Est. 1853
2017 HONORS LECTURE
Cindy Skrzycki “Fact, Falsity and Fiction: Are You Media Literate?” October 12, 2017 — Mount Aloysius College - Alumni Hall
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INTRODUCTION OF GUEST SPEAKER
Dr. Thomas P. Foley, President of Mount Aloysius College Cindy Skrzycki, in her first Honors Lecture at Mount Aloysius, defined good writing as “so beautiful that students can’t help but fall over the threshold into a subject they never considered reading about.” That characterization certainly describes her writing. But underneath Cindy Skrzycki’s writing style always stands the bedrock of fact. As a professional journalist she accomplished this at The Buffalo Evening News, The Fort Worth Star-Telegram, US News & World Report, The Washington Post and The GlobalPost. Her focus at those publications was business and regulation. She spent 18 years at The Washington Post making those topics accessible to a nation of readers—always building on facts. And so this year as our 2017 Honors Lecturer, Cindy drilled deep into the nature of fact for the Mount Aloysius College learning community.
“Fact, Falsity and Fiction: Are Your Media Literate?” is just the right lesson for our era. And it is my special pleasure to welcome Cindy Skrzycki back to the College again—this time to deliver our Fall 2017 Honors Lecture. She and her husband David Shribman, who serves as Executive Editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, are true friends of Mount Aloysius College. They have offered journalism camps, served on discussion panels and so much more. The couple accepted our invitation to serve as Commencement Speakers here in 2014 and we honored them both with Honorary Doctor of Humane Letters degrees. In addition to her credits as a nationally respected professional journalist, Cindy Skrzycki is an award winning professor of writing at the University of Pittsburgh. Truly, we could not find a better person to deliver this very timely message to us today. Welcome back Cindy!
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REMARKS OF CINDY SKRZYCKI
Fact, Falsity and Fiction: Are You Media Literate? Like all of you who are at a college steeped in the values of the Sisters of Mercy, I spent my undergraduate years learning the skills of critical thinking, seeking to discern truth from falsehood, skullduggery from science, and poetry from plagiarism. These are the very skills one needs to be media literate in 2017. But can you strive to be try to be media literate in an atmosphere like this? We have a President who is at the boiling point, angry and isolated. He hates the press openly. He has shredded any chance of a relationship with the press. He maligns the First Amendment. In fact, he wants Congress to investigate the media for covering him.
The worst yet: During a photo with Canadian Premier Justin Trudeau at the White House, Trump responded to a question from NBC about increasing our nuclear arsenal this way: “It’s frankly disgusting the way the press is able to write whatever they want to write. And people should look into it.” Facebook, Google, Instagram, Twitter—the online tools that people use every day—were allegedly involved in helping Russian operatives to influence the election. The amazing thing is that the Russians hijacked content already on these sites, paid handsomely for an ad so it would get prominence, and then posted them. And they were then passed on by millions of people who wanted to share. Where did this information come from? Well, The New
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York Times and ton Post who have increased staff to cover Trump.
ads to political preferences. It’s equal opportunity propaganda.
Facebook, wide-eyed, initially denied any involvement with the 2016 election. Under pressure from the government, Facebook then turned up 30,000 fake accounts in France. Thousands more throughout the world have been discovered since. Facebook will be testifying before Congress on Nov. 1.
The average person probably does not realize the “news” that Facebook feeds you is picked by an algorithm that caters to your behavior on the site. Hence, it reinforces your bubble—and your beliefs.
The vitriol, lying and disinformation reached a feverpitch during the election. Factchecking sites, which are sprouting like mushrooms, have tried to disprove falsehoods, to limited effect. Try FactCheck.org. We live in a society where a fact can be snapchatted away in seconds, a text can come and go in the time it takes to read it, Twitter is, well, a tweet, and emails are time-consuming. This is the internet bubble many Americans live in, an existence that is the apotheosis of the literate public we need to have to live in a democracy. One thing media literacy would show is that Facebook is one of the largest news purveyors in the world. YouTube and Facebook receive big chunks of the overall media ad spending that is expected to reach $36 billion this year. Some of that Russians paid for, tailoring their
For example, no questions asked, teens spend up to nine hours a day on social platforms, most of that on a mobile device. I have nothing personally against Facebook; I look at it as any reporter would; as an institution that needs to be watched, understood and written about. Clearly, the press has been doing that and Congress has woken up to see the outsize influence tech companies—with very different objectives—have on our society. They have noticed these companies are totally unregulated, thinking they are too big to fail. You’ve heard that before. At the center of all this is journalism, truth, and the disappearing notion that news is an account of what actually happened or could be discerned to have happened. It takes time and money to hold to this principle and many news organizations are running out of both.
Yet, do people realize the press is the best watchdog we have? Do people know the difference between The New York Times and The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette -- and their Facebook news feed? (Obviously not, since 60 percent of respondents to a PEW survey said they get their news from Facebook.) Do they know the difference between the objectives of print and broadcast news? Do they have any idea about how government plays a huge role in what Americans know or don’t know?
