Facts and Fact Checking

"In 2016, Stanford History Education Group conducted a study that showed students at the middle school, high school and college level all demonstrated “bleak” reasoning skills. More than 80% of middle school students could not tell the difference between an advertisement and a news article on Slate. In similarly poor results, less than 20% of high school students were able to critically evaluate an online image related to the 2011 Fukushima disaster. Few college students were able to critically evaluate the content and source of a Twitter post on gun control." ISTE.org

But beware, even Fact check websites and fact checkers will still display media bias. Some might even turn out to be fake news themselves.

Find out about the long history, and powerful effect of Fake News in these three videos...

AllSides is a site for news reports where the bias of the publisher is assessed and included with the news articles.

https://www.allsides.com/topics/facts-and-fact-checking

Lateral Reading to find out who is behind a website...

Evaluating Sources Libguide from The University of Texas

This guide is intended to help students evaluate online sources. This is an important part of information literacy. In this context, online sources are defined as sources found outside of the UT Libraries website and databases. Basically, we want to help you determine whether or not an online source (i.e. website, blog, YouTube video, social media post, etc.) is credible.

While on the surface this may seem to be an easy thing to do, it becomes more complicated once you begin to consider the many factors that come into play. We will dig more into this in each of the tabs located to the left, but broadly speaking credibility comes down to a few, sometimes-hard-to-answer questions:

• What is the compelling research question are you trying to answer?

• Who or what authored this source and what is their background/biases?

• Where did they get their information?*

Many media outlets do not properly label content. You can be easily deceived by media bias when you think you’re reading news, but are actually reading someone’s opinion or analysis.

This guide can help you learn how to spot the difference.