SILHA
2020 SILHA SPRING FORUM
Addressing the impact of fact-checking and misinformation on journalism. BY SCOTT MEMMEL
THE SILHA CENTER’S SPRING FORUM QUICKLY moved online when the
University of Minnesota concluded that in-person events would cease during the pandemic. On April 27, 2020, via Zoom, Silha Center Director Jane Kirtley welcomed more than 70 attendees to the Forum, which featured Barbara Allen, the director of college programming for the Poynter Institute of Media Studies (Poynter), a nonprofit journalism school and research organization based in St. Petersburg, Fla. Allen’s presentation, titled “What the Fact? How fact-checking is ballooning, its impact on journalism—and how not to be fooled yourself,” focused on the increasingly important role of journalists and fact-checkers around the world. She offered tips, recommendations, and tools for how everyone, but especially journalists, can spot and address mis- and disinformation online. Journalists, journalism students, and community members from around the country (and Iceland!) attended the forum, sponsored by the Silha Center for the Study of Media Ethics and Law and the Minnesota Pro Chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ). Allen provided a brief history of fact-checking, including the founding of fact-checking website Snopes in 1994 and PolitiFact, an independent fact-checking organization under Poynter, in 2007. She described the International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN), a unit of Poynter launched in September 2015. According to Allen, the IFCN created a series of standards that fact checkers around the world should follow. The organization works with 74 signatories, according to Allen, “to make sure that
they’re doing the best kind of fact checking that you can possibly do.” Allen then talked about her current work with MediaWise Campus Correspondents, a group of 11 students from around the United States trained by Poynter to spot “fact from fiction online.” According to Allen, since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, the students have been conducting training across the country at every different university that will have them.” She provided a series of practical ways to spot in mis- and disinformation online, as well as tools to help readers trust information. The questions, which followed the journalistic 5 Ws, included: ❙ Who posted this? What motivations might they have? ❙ What evidence did they include to back up [this claim]? ❙ When was the information posted or updated? ❙ Where is it posted? ❙ How is the information being shared? Allen then described two really powerful tools favored by fact checkers including a reverse image search—uploading an image to a search engine to get more information about the image—ideally where it was originally posted and, potentially, who owns it. The second tool is “lateral reading,” which was developed by the Stanford History Education Group, a research and development group aiming to improve education around the United States. Allen played a video in which MediaWise ambassador and New York Times bestselling author John Green explained that lateral reading means “looking elsewhere for additional information. When you’re on a new website,
instead of staying put and taking their word for it, you should just leave, open a new tab [on your browser], and start looking for more information. That’s called lateral reading because instead of moving up and down [on a single webpage,] you’re moving from tab to tab.” Allen concluded by asserting that “a lot of the people that you may run into online that you have disagreements with . . . don’t have the luxury of spending their days in a newsroom being immersed in the world of the importance of fact checking the veracity of open records.” However, she argued that journalists, news organizations, and others “aren’t always doing a great job providing that understanding.” Allen therefore provided a “call to action [to] kindly start a conversation around the myths and disinformation you see online, which is often centered around the media or can be brought into a conversation about how much good the media does as its employees work to find out if [information online] is true or not.” She continued, “Remember, non-journalists don’t see how hard we work, how much we care, [and] the intricacies of our jobs. Now more than ever, journalists have to tell our stories and we have to help our fact-checking brethren correct mis- and disinformation.” Allen added, “Doing so is going to help our communities make better decisions and have better information. In short, bad actors are trying to pry open the chamber of chaos with misand disinformation and together we can slam it shut.” Silha Center activities, including the Spring Ethics Forum, are made possible by a generous endowment from the late Otto and Helen Silha.
HUBBARD SCHOOL OF JOURNALISM AND MASS COMMUNICATION
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