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For example, The White House Visitor’s log is no longer available to scrutinize because this president says it’s not needed. Do they know this is a blow to reporters who watch who comes and goes at the White House, looking for clues to who is influencing the president? At the same time, though collaboration and acceptance of it, real newspapers—in their digital end of the business—have allowed themselves to be kidnapped by social media and thrown into a leaky lifeboat. To stay afloat, some of the biggest names in news have made a pact with the devil who sets prices and algorithms. This is how it works: In exchange for giving Facebook their content to run on Facebook’s news feed, news organizations get some of the ad revenue
determined by clicks, which determines prominence of the story on the site.
How can anyone be trusted when, just a few months ago, the media reports the USS Carl Vinson was streaming toward an angry and Only a truly media literate person, inflamed North Korea? We not or a techie, or a reporter with eyes only have fake news, we have turned on the social media giant, confused news when the White would know how that system House sold the story to just works. about every news outlet that this was a show of power. In reality, The New York Times and other big it was GPS and news reporting names signed up for this because that finally confirmed the carrier they figured, if you can’t beat them, heading for Australia. join them. Now there is buyer’s regret. And, wouldn’t you trust this report So, when traditional journalism became more about metrics and clicks and less about truth— serious reporting, and calling out wrongdoing in centers of power such as the government, business, education and other institutions— the trouble began. As you know, the public trusts the media about as much as it does Congress.
from CNN?
“A US aircraft carrier-led strike group is headed toward the Western Pacific Ocean near the Korean Peninsula, a US defense official confirmed to CNN. The move of the Vinson strike group is in response to recent North Korean provocations,” the official said. Next came a military denial and then the White House claiming it knew what it was doing all the time. Tough for reporters and readers to find the truth in a story like that. Is it lying or incompetence? Could you determine as a reporter whether the explanation by the White House is accurate? Or as a reader, scratching your head. There have been plenty of instances where the press has let its guard down and not done enough reporting to see that a story is false. That used to be routine practice for reporters because a mistake like that would be put in
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your permanent record and the size of an embarrassing correction would be huge. It’s not so different now. The press corps should be checking every word and punctuation mark that of comes out of the White House, where Donald Trump famously said, “There is fake news because the news is fake.” Listen to that again: There is fake news because the news is fake. So, let’s unravel how we got to where we are and what we have been creeping toward in journalism over the last decade
or so. And why, suddenly, media literacy lessons starting in grade school may be the only way to sift the rotten from right. We have outsized enrollments in journalism schools. Young people want to report and write. They also want to design, run analytics, pick through massive troves of data and be part of the comedic bad writing thrown up on sites like Buzzfeed, alongside the news. Yet, many of them, when they seek internships, want to go to a “real” newspaper with a “real newsroom” and “real professionals.”
They have that sixth sense that this is where they will learn solid reporting skills, critical thinking about how tough and sensitive stories should be handled, and how to find the truth—or what I call ‘the best version of the truth.’ As Americans have junked their newspaper subscriptions, and balked at paying for online news, what they are now looking at is an aggregated digital “newsfeed” that they think is true and sufficient. Over that same decade, companies like Facebook became common carriers of information. They took on the role of being the electronic
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news delivery boy or girl. Voila! It was instant free news from reputable news organizations. Not that anyone cared much where it was coming from and that the people producing those stories were paid professionals trying to hang onto their jobs. Traditional, or what I call real journalism, was high-jacked by social media. Voila. It was instant news from reputable news organizations. A morning feed, breaking news, a newsletter was served up, largely for free, get it in an email or through social media.
It took the Trump campaign and his election for the average person to realize that along with the real news came the fake news. It also became an uncurated X-rated tabloid where fake news could be distributed and live happily because no one cared enough to sift the trash from the treasure. At one time, Facebook did have a handful of engineers and journalists figuring out the hierarchy and propriety of what should run. They knew news does have a certain hierarchy—that’s why they call it breaking news and it has a big headline. They proceeded to use their professional
training to sort by importance what was coming out of the Facebook fire hose. But Facebook was accused of choosing stories that supported the liberal viewpoint. The curators were fired. Mark Zuckerberg denies it, but Facebook operates without any of the attendant obligations and responsibilities that a Warren Buffet or the Saltzberg family shoulders. That is, be a watchdog, report the truth, guard the First Amendment, be a public good. And support your foreign correspondents when they are captured, jailed and killed
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with a knife to their throats by terrorists. Pay for lawyers to get access to documents that should be released by the government or the courts because they are in the public interest. Facebook’s stock in trade is algorithms. With some six billion users, the Silicon Valley company has a prominent role in deciding where and how information moves around the world. Yet, Facebook says it is not a publisher. When the company released its 4th quarter earnings, Mark Zuckerberg Facebook founder and CEO, said, “Our mission to connect the world is more important now than ever. Our biz did well in 2016, but we have a lot of work ahead to help bring people together.” It sounds like an idealistic start-up worrying about whether friends
and family are connecting quickly enough. On the other side of the screen, Facebook users assume all is well. After all, who spends but a few minutes on the news unless you are transfixed by CNN after the U.S. drops a huge bomb or you are a Fox follower watching in horror as your favorite commentator was fired for losing FOX advertisers. But what is even worse is that the importance of news has fallen so far so rapidly that many people cannot tell the difference between a cooked up story splashed across the internet or a news flash from Reuters. I know most of my students could not. In fact, one of their main news sources is News. Just News. Or The Skim. The first is an app embedded in your Apple phone, and curated by Apple. Who can tell me about any of these sites.?
