Category: Media Literacy

  • That info you found. You sure of the source?

    That info you found. You sure of the source?

    Ever play telephone? You sit with a bunch of friends and whisper a phrase in the ear of the person next to you. That person whispers it to the next person. So, it goes until the phrase reaches the last person. 

    More times than not, the initial phrase became so convoluted as it is passed from person to person that it is funny. The phrase “80% of success is showing up” might end up as “an Asian person senses a growing pup.”

    That’s often the case with information on the internet. The more sources through which an article has been published through a syndicate or aggregated source, the more likely that article will change. Sometimes important context or nuance is lost. 

    In journalism, the goal is to be as close as possible to the publication making that initial “phone” call.

    “The closer you can get to the source, the better,” said Dan Evon, senior manager of education design at the News Literacy Project, a nonpartisan education nonprofit that provides students with media literacy tools. “It’s important for people to know how to find those sources.” 

    How to know if info has been rehashed

    Sometimes it is difficult to tell an original source from one that has been republished and rehashed. Media consumers often think they got their information from an original source, when they had found it on what is called an aggregator or syndicator.

    An aggregator compiles data from many sources into one. Many institutions host aggregated databases with publications from various sources, including the scientific and medical communities. 

    One such example of an aggregated source is the National Library of Medicine PubMed, the world’s largest biomedical library that hosts more than 37 million citations. Publications hosted by the database span institutions, journals and online books but always include the name of the original publication. 

    These are shown at the top of the webpage near the title; the page should display the original journal or book that the research appeared in. In addition, research studies include a unique code known as a Digital Object Identifier (DOI), and a search of this configuration of numbers and letters will also lead to the original publication. 

    Other aggregators include the Harvard Web of Science, a database that indexes the world’s leading scholarly literature, and Science.gov, an online U.S. government database of millions of scientific research across U.S. federal agencies.

    Syndicators and news wires

    Syndicators are networks of media organizations that share content. Snopes, a U.S.-based fact-checking website, publishes original content. This content can then be republished by its syndicated partners, which include MSN and Yahoo. 

    But just as in that game of telephone, important information can be lost or confused when a story is republished. For example, a syndicate publication may adjust a headline or alter the story’s content, leading to a story being factually incorrect or lacking crucial context. 

    Many news publications, for example, use content from newswire services like the Associated Press or Reuters, but each publication might alter the story or reword photo captions.

    “If you have a correction or an article is withdrawn, or there’s an editor’s note, that might not make it into the sites aggregating it,” said Evon. “When outlets republish articles, sometimes they change headlines, which can sometimes change their meaning — especially when people don’t read past the headlines.” 

    In other words, an update, editor or correction note issued to the original article may not be reflected in a syndicated article published before these additions. 

    Who wrote the story?

    Look to the writer’s byline to find an article’s original publication source. Information about the reporter, original publication outlet, date and location should be included here. Sometimes, that information is at the bottom of the article. 

    Perhaps the most well-known syndicated news source in journalism is The Associated Press, a wire service that covers global news. This independent news source publishes original reporting that websites, newspapers and broadcasts worldwide can republish. AP syndicated stories can appear in various news outlets, including local newspapers.

    To identify an AP style, look for the “AP” and original publication location in the byline. 

    If this information isn’t readily available or apparent, a Google search of the article headline and reporter name may sometimes reveal the original source. In a seemingly endless world of information, how does one determine whether a news source is reputable? Evon advises readers to take their time. 

    “Slow down. There is so much information that comes at you so fast, and you don’t have to look at everything,” Evon said. “The internet is awesome. It has all the information that you need. You just have to slow down and learn how to use it properly. Take a few seconds to look at an account name, who is publishing it, where it’s coming from — there are many basic questions that can be answered in 30 seconds that can really weed about the false information that goes around.”

    Credibility can’t be rushed.

    A credible media outlet or news publication will be transparent in its editorial strategies, correction policies, staff, funding and any conflicts of interest. This information should be easy to find and is often listed on a website’s “About” page. 

    “Once you know that’s a source that you can trust, you don’t have to do that work every time. It’s more about when you come across new and unfamiliar sources,” said Evon. “If you do not recognize the account or the outlet, that should give you pause to do a bit of research.”

    Understanding the different source types can also help determine whether information comes from an aggregated or syndicated source. Sources of information often fall into three categories — primary, secondary and tertiary — based on how close they are to the source. Primary sources are considered original materials or official sources of information, such as a research journal that published a study or a press release issued by a law official. 

