on an article with a new caption. If the story has a photo that is supposedly taken at the reported events (in other words, not just a stock photo of city hall or something that could have been taken any time), do a Google search* of that photo to see if it’s been used in an older story. If you find the exact same photo was used to depict a specific event in an older, unrelated story, the one you’re reading is probably fake.
- Look for errors. If the story you are reading is riddled with glaring spelling or grammatical errors, is badly written or is written in poor English, it might be a fake. People who train in journalism know how to write well and have editors who make sure that the work is polished before it goes to press. Of course, while poor writing may be an indication of fake news, good writing and sophisticated-looking websites are not necessarily an indication of legitimate news.
- Is it opinion? There are thousands of blogs, radio shows and TV shows that offer opinions on events, trends or other phenomena, political, ideological or otherwise. Sometimes these are well thought out and balanced opinions, and sometimes they are knee-jerk reactions informed by anecdotal evidence. It is important to distinguish between reporting of actual events and personal opinions on those events. Opinion media is not necessarily a good place to start when trying to gain an understanding of current events. Generally, people who sound angry in their writing or speech (angry to the point you’re actually afraid they may reach through the computer and throttle you if you disagree), are usually the ones who have the least accurate understanding of events.
Good News
Legitimate news outlets don’t want to fool you. The main goal of real journalists is to inform the public and keep people in power accountable. They value truth and their enemies are not public officials but lies and corruption. And the truth of the matter is that many of the most reliable journalists work for larger news companies, whether it’s old ones like the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, or newer ones like Slate and the Huffington Post.
Publishers provide professional journalists with a steady income, reporting resources like equipment, translators, and proper support so that they can move quickly when events happen and inform the public as soon as possible. These institutions also have layers of oversight so that nothing goes directly from a first draft to print (or website). Stories are edited and fact-checked so that they provide coherent and accurate accounts of any given event.
And when it comes down to it, such organization is necessary when breaking stories. Blogs run by a single person may be a fine place to go for an interpretation of already-established events, but let’s face it, who would you trust to break the story of the politician who just got caught driving with twenty pounds of cocaine in his trunk: the veteran crime reporter whose work is fact checked and edited, or the guy who updates his website during his breaks at Kinko’s?
*You can do a Google search of an image here: https://www.google.com/intl/es419/insidesearch/features/images/searchbyimage.html