Many of my students thought this was very cool and saved them time. It did, but here’s what is sacrificed. Information that makes you smarter when you vote. This means several things. They are getting a very limited view of the world. Sure, you will know what happened in Las Vegas, but you might not know anything about Republicans attempting to gut Obama Care. You won’t know how this might affect you, or your parents. Media Illiteracy devalues the importance of news and how it is gathered. It ignores that reporters are on the streets in communities around the world doing what the press in many countries cannot do—collect the news freely. Imagine a White House press corps that probably spends more time fact checking Shawn Spicer and Donald Trump than they do
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listening to anonymous sources who might deliver the tip for a blockbuster investigation. How many of you know the Edward Snowden story and the tip that made it the biggest story on government leaks ever. Isn’t it odd, ironic, sad and quite unbelievable that David Fahrenthold of The Washington Post won in April the Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting for an investigation of a big whopper from the President of the United States? Sure politicians fib—they always have—and journalists make mistakes. But this was a big one that took months of reporting and checking with some 450 charitable organizations to nail down Trump’s charitable status as a donor. Calling and tweeting them. What did Farenthold find? A façade, a total fake philanthropist. As the story goes, Trump came unexpectedly into a ribbon-cutting ceremony of a nursery school for children with AIDS. He took his place among state politicians and major donors. “Nobody knew he was coming,” said Abigail Disney, another donor sitting on the dais. “There’s this kind of ruckus at the door, and I don’t know what was going on, and in comes Donald Trump. [He] just gets up on the podium and sits down.” Trump was not a major donor. He was not a donor, period. He’d never given a dollar to the nursery
or the Association to Benefit Children. But, because the real is being obscured by the fake to an extent where discernment is impossible, we are in a time where citizens must fact check the news, read deeply and become saavy about news sites that have names like TK. One can only hope reporters continue to report, write and publish the news on their own newsprint or pixels. Figure out a way to convince readers that subscriptions to read all the news, not just snippets, is worthwhile. The Guardian has tried to reassure readers, saying: “Our primary objective is to bring audiences to the trusted environment of The Guardian to support building deeper relationships with our readers, and growing membership and contributions to fund our world-class journalism.” In other words, the truth outs. Or as George Orwell said: “In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act.” Truth is a big, meaningful, searching word in journalism. It’s a goal, it’s a precept, it’s a standard, it’s a struggle. So how do you discern truth and become more media literate? Learn the forensics. It takes a keen skeptic and a sharp eye to take apart a story or ad and figure out who wrote it, who was paid for it are the sources real, does the
author exist? Is there an author? What does the headline say? Does the site it came from have funny name you have never heard of? Digging for truth is very hard work, and until you go through much analysis, you won’t know in many cases if the information is real fake, or alternative, creating an unsettling illusion and a break in trust. God’s Seal on the world is truth. The Hebrew word for truth is emet, the first middle and last words of the alphabet. It means truth is all inclusive, from A to B.” Let’s talk about another area that has a hold on us, advertising. It has evolved from the days when Double Mint gum had cartoon characters clicking two pieces of gum, to newspapers now creating and publishing extremely sophisticated ad. Your media literacy has to be turned up high to figure this out. Creating is the key word. Let’s look at a few things the newspapers of record—The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic Magazine and The Guardian—are creating in their brand new studios with a slightly different name. I say creating because before the artistic wonders of digital, the only ads on paper that looked really good were those created by Andy Warhol, who started his career by drawing advertisements for shoes. In those days, you worked for an ad agency or directly for the client.
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captured in words and images what was going on. The course of the war changed, particularly when Americans saw a little girl, doused with napalm, running naked down a street in her village. Television was the factor here. That was a time when Americans didn’t have to worry much about media literacy. They got their news from three television stations with respected news anchors and the radio. They believed what they saw and heard. What was the truth after this? Is this where it our schism with truth began? Did we still believe Zachariah 8:16) where it is said:
News organizations now run digital ads that bring in a fraction of the revenue because there is so much competition for eyeballs. So they slowly have aligned themselves with companies, sort of like sports sponsorships.
advising President Johnson on how the war was going. Robert McNamara, secretary of defense, was a whiz with numbers and estimates. Unfortunately, he insisted the truth was in his slide rule and charts.