    Tracking down the primary source is the best way to track down the first time this information was made available and hasn’t yet been distorted by varying degrees of reporting, interpretations or users who copy and paste text without context. 

    For scientific or social science studies, the primary source will be the study itself and the researchers who conducted it and the university where the research took place. Moreover, once you identify the researchers, you can contact them and interview them for original research of your own. 

    Secondary sources reprint, restate or analyze primary sources. These might include textbooks, articles, biographies, political analyses or commentaries that add value to the primary source but don’t necessarily represent its original context. 

    Tertiary sources compile, index and organize different pieces of information to create a broader understanding of a topic. These include dictionaries or encyclopedias, almanacs and manuals that usually do not credit a particular author.

    “Journalists play a role of an intermediary between sources, so there is this desire or inclination to go to the primary source,” Evon said. “What we hope journalists can do is look at that primary source, parse that data into easily understandable tidbits that they can then put out to the general readership.” 

     

    Questions to consider:

    1. What is meant by a news aggregator?
    2. How do you tell who conducted the research when you find a scientific or social science study on the Internet?
    3. Why is it important to tell if information has been republished and altered?

     

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  • The legion of journalists who report unbiased news

    The legion of journalists who report unbiased news

    Are you frustrated because politics is bitterly polarized? Have you almost given up on finding news that is fair, accurate, dispassionate and digestible?

    If so, I have a tip for you: Take a look at some of the major international news agencies. It may change how you consume news while making you better informed.

    Also called wire services, news agencies like the Associated Press (AP), Reuters and Agence France-Presse (AFP) have thousands of multimedia journalists — and clients — spread out around the world. With roots in the 19th century, they have impartiality and a commitment to accuracy in their DNA.

    No news organization can be perfectly impartial. But the better wire services offer an antidote to the slanted and unreliable offerings that often pose as “news” on the internet but can represent little more than one-sided, sensationalized accounts that stoke social and political discord.

    Check out this chart: There’s a reason the AP, Reuters and AFP are considered among the most reliable and balanced Western news sources. It has a lot to do with their history and purpose.

    Fast and factual

    The AP, Reuters and AFP were founded in the 19th century to serve a cross-section of newspapers that could ill afford to have journalists around the world at a time when the appetite for international news was on the rise.

    To succeed, the agencies sought to play it straight and to deliver the news quickly and accurately. Their stock-and-trade was unvarnished, accurate, fast coverage that could win space in any newspaper, regardless of its owners’ or readers’ political leanings.

    “To achieve such wide acceptability, the agencies avoid overt partiality,” Jonathan Fenby wrote in a 1986 book on international news agencies. “They avoid making judgments and steer clear of doubt and ambiguity. Though their founders did not use the word, objectivity is the philosophical basis for their enterprises — or failing that, widely acceptable neutrality.”

    By the 1980s, the four biggest news agencies accounted for the vast majority of foreign news printed in the world’s newspapers.

    A great deal has since changed in the news ecosystem, much of it due to the invention of the internet. But most wire services continue to strive to offer comprehensive, impartial and accurate news reports, complemented nowadays by photographs, video and graphics.

    Keeping a cool head in hot spots

    If you’re home watching the news and there is a video report of an event in a far-away country, chances are it was produced by a news agency. Similarly, reports in newspapers, on the radio or even on the internet often come from news agencies, which typically have many more journalists on the ground than other news organizations, especially in hot spots.

    “The first word of natural disasters in out-of-the-way places invariably comes from agencies,” said News Decoder correspondent Barry Moody, who worked for decades at Reuters and ran the agency’s news coverage during the second Iraq war at the beginning of this century.

    “During the Iraq war, we had an army of staff in Middle Eastern capitals, embedded with American and British troops and as ‘unilaterals’ roaming the front. I can remember watching as we filed snaps revealing the speed of the American advance into Iraq and seeing the tickers on TV stations and the market screens lighting up at every new alert.”

    News agencies have been playing a similar role more recently in the conflict in Gaza. Although the outlets’ international correspondents have been barred from entering Gaza, Palestinian journalists have risked their lives to deliver timely accounts to the wire services from inside the enclave.

    With journalists and clients around the world, the big international news agencies look at events through a global lens. 

    Balanced news in a biased world

    Many of the thousands of correspondents who report for newswires are in war zones or disputed territories. To protect their staff and reputations, the agencies need to be sensitive to conflicting viewpoints, to cite reputable, credible sources and to avoid taking sides. That explains why, in a world full of shrill, partisan bickering, their reports can seem dispassionate, neutral and tolerant.

