Looking for Media Literacy Lessons? Check Out These Resources. Yellow Journalism: The “Fake News” of the 19th Century. Fake news is not new | News, Sports, Jobs - Journal News. For those of you who may think “fake news” is a new phenomenon, you are mistaken. One of the prime examples of long time “fake news” for the month of February is the Ground Hog Day’s prognosticating varmint, Punxsutawney Phil. The contrived event surrounding that town and ground hog was started way back in 1887. (In full disclosure, my deadline for this column was before the Ground Hog Day prediction for 2018.) That particular “false news” has put that Pennsylvania town and a cute furry animal on the world map at least for one day a year.
It’s a day where visitors jam local hotels and inns (paying outrageous special event rates) to watch grown men dressed in tuxedos act as if what they are doing is the best thing since sliced bread. It is not even that “Punxsutawney Phil” knows what he/she is doing. But Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania was not even the only Pennsylvania town to provide “fake news”. Thorpe’s wife, who may have been the LaVar Ball of her day, created a huge “fake news” story. Casey Seiler: Fake news Civil War edition. Imagine a world in which partisan hack journalists gin up a phony scandal in order to troll their political opponents. Crazy, right? Then imagine that their disinformation campaign manages to infect the public discourse of the nation for more than a century, contributing to several generations of human misery. And alas, they were New Yorkers. Thank you for signing up for the Daily Brief newsletter!
Timesunion Get Unlimited Digital Access this month! When you sign up for the Daily Brief newsletter Everything you need to know to start your day. Or want to get Unlimited Digital Access? The scandal in question was the publication of a pamphlet that hit the kiosks of New York City in December 1863, clad in an autumn-orange cover and bearing the title "Miscegenation: The Theory of the Blending of the Races, Applied to the American White Man and the Negro. " "The miscegenetic or mixed races are much superior, mentally, physically, and morally to those pure or unmixed," the pamphlet stated. Believe It or Not? At West Point, Annual Pillow Fight Becomes Weaponized. For generations, freshmen cadets at the United States Military Academy have marked the end of a grueling summer of training with a huge nighttime pillow fight that is billed as a harmless way to blow off steam and build class spirit. But this year the fight on the West Point, N.Y., campus turned bloody as some cadets swung pillowcases packed with hard objects, thought to be helmets, that split lips, broke at least one bone, dislocated shoulders and knocked cadets unconscious.
The brawl at the publicly funded academy, where many of the Army’s top leaders are trained, left 30 cadets injured, including 24 with concussions, according to West Point. In interviews, cadets who asked that their names not be used for fear of repercussions in West Point’s strictly controlled culture, said the fight had left one cadet with a broken leg and dislocated shoulders in others. One cadet was knocked unconscious and taken away in an ambulance and had not returned to school, they said. No, You Don’t Need to Post a Facebook Copyright Status. A Tarantula Isn’t Lost and Isn’t Real. “I don’t think this is a harmful situation,” said Tim Wong, the technical director of M&M Pest Control, a Manhattan company with, its website says, “20 years of pest management experience.” First of all, as Mr. Wong explained, tarantulas, like most of their spider brethren, are nocturnal.
Moreover, he went on, “They don’t prey on people.” “I think it’s kind of funny that they even put a sign up,” he added. “The odds of finding it are small at this point — very, very small. And the only time that anyone would be in danger is if they actually tried to catch it.” Such heroism will not be necessary. “I always see those signs for missing dogs and cats taped up on posts; I thought, ‘What’s the most absurd poster I could come up with?’ The man, who refused to provide his name, said he lived in the neighborhood and worked as a, er, web and graphic designer. Pig Rescues Goat, and the Video Is Really Cute, but Totally Faked. It seemed too adorable to be fake, but it was too good to be true. On Sept. 19 a 30-second video appeared on YouTube, depicting a baby goat that had become stuck in the pond of a petting zoo and that was heroically rescued with a helpful nudge from a pig that swam out to it.
