This week marks the first August in 28-years where I’m not busy scrambling to get my classroom ready for the arrival of new students. Having turned in my keys at the end of may, these posts will be my classroom. With that in mind, one of the things that I wanted to do when I was teaching media was to explore Crash Course’s high quality video series as part of my class. We never got there. I was also concerned that the content could have been a bit too advanced for sixth, seventh and eighth graders. So I want to spend the next few What’s in the News Wednesdays exploring the Navigating Digital Information series. I hope you’ll follow along. Please watch the following video and then I’ll have something thoughts, comments and questions for you to ponder.

In this introductory episode, presenter John Green pushes a few main ideas. The first idea is that misinformation and disinformation is not connected to any one side of the political divide or ideology. Meaning, if one makes this assumption that they are not susceptible to misinformation or disinformation then they will probably fall victim to accepting misinformation/disinformation as factually true. The second idea is that It’s better to not approach the subject as true/false but look at the quality of the information as a spectrum not a duality. The third idea is that the quality of the presentation is often confused to being an indicator of the reliability of the information and that perception is boosted even more if infographics and statistics are used in the presentation. Basically, if it looks professional then it must be reliable. Here’s a case where the availability of high-quality technology can fool the viewer into thinking that the person doing the presenting actually knows anything about the subject in question.

I’m curious how they’re going to employ fact checking as part of this process. I know something about Fact Checking. Toward the end of getting my degree in Journalism I interned at the LA Weekly doing Fact Checking. This was in 1990, before the Internet, so from what I remember, Fact Checking was mostly getting on the phone and calling story sources to double check the spelling of names. On one such call I got yelled at by the source at a local university because I mispronounced the name of some classical musician. The writers at the LA Weekly rarely if ever got the facts of their stories wrong, thus fact checking was mostly a boring slog, thus it seemed fitting that they gave the job to us lowly interns. But as news consumers, are we expected to do the same and track down everything that we read? That doesn’t seem doable… What do you think? What could you or are you doing to help you establish the reliability of your “news” consumption? 

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Sources:

• Introduction to Crash Course Navigating Digital Information #1 by Crash Course (2019-01-08), https://youtu.be/pLlv2o6UfTU, retrieved 2023-08-02)
• MediaWise, https://www.youtube.com/mediawise