Only the media literate and those who work in the industry realize how business and the newsroom have virtually merged.
No, the real numbers were in the carnage on the ground of the Vietnamese who died and some 58,000 American soldiers. The generals hung to the party line that the U.S. was winning the war until the day Americans left Saigon, desperately trying to escape on American helicopters.
Somehow this sleek disregard for the truth and sometimes ethics echoes some of the points that Ken Burns is displaying and re-playing for us about the 1960s central truth for Americans—you cannot trust your own government. Or, you have to dig dig the truth. This deception came from administration officials who were
It was the media, in part, that convinced the American public that this was an unwinnable war. Morley Safer and Walter Cronkite—two traditionally trained television reporters—
“On three things the world stands: on judgment, on truth and on peace. Judge truth and the justice of peace in your gates.” Or, not to be sacrilegious, on your Iphone.
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Four Good Reads — A Media Literacy Toolkit
Just the Facts? BY NANCY PFENNING AND CINDY SKRZYCKI JUNE 12, 2013
• Either of the following two headlines would work to describe a new course on “Statistics in Journalism” that we offered for the first time this past spring at the University of Pittsburgh: s • “Lackluster Enrollment Plagues New Course” would describe the seven students brave enough to sign up for the onecredit honors class. “Rave Reviews From Students on Groundbreaking Course” would sum up our end-of-semester teaching evaluations. Those headlines also reflect what we were trying to teach students: Different versions of the truth can sway readers in widely divergent directions. The experience was so eye-opening that we are convinced that a course on the use and misuse of statistics in sciencebased news coverage is one that would benefit all students, no matter their major. It would not only focus their attention on the importance of accuracy, precision, and word choice in writing, it would also help them understand the difficulties of arriving at an accurate version of the truth.
We took a cross-disciplinary approach in developing and teaching the course. One of us teaches statistics (Pfenning) and the other teaches nonfiction writing after spending most of her career in journalism (Skrzycki). We designed the course to deal with the weaknesses that can occur both in how journalists present statistical results and how research studies arrive at those results. Our goal was to take students behind the scenes of both professions. For the first part of the course, we asked students to critique news articles in major publications. By searching and analyzing the underlying research, they came to understand the shortcuts and shallow reporting that can plague important stories that the public eagerly consumes. For the second half of the term, they took a stab at writing stories based on recently published research, to get a sense of the appropriate questions, attributions, and facts that need to be included in a professional piece of writing. We started the course with a quick review of basic statistics, and then outlined various approaches to reporting on numbers in the news media. An introductory statistics course was a prerequisite for our class, but we didn’t require a journalism course. We provided handouts to guide students on
stylistic conventions in journalism. In the first half of the course, the weekly assignment was for a student to find a news report, delve into its statistical and journalistic strengths and weaknesses (with guidance from us), and give a presentation. Meanwhile, classmates would read the same articles and prepare at least three questions or comments for use in discussion following the student’s report. Week after week, students went to reputable sources such as The New York Times, online science blogs, and Time magazine, to name a few, to search for relevant news stories. They quickly found disparate interpretations of reality as we discussed stories and research studies on topics such as whether high-heel shoes cause knee problems and whether Ecstasy can help veterans cope with stress. One student, a geology major with a love of fashion, zeroed in on a Daily Mail article entitled, “High Heels Are ‘Good’ for You.” She e-mailed us a copy of the article, expressing her intention to question the researchers’ emphasis of a rather surprising discovery: Women who danced in high heels were less likely to have knee problems than those who did not. She argued that that relationship wasn’t expressed in the researchers’ original hypotheses;
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they’d cherry-picked it from the data to sensationalize their results, and the Daily Mail jumped on the bait in the story. We approved the student’s project. Besides the flaw in the study noticed by the student, we urged her to consider another problem we had spotted—namely, the limitations of an observational study in an attempt to establish a causal connection. There might be a simpler explanation for why women with knee arthritis were less likely to have worn highheel shoes than women with no pain: Women who do physically demanding work like scrubbing floors do tend to have knee problems, and what kind of shoes do they tend to wear to work? Certainly not three-and-a-half-inch stilettos. Similarly, women whose knees are in good shape are the ones more likely to venture onto the dance floor in ultra-high heels. The student presented, and the class was able to reach a consensus on what was good and bad in the underlying research, as well as in the reporting. Our expertise was requested occasionally to resolve questions such as “How do we interpret a relative risk?” or “How much detail is appropriate when a reporter cites quantitative results?” Another student began with an article from The New York Times, “Parents’ Financial Support May Not Help College Grades.” Next she found a news report from The Fiscal Times that took the claim one step further: “When Parents Pay for College, Kids’ Grades Could Suffer.” Even more forceful encouragement to stop the tuition checks came from this blog post in Forbes: “Want Your Kids to Succeed? Don’t Pay For Their Education.”