    Such balance is not always easy.

    Randall Mikkelsen, another News Decoder correspondent, remembers being a White House reporter for Reuters after the 9/11 attacks in the United States. Bucking intense pressure from the U.S. administration and public, the news agency refused to call the attackers “terrorists,” instead opting for “militants” or “designated by the State Department as ‘terrorists.’”

    “Our stories were read around the world,” Mikkelsen said. “In some places, people the United States called terrorists were considered by the readers of our work as ‘freedom fighters.’”

    The internet has all but ended two of the biggest advantages that news agencies held during the analog era — speed and the ability to break news to huge numbers of people around the world.

    Increased competition for fast news

    The low cost of entry for competitors into the news ecosystem has undermined the agencies’ traditional, business-to-business model, which was based on the sale of news stories to mainstream media organizations, themselves under financial stress.

    So, the wire services have launched news portals for the public, giving consumers around the world direct access to agency reports. It’s been a challenge for the agencies to make money off of their consumer business, and services like Reuters and Bloomberg continue to pocket the lion’s share of their revenue from well-heeled clients in the financial markets even as they continue to sell content to news organizations.

    If you peruse the agencies’ websites, you’ll find a vast array of multimedia reports from points around the world. Their global footprint remains a competitive advantage.

    Still, as hard as the international agencies try to be balanced and fair, bias can at times creep in. Their journalists are not spread evenly around the world; many more tend to be in Western nations, whose businesses, advertisers and subscribers provide most of the big agencies’ revenues.

    So while a disaster that kills hundreds in a developing country in the Global South may merit coverage, it can be dwarfed by the attention the same agency will pay to an accident or event in a rich nation. As they say, follow the money.

    Still, as News Decoder correspondent Helen Womack put it: “International news agencies are on the ground in all sorts of places where other media cannot be, and they help to give us the bigger picture.”

    In some countries, local news agencies are controlled by the government or focus almost exclusively on that nation’s interests. They do not have the footprint of the big, international agencies.

    Said another News Decoder correspondent, Maggie Fox: “News agency-style coverage is just what’s called for in this age of mistrust and distrust of news — calm, dispassionate, just-the-facts reporting.”

     

    Three questions to consider: 

    1. What is a “newswire”?
    2. Why must newswires report news without bias?
    3. If you were a news reporter why might it be difficult for you to report without bias? 

     

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  • Is freedom of speech the same as freedom to lie?

    Is freedom of speech the same as freedom to lie?

    Meta will stop checking falsehoods. Does that mean more free speech or a free-for-all?

    “First, we’re going to get rid of fact-checkers,” Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Meta, said in a video statement early this January. “Second, we’re going to simplify our content policies and get rid of a bunch of restrictions on topics like immigration and gender that are just out of touch with mainstream discourse.”

    This statement marks another turn in the company’s policies in handling disinformation and hate speech on their widely used platforms Facebook, Instagram and Threads. 

    Meta built up its moderation capabilities and started its fact-checking program after Russia’s attempts to use Facebook to influence American voters in 2016 and after it was partially blamed by various human rights groups like Amnesty International for allowing the spread of hate speech leading to genocide in Myanmar. 

    Until now, according to Meta, about 15 thousand people review content on the platform in 70 languages to see if it is in line with the company’s community standards.

    Adding information, not deleting

    For other content, the company involves professional fact-checking organizations with journalists around the world. They independently identify and research viral posts that might contain false information. 

    Fact-checkers, like any other journalists, publish their findings in articles. They compare what is claimed in the post with statistics, research findings and expert commentary or they analyze if the media in the post are manipulated or AI generated. 

    But fact-checkers have a privilege that other journalists don’t – they can add information to the posts they find false or out of context on Meta platforms. It appears in the form of a warning label. The user can then read the full article by fact-checkers to see the reasons or close the warning and interact with the post.

    Fact-checkers can’t take any further action like removing or demoting content or accounts, according to Meta. That is up to the company. 

    However, Meta now likens the fact-checking program to censorship. Zuckerberg also argued for the end of the program saying that the fact-checkers “have just been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they’ve created.”

    Can untrained people regulate the Web?

    For now, the fact-checking program will be discontinued in the United States. Meta plans to rely instead on regular users to evaluate content under a new program it calls “Community Notes.” The company promises to improve it over the course of the year before expanding it to other countries.

    In a way, Meta walking back on their commitments to fight disinformation wasn’t a surprise, said Carlos Hernández- Echevarría, the associate director of the Spanish fact-checking outlet Maldita and a deputy member of the governance body that assesses and approves European fact-checking organizations before they can work with Meta called the European Fact-Checking Standards Network. 

