Truth, Reality, and the News: Training a Critical Eye

I love The Onion.  I really do.  It scratches the itch that sits firmly at the intersection of my need for intelligent commentary and craving for satire.  From the gang violence between academics who use APA and MLA citation styles to the new requirement that welfare recipients provide sweat samples to show how hard they are working, The Onion provides skillfully crafted commentary on our world, society, and those aspects of humanity that define us, occasionally uplifting but typically through shame. 

While The Onion is great fun, it isn't news. Heck, its tagline is "A farcical newspaper featuring world, national and community news." It is satire. It is farce. It is hilarious.  And it is not news. It is fake.  Everybody knows that, right?  

Well, no, everybody doesn't know that.  News organizations don't even seem to know that, since they are so readily fooled by it and cite the Onion as a source. And it isn't just international news organizations; politicians in the US seem to be unaware of what The Onion actually is. 

I guess it is no surprise, then, that the average American is so easily fooled by it. And it isn't just The Onion.  

weeklyworldnews.com

There are a whole host of satirical news sites. Some proudly wear their absurdity on their sleeves like The Weekly World News (Batboy lives!!! Their favicon is even a picture of Batboy), but at the same time sprinkle in believable headlines. Today's slide show on their homepage rotates between Megyn Kelly leaving Fox News and Saturn being a large UFO.

weeklyworldnews.com 10/31/2016

While most people wouldn't even consider the latter, an awfully large section of the population wouldn't think twice about the former.  


And that is in no small part due to the mixture of reality and fiction. Kelly has been reportedly looking elsewhere.  But she hasn't left yet, and that makes the news story fake. 

weeklyworldnews.com 10/31/2016

But people still share it.  And they share it with a level of faith in the validity that is strong.  

In the last week alone, news organizations around the world have written about the problem of people reading (or, more often, not reading) fake news and sharing or re-tweeting it, with a signal boost that gives it a wider range and a greater likelihood of catching another unsuspecting reader unawares.  CNN, The Guardian,  The Daily Beast (Newsweek's digital home), all talking about how people are tricked by spoof news sites. 

And let's be honest here.  This is only talking about satire news sites. What about satirical sites within reputable ones?  Things like The Borowitz Report (100% fake) as a legitimate column within The New Yorker (entirely legitimate news source).  

Who cares though?  It is all good fun! 

No, actually, it isn't. 

According to the Pew Research Center, "Twenty years ago, only 12% of U.S. adults got news online. Today, that number stands at 81%. About six-in-ten (62%) get news through social media – a figure that rises to 84% for 18- to 29-year-olds. We have also reached a point where a large majority of the public (72%) gets news on a mobile device." Source

If people so readily believe news that is 100% fake (and tells you that right upfront), how much more do they fall for news that is a mixture of truth, reality, spin, bias, and hyperbole?

What about heavily biased or extreme right and left-wing news sites like The Drudge Report or Salon.com, even though they make no pretense at hiding their slant (and, in fact, celebrate it)? These sites make no apologies about putting a spin to news. 

Or bloggers who present their views, bias and all? Alex Jones of Infowars is a blogger, radio host, and conspiracy theorist who, according to Quantcast, reaches over 7 million listeners a month.  he dances between outright conspiracy theory (the US was behind 9-11 and faked the moon landing) and "news" stories purporting to reveal the truth the government hides. Michael Moore is an award-winning documentary maker and news shaper. He has 3.2 million followers on Twitter and refers to his own pieces on his website as "letters", though they give the look and feel of news. 

Neither hides his bias.  Both are upfront about who they support, who they oppose.  And neither are impartial news sources. 

But readers see the stories, tweets, blog posts, and letters from all of these sites, people, agencies, and more, and readily believe that there has been a background check or the vetting of information.

When people rarely read beyond the first paragraph of a story, it is so much easier to spread misinformation. 

But why should I care?  Why should anyone care? 

As a librarian, I strive to encourage literacy, and being able to detect spoof, satire, and misinformation is a big part of digital literacy. 

If one need only use a serif font and put leaves around some well-worded headlines in order to trick people, then that is not literacy. 

Being able to recognize some letters or symbols is not literacy.  To be literate, one must understand , and a part of truly understanding is knowing when something is real, when it is factual, when it is presented without bias, and when it is not. 

The problem, I think, and I include myself at times in this indictment, is that this can take a lot of work.  Not always. Sometimes it is obvious. Or should be.  The now-famous meme about dividing 360 million dollars among the people of America created online debates so fierce that the UK Daily Mail reported on it. Solving that didn't even need research. Just a calculator.

But there is an entirely different level of story that needs to be run through Snopes, an award winning, highly respected site that debunks rumors and false news stories. 

Often, it is just a question of doing one's due diligence.  

• Read the story. (I know. We are all busy and tl;dr is an easy way out, but at least read more than the first paragraph.) 
• Look at the source.  
• What is cited? 
• Who is cited? 
• What is the date or the story? 
• Can you find the same info at any other site?

And all of that takes work, but it is part of being informed. It is part of literacy. It is a part of knowing that the information you are getting is true, accurate, unbiased. And if it isn't, at least being aware of the bias, and countering it.

This isn't explicitly about politics, but that does seem to be the field on which the battle for accurate information is most regularly fought these days. I am not so foolish as to think that it will all go away on November 9th.  Honestly, it is something that has been building for years, with the rise of social media and the increased use of non-traditional sources of news including The Colbert Report, The Rush Limbaugh Show,  The Daily Show, Brietbart, and Last Week Tonight.  

I fully recognize that as a Gen X, it is tricky to look at the way Millennials and Gen Z get their news with a critical eye without being purely critical.  Millennials, as a group, are highly informed. They are critical of news sources,and they are exposed to politics in their Facebook and Twitter feeds at a higher rate than Gen X or Baby Boomers.  

So this isn't a generational thing. It seems that it is societal.  At the risk of turning the nation into a monolith, generally, people are in a hurry. They digest news quickly and move on (tl;dr). And that creates a prime breeding ground for misinformation. 

For many people, and I include myself in this, there are times that a news item is what we want to believe.  We want  it to be true. In those cases, it doesn't take much convincing. 

And in those cases we must be ever more diligent. 

To check sources. 

Look for citations. 

Demand verification.

Ask the hard questions.

Because being a well-informed, literate digital citizen is more than just consuming information.  

It is knowing what information to spit out.