The student was curious as to whether the original study had also made the leap from association to causation. Could the researcher really control for confounding variables like students’ personalities? Wasn’t it possible that parents were less likely to give a financial boost to children who were already very self-motivated— the same sort of children who manage to achieve higher grades? Good questions that all the stories failed to answer. Moreover, they downplayed the more intuitive result that parental aid increases the odds of graduating. Not surprisingly, nobody opted to go with a dud headline like, “Students More Likely To Graduate If They Get Help With Tuition.”
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Most Students Don’t Know When News Is Fake, Stanford Study Finds
BY SUE SHELLENBARGER U P D A T E D N O V. 2 1 , 2 0 1 6 A T 9 : 4 3 P. M .
Preteens and teens may appear dazzlingly fluent, flitting among social-media sites, uploading selfies and texting friends. But they’re often clueless about evaluating the accuracy and trustworthiness of what they find. Some 82% of middle-schoolers couldn’t distinguish between an ad labeled “sponsored content” and a real news story on a website, according to a Stanford University study of 7,804 students from middle school through college. The study, set for release Tuesday, is the biggest so far on how teens evaluate information they find online. Many students judged the credibility of newsy tweets based on how much detail they contained or whether a large photo was attached, rather than on the source. More than two out of three middle-schoolers couldn’t see any valid reason to mistrust a post written by a bank executive arguing that young adults need more financial-planning help. And nearly four in 10 high-school
students believed, based on the headline, that a photo of deformed daisies on a photo-sharing site provided strong evidence of toxic conditions near the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant in Japan, even though no source or location was given for the photo. Facebook Inc. and Alphabet Inc.’s Google are taking steps to prevent sites that disseminate fake news from using their advertising platforms, and Twitter Inc. is moving to curb harassment by users. But that won’t get rid of false or biased information online, which comes from many sources, including deceptive advertising, satirical websites and misleading partisan posts and articles. A growing number of schools are teaching students to be savvy about choosing and believing various information sources, a skill set educators label “media literacy.” A free Stanford social-studies curriculum that teaches students to judge the trustworthiness of historical sources has been downloaded 3.5 million times, says Sam Wineburg, a professor in Stanford University’s Graduate School of Education and the lead author of the study on teens. However, fewer schools now have librarians, who traditionally taught research skills. And media literacy has slipped to the margins in many classrooms, to make room for increased instruction in basic
reading and math skills. Devorah Heitner, author of “Screenwise” and founder of Raising Digital Natives, an Evanston, Ill., provider of consulting services to schools, suggests parents pick up on their children’s interests and help them to find and evaluate news on the topic online. Encourage them to read a variety of sources. For small children, Common Sense Media, a San Francisco nonprofit, lists browsers and search sites that are safe for children, including KidzSearch.com and KidsClick.org. Parents can instill early a healthy skepticism about published reports. Vincent Tran and his wife Christina allow their three children, ages 10, 8 and 6, to research sports, games and other topics that interest them by googling or by asking Siri or Alexa. Mr. Tran, a Web architect, blocks sites he considers inappropriate for his children and doesn’t allow them to use social media. He notices when they have trouble sorting facts from fiction, and “we spend a good deal of time asking them where they get their information,” Mr. Tran says. He and his wife also ask them during family dinners about topics they’ve been exploring, “and hopefully challenge them to think,” he says.
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By middle school, preteens are online 7-1/2 hours a day outside of school, research shows. Many students multitask by texting, reading and watching video at once, hampering the concentration needed to question content and think deeply, says Yalda T. Uhls, a research psychologist at the Children’s Digital Media Center at the University of California, Los Angeles. By age 18, 88% of young adults regularly get news from Facebook and other social media, according to a 2015 study of 1,045 adults ages 18 to 34 by the Media Insight Project. This risks creating an “echo chamber effect,” because social media tends to feed users news items similar to those they’ve read before, says Walter C. Parker, a professor of education at the University of Washington, Seattle. He advises parents to ask children about what they’re reading online, and let them see you reading news from a variety of sources. Try watching several different TV news programs with them, to compare coverage. Teens also can learn MORE WORK & FAMILY COLUMNS basic skills used by Related columns by Sue Shellenbarger professional fact-checkers, Dr. When Your Child Won’t Hug the Relatives December 26, 2017 Wineburg says. Sexual-Harassment Training Gets a Revamp December 19, 2017 Rather than trusting The Tough Job of Playing Well With Colleagues November 28, 2017 the “about” section Step Away From Your Over-Scheduled High School Student November 21, 2017 of a website to learn When Your Company Makes You Queasy November 14, 2017 about it, teach them “lateral reading”— leaving the website almost immediately after landing on it and research the organization or author. Also, explain to teens that a top ranking on Google doesn’t mean an article is trustworthy. The rankings are based on several factors, including popularity. Students should learn to evaluate sources’ reliability based on whether they’re named, independent and wellinformed or authoritative, says
Jonathan Anzalone, assistant director of the Center for News Literacy at Stony Brook University in New York. Posts should cite multiple sources, and the information should be verifiable elsewhere, he says. Talk with teens about information they’ve found online and ask, “Why did you click on that?” says Will Colglazier, a history teacher at Aragon High School in San Mateo, Calif., who is helping test Stanford University teaching materials aimed at remedying the problem. “Follow their train of thought,” inviting them to explain the steps that led them to the website. If their reasoning reveals faulty assumptions or a lack of skepticism, “use that as a teachable moment,” he says. Scott Secor has tried to instill in his three children, ages 20, 18 and 16, a habit of noticing the sources of information they read online and learning about their viewpoint or goals. He encourages them to read deeply before forming an opinion. “A rule of thumb at our house is that if an article on a serious topic is less than 100 words,” the length of some fake-news items, more research is needed, says Mr. Secor, of Raleigh, N.C. He and his wife Laurie also encourage their children to express their views and respect each other’s opinions if they disagree. “The day’s news is a regular conversation topic at the dinner table for us,” Mr. Secor says. Among subjects they discussed during the recent campaign: How much impact would clickbait have on voters’ perceptions?