    Zuckerberg had previously said that the company was unfairly blamed for societal ills and that he was done apologizing. But fact-checking partners weren’t warned ahead of the announcement of the plans to scrap the program, Hernández- Echevarría said.

    It bothers him that Meta connects fact-checking to censorship.

    “It’s actually very frustrating to see the Meta CEO talking about censorship when fact-checkers never had the ability and never wanted the ability to remove any content,” Hernández-Echevarría said. He argues that instead, fact-checkers contribute to speech by adding more information. 

    Are fact-checkers biased?

    Hernández-Echevarría also pushes back against the accusation that fact-checkers are biased. He said that mistakes do occur, but the organizations and people doing the work get carefully vetted and the criteria can be seen in the networks’ Code of Standards. 

    For example, fact-checkers must publish their methodology for choosing and evaluating information. Fact-checkers also can’t endorse any political parties or have any agreements with them. They also have to provide proof of who they are owned by as well as publicly disclose information about their employees and funding.

    Meta’s own data about Facebook, which they disclose to EU institutions, also shows that erroneous decisions to demote posts based on fact-checking labels occur much less often than when posts are demoted for other reasons — nudity, bullying, hate speech and violence, for example. 

    In the period from April to September last year, Meta received 172,550 complaints about the demotion of posts with fact-checking labels and, after having another look, reversed it for 5,440 posts — a little over 3%. 

    However, in all other categories combined, the demotion had to be reversed for 87% of those posts.

    The sharing of unverified information

    Research shows that the perception of the unequal treatment of different political groups might form because people on the political right publish more unreliable information.

    A paper published in the scientific magazine Nature says that conservative users indeed face penalties more often, but they also share more low-quality news. Researchers therefore argued that even if the policies contain no bias, there can be an asymmetry in how they are enforced on platforms.

    Meta is also making other changes. On 7 January, the company published a revised version of its hateful conduct policies. The platform now allows comparing women to household objects and “insulting language in the context of discussing political or religious topics, such as when discussing transgender rights, immigration, or homosexuality”. The revised policies also now permit “allegations of mental illness or abnormality when based on gender or sexual orientation”.

    LGBTQ+ advocacy group GLAAD called these changes alarming and extreme and said they will result in platforms becoming “unsafe landscapes filled with dangerous hate speech, violence, harassment, and misinformation”. 

    Journalists also report that the changes divided the employees of the company. The New York Times reported that as some upset employees posted on the internal message board, human resources workers quickly removed the posts saying they broke the rules of a company policy on community engagement.

    Political pressure

    In a statement published on her social media channels. Angie Drobnic Holan, the director of the International Fact-Checking Network, which represents fact-checkers in the United States, linked Meta’s decision to political pressure.

    “It’s unfortunate that this decision comes in the wake of extreme political pressure from a new administration and its supporters,” Holan said. “Fact-checkers have not been biased in their work. That attack line comes from those who feel they should be able to exaggerate and lie without rebuttal or contradiction.”

    In his book “Save America” published in August 2024, Donald Trump whose term as U.S. President begins today, accused Zuckerberg of plotting against him. “We are watching him closely, and if he does anything illegal this time he will spend the rest of his life in prison,” he wrote. 

    Now, with the changes Zuckerberg announced, Trump is praising Meta and said they’ve come a long way. When asked during a press conference 7 January if he thought Zuckerberg was responding to Trump’s threats, Trump replied, “Probably.”

    After Meta’s announcement, the science magazine Nature published a review of research with comments from experts on the effectiveness of fact-checking. For example, a study in 2019 analyzing 30 research papers covering 20 thousand participants found an influence on beliefs but the effects were weakened by participants’ preexisting beliefs, ideology and knowledge. 

    Sander van der Linden, a social psychologist at the University of Cambridge told Nature that ideally, people wouldn’t form misperceptions in the first place but “if we have to work with the fact that people are already exposed, then reducing it is almost as good as it as it’s going to get”. 

    Hernández-Echevarría said that although the loss of Meta’s funding will be a hard hit to some organizations in the fact-checking community, it won’t end the movement. He said, “They are going to be here, fighting disinformation. No matter what, they will find a way to do it. They will find support. They will do it because their central mission is to fight disinformation.”

    Questions to consider:

    • What is now allowed under Meta’s new rules for posts that wasn’t previously?

    • How is fact-checking not the same as censorship?

    • When you read social media posts, do you care if the poster is telling the truth?

     

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