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5 Ways Teachers Are Fighting Fake News NPRed Published: FEB 16, 2017 · 6:00 AM
As the national attention to fake news and the debate over what to do about it continue, one place many are looking for solutions is in the classroom. Since a recent Stanford study showed that students at practically all grade levels can’t determine fake news from the real stuff, the push to teach media literacy has gained new momentum. The study showed that while students absorb media constantly, they often lack the critical thinking skills needed to tell fake news from the real stuff. Teachers are taking up the challenge to change that. NPR Ed put out a social media call asking how educators are teaching fake news and media literacy, and we got a lot of responses. Here’s a sampling from around the country: Fake news “Simon Says” In Scott Bedley’s version of Simon Says, it’s not those two magic words that keep you in the game, but deciding correctly whether a news story is real or not. To start off the game, Bedley sends his fifth-graders at Plaza Vista School in Irvine, Calif., an article to read on their laptops. He gives them about three minutes to make their decision — they have to read the story carefully, examine its source and use their judgment. Those who think the article is false,
stand up. The “true” believers stay in their seats. Bedley says he’s been trying to teach his students for a while to look carefully at what they’re reading and where it comes from. He’s got a seven-point checklist his students can follow: 1. Do you know who the source is, or was it created by a common or well-known source? Example National Geographic, Discovery, etc. 2. How does it compare to what you already know? 3. Does the information make sense? Do you understand the information? 4. Can you verify that the information agrees with three or more other sources that are also reliable? 5. Have experts in the field been connected to it or authored the information? 6. How current is the information? 7. Does it have a copyright? Subtle changes Bedley also teamed up recently with Todd Flory at Wheatland Elementary School in Wichita, Kan., to do a fake news challenge via Skype. Flory’s fourth-graders chose two real articles and wrote a fake article of their own. Then, they presented them to Bedley’s class in California. The fifth-graders had four minutes to do some extra research based on the presentations, and then they decided which article out
of the three were fake. Most importantly, they had to explain why they thought it was fake. Otherwise, no points. Flory says writing the fake news article was more difficult for his students than they expected because they had to make it believable. “It really hammered home the idea to them that fake news doesn’t have to be too sensational,” he says. “It can be a very subtle change, but that subtle change can have big consequences.” Every Friday, Flory’s class participates in what he calls Genius Hour. His students propose a question to answer through online research. But before they took to the Internet, Flory had to walk his students through the steps: What are reliable and trusted websites? How do you effectively search on the Internet and verify information? He uses Skype to connect his students with researchers and scientists from all over the world. He calls this “authentic research.” “It’s so much more powerful for them to do some of this authentic research when they’re able to hear from a scientist who’s seeing firsthand the effects of climate change,” Flory says. This year’s class got to talk to a penguin scientist.
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Flory says he’s not only teaching his students effective media literacy skills; he is also helping them to be better citizens through global engagement and interaction. Let them eat fake (news) Remember Marie Antoinette and “Let them eat cake” — her famous line about the poor that got her in all that trouble? Thing is, it never happened. Fake news! For Diane Morey and her ninthgraders at Danvers High School in Danvers, Mass., that’s a teachable moment. “The media of the day didn’t have Facebook, Twitter or partisan websites,” Morey says. “But they did have pamphlets.” She shows her class cartoons and pamphlets from the French Revolutionary period that criticized Antoinette, and then discusses the conclusions that were made from those sources. She also includes a primary source: a letter written by Antoinette. Morey says history is rich with examples of fake news, and since source analysis is the core of her lesson plans, she doesn’t need a textbook. “We don’t study [history] to memorize Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI,” she explains. “We’re studying this because we can see this happening in the current-day political climate.” Morey encourages students to bring in examples of articles from today’s news that don’t ring true. “Once you expose it to them,” she
says, “it’s like a game for them, seeing, ‘Hey, I’m not sure I can trust this.’ “ Extra layers For 13 years, Larry Ferlazzo has been teaching kids who are learning English how to read and write. Now, he’s adding another layer: helping them figure out if what they’re reading is true. Ferlazzo teaches at Luther Burbank High School in Sacramento, Calif. He’s also a blogger and journalist. Last month, he wrote a lesson plan on addressing fake news to English language learners (ELLs), which was published in The New York Times. He says media literacy is especially important for ELLs for two reasons. First, they’re not fluent in the language they’re reading, adding an extra level of difficulty in deciding what to believe. On top of that, false or exaggerated news about immigration could have a major impact on their lives. His lesson starts off with a few examples of reliable and fake news. Then, some basic journalism stuff: Students identify the different parts of the news, from the “lede” to quotations. They enter all that into a diagram on paper so they have a visual representation of what they’re reading. That diagram eventually becomes a guide for students to write their own fake news lede that they can share with other classmates or post on a class blog. Media consumers and contributors In 2015, Spencer Brayton and his colleague Natasha Casey revamped a media literacy course for students at Blackburn College in Carlinville, Ill. Brayton says the key
is the critical approach. “Students come in expecting that we’re going to lecture,” Brayton explains. “But we have them think about certain power structures in how information is produced and how it reaches them. If they’re going to understand how they’re going to take it in, then they have to know how the news is going to be produced.” To take the class, students need a Twitter account. From the very first week, they are asked to follow five to 10 accounts on Twitter that promote media and information literacy, like Media Literacy Now or Renee Hobbs. As they follow these posts and add additional ones, the goal is that they’ll start to recognize fake news and other biases or viewpoints in media. By the end of the course, Brayton says students begin to see themselves not only as creators of information, but as credible sources of information too. The Twitter assignments encourage his students to engage with social media -retweeting, following and commenting — which Brayton says helps his students see how they play a role in spreading information to other media consumers. That means they have to take what they share more seriously. “In looking at this issue, people seem to want a quick solution to fake news, but I’m not sure there is a solution (at least an easy one),” Brayton writes in an email. “Students need to recognize that these skills and ideas need to stay with them through adulthood, but that’s easier said than done — we all fall into this trap.”
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7 Tips To Increase Your Online Media Literacy Is your BS detector optimized to deal with the new realities of democratic media? Every day, when we take a ride on our favorite search engines or tune in to our favorite news sites, we seem confident that we know how to spot the good stuff and weed out the nonsense. But do we? Here’s a guide to help you optimize your BS detector to deal with the new realities of democratic media. 1. Give your trust to sources that earn it
3. Suss out Internet hoaxes
6. Other vetting tools
When my relatives contact me about a chain letter in their in-box – like the purported “dry run” by Muslim terrorists on an AirTran flight or fabrications about social security taxes – I direct them to Snopes and tell them to check for themselves. More often than not, Snopes has vetted and debunked the account.
The Internet may be a swamp of misinformation, but it’s also the most incredible fact-checking apparatus ever invented. Some tools that should be in your arsenal:
4. Use your social network Crowdsource your fact-checking. If you’re on Twitter (and chances are you should be), don’t be shy about asking your followers, “Is this true?” instead of just passing along something from an unknown source. Chances are that a member of your posse will do some sleuthing and give it a thumbs up or down.
A new search engine, Aardvark, has put this formula to good use. What’s important is not whether Enter a query and Aardvark will news or information outlets ping your social network to find occasionally slip up –- we all do –- the answer to your question. but whether they have mechanisms 5. Judge the journalism in place to prevent and correct mistakes. In other words, minor At the nonprofit news network blips notwithstanding, are they NewsTrust, a small team offers earning our trust? “an information credibility filter, news literacy tools and a 2. Get out of your bubble civic engagement network.” A Avoid the media echo chamber, bipartisan community of news which exposes you to only a evaluators makes judgments to narrow prism of views and determine whether a news story discourse. A good way to burst exhibits bias, makes unverified your isolation bubble: Broaden factual claims and provides your online diet by bookmarking needed context and sourcing. overseas news sites. Anyone can participate by using the site’s review tools.
• Campaign Desk from Columbia Journalism Review critiques media coverage of politics and policy each weekday, separating spin from substance. • Factchecked.org provides educators and students with a framework for analyzing information and avoiding deception in the media. • FactCheck.org, its sister site, run by the Annenberg Public Policy Center, focuses on political bias in the news. 7. Commit a random act of journalism To really understand what goes into creating a story, try it yourself. Next time you’re at a public event, be the media: Whip out your favorite mobile device, take some photos or video, add some text and zap it off to a media sharing site. Next time you come across a similar media report, you’ll likely have a deeper understanding of what goes into the process. And maybe a more sympathetic outlook. JD Lasica, founder of Socialmedia.biz, is now co-founder of the cruise discovery engine Cruiseable.
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students and undergraduates. She has lectured throughout the country, from, among other venues, Willamette University in Oregon to Dartmouth College in New Hampshire to the University of Illinois and the University of Notre Dame. She conducted master classes in writing at the University of Mississippi and lectured on federal regulation at Colby College and George Washington University. She twice has been a guest lecturer for the Vermont Council on the Humanities and was writer in residence at Grinnell College, Salem College and Austin College.
Cindy Skrzycki is an award-
Regulators: The Anonymous Power Brokers Who Shape Your Life,” that has been adopted nationally in law schools and others institutions teaching public policy.
She is a 2017 recipient of the Chancellor’s Award for Teaching that she received for exceptional teaching of non-fiction writing and journalism in the English Department. She also received in 2012 the Tina & David Bellet Teaching Excellence Award, an annual award given to two members of the faculty.
Before joining The Post, she was an associate business editor at U.S. News & World Report, specializing in transportation issues, and a Washington correspondent for The Fort Worth Star-Telegram, where she covered the gamut of business topics, including the Federal Reserve. She also worked in the Washington bureau of the Fairchild News Service, covering Congress and the steel industry, and was a business writer for The Buffalo Evening News.
winning, full-time senior lecturer in the English Department at the University of Pittsburgh and is a freelance journalist for numerous national publications.
She was on staff at The Washington Post for 18 years, covering federal regulatory issues, management, and technology. She has a special expertise in the business of federal regulation, law and lobbying and wrote a weekly column called “The Regulators” for more than a decade. She is the author of the book, “The
She was Commencement speaker at Mount Aloysius College, where she was awarded an honorary doctorate degree and where she twice conducted three-day seminars in writing for high school
Skrzycki was the 2017 William H. Fitzpatrick Chair of Political Science lecturer at Canisius College, joining Paul Farmer, Karl Rove and Presidents Jimmy Carter and Harry S. Truman who received the award. Born in Buffalo, N.Y., she is an honors graduate of Canisius College, where she was editor of the student newspaper, The Griffin, and a member of the DiGamma Honor Society. She is a former three-term member of the board of trustees of Canisius College. She holds a master’s degree in public affairs and journalism from the American University, Washington, D.C.
Mount Aloysius College — Since 1853 Founded in 1853 by Sisters of Mercy from Dublin, Ireland, Mount Aloysius College is an accredited, comprehensive, degree-granting institution offering Associate, Baccalaureate, and select Graduate Programs where women and men of diverse cultural, educational, and religious backgrounds optimize their aptitudes and acquire skills for meaningful careers. Mount Aloysius graduates are job ready, technology ready, and community ready.
Mount Aloysius College is located on a beautiful 193-acre campus in Cresson, nestled in the scenic Southern Allegheny Mountains of west-central Pennsylvania. Convenient and accessible from U.S. Route 22; the College’s setting is rural but within easy access from State College, Altoona, Johnstown and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
Mount Aloysius has earned accolades as a Best Value College, a College of Distinction, a Catholic College of Distinction, and a Military Friendly Institution. The College’s Nursing Division is ranked sixth among Pennsylvania’s largest and most prestigious nursing programs. The College is accredited by Middle States Commission on Higher Education, the Conference for Mercy Higher Education, and by 12 separate profession-specific accreditation bodies.
Four Traditions
Mercy Tradition
Catholic Tradition
We cherish and revere the charism and example of the Sisters of Mercy, our founders and inspiration. We make concrete the Mercy Values — mercy in all relationships among students, faculty, staff, and administration, justice in all our endeavors, with hospitality and service to all at Mount Aloysius and in the larger community in which we live. In pursuit of these values, our faculty and staff personally engage, care for, and mentor each student. In practice as well as in word, we help all our students — including those facing significant challenges — to pursue their objectives.
surmount economic and educational hurdles that inhibit their aspirations for productive and fulfilling professions. To this end, we recognize that responsibility is shared across the Mount Aloysius community. Our faculty acknowledge and promote the truth that learning for career and for life takes place both in and outside classroom settings. Our staff give daily support to students, enhancing the process that brings them to their graduation day. We require service of our students so that they will recognize that educational attainment and self-giving are inseparable components of the good life. We rejoice in the assistance and loyalty of trustees, alumni, and the larger community who contribute in multiple ways to our mission, modeling the conviction that fulfillment ensues as a result of generous living.
We affirm and embrace the Catholic heritage of higher education, seeking knowledge, and communicating truth from its manifold sources, and welcome people of all faiths. (60% of the student body comes from other traditions.)
Liberal Arts Tradition We challenge and empower students in all programs to attain the goals of a liberal arts education — character development, critical thinking, communication skills, a passion for continual learning — and to become responsible, contributing citizens.
Mount Aloysius Tradition We honor and sustain the Mount Aloysius legacy of being an “engine of opportunity” for all students, helping them