Within hours the video had been posted around the Web; it had been shared with the Twitter followers of Time magazine and Ellen DeGeneres; and it had been broadcast on NBC’s “Today” show and its “Nightly News” program, ABC’s “Good Morning America” and Fox News, where the “Fox & Friends” co-host Brian Kilmeade said of it, “You couldn’t do this at Warner Brothers as a cartoon and make it seem more realistic.” But the video was thoroughly staged. It was created for a new Comedy Central series, “Nathan for You,” with the help of some 20 crew members, including animal trainers, scuba divers and humane officers, and required the fabrication of a plastic track to guide the pig to the goat (which was never in jeopardy). Mr. Selfie/shark Refute. More people have died from selfies than shark attacks this year. A 66-year-old Japanese tourist has died, and his travel companion has been injured, after falling down stairs while attempting to take a selfie at the Taj Mahal.
The man's death raises the selfie-related death toll this year — to 12. To put that in perspective, in 2015 there have so far been eight deaths caused by shark attacks. Image: Donte Neal, Mashable It sounds like a joke, but unfortunately it isn't: The deaths are a tragic reminder to travelers that focusing on a phone screen instead of unfamiliar surroundings is not safe. Four of the selfie deaths this year, like the tourist, identified as Hideto Ueda, were caused by falling. The next leading cause of deaths involving selfies was being hit or injured by trains, either because the individual was taking trying to get a photo with a train or because the photo they wanted involved getting on dangerous equipment. Why the News Isn't Really the News [Epipheo.TV] How to choose your news - Damon Brown. How false news can spread - Noah Tavlin.
Sorting the Real Sandy Photos From the Fakes. With Hurricane Sandy approaching the New York metro area, the nation's eyes are turning to its largest city. Photos of storms and flooding are popping up all over Twitter, and while many are real, some of them -- especially the really eye-popping ones -- are fake. This post, which will be updated over the next couple of days, is an effort to sort the real from the unreal.
It's a photograph verification service, you might say, or a pictorial investigation bureau. If you see a picture that looks fishy, send it to me at alexis.madrigal[at]gmail.com. If you like this sort of thing, you should also visit istwitterwrong.tumblr.com, which is just cataloging the fakes. The fakes come in three varieties: 1) Real photos that were taken long ago, but that pranksters reintroduce as images of Sandy, 2) Photoshopped images that are straight up fake, and 3) The combination of the first two: old, Photoshopped pictures being trotted out again.
And ... it's legit! So the image is most likely a real one. Post-truth | Definition of post-truth in English by Oxford Dictionaries. Unit: Facing Ferguson: News Literacy in a Digital Age. What is the role of journalism in a democratic society, and how can we become responsible consumers and producers of news and information in the digital age? On the afternoon of August 9, 2014, Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager, was shot to death in a confrontation with Darren Wilson, a white police officer in Ferguson, Mo.
Within a week, the shooting became a flashpoint for a national discussion about race, policing, and justice in the United States. Using Ferguson as a case study, students will explore the media coverage and the protests that followed—driven to a large degree by social media—and learn to become informed and effective civic participants in today’s digital landscape. Learning Goals Students will be able to: Investigate the choices and challenges facing journalists as they report on a story, including the importance of verification, sourcing, and other journalistic practices and standards. School Library Journal. When teachers and administrators prod us to address this “new and urgent” concern, let us remind them that we’ve been doing that, and so much more, all along.
Have you heard the news? We have a new four-letter word featuring an “F” and a “K” in our lexicon: It is F-A-K-E. The 2016 Presidential election campaign made fake news one of the hottest topics in—ahem—the news. Shortly after President Trump’s inauguration, “alternative facts” stole the limelight for a brief period, but the fascination with fake news persists. Our focus on fake news, “alternative facts,” and general media mendacity distracts us from a very real educational challenge: teaching students the skills and dispositions that make them careful and thorough researchers.
This is hard work, and there are no easy recipes to facilitate the process. For those who are not in education, the interest in fake news exploded during the 2016 presidential election campaign. UNESCO's Five Laws of Media and Information Literacy. School Library Journal. Critical thinking is more important than ever. As part of our popular series on technology in the education space, our panelists will cover how to vet information and establish best practices for students to manage the digital firehose, and consider perspective and bias.View On Demand Presented by: ISTE, Mackin Educational Resources, Rosen Publishing Group, Credo and School Library JournalEvent Date & Time: Thursday, March 16th, 2017, 3:00 PM - 4:00 PM ET / 12:00 PM - 1:00 PM PT Our popular series returns with all-new presentations on technology in the education space, from helping struggling readers to sorting fact from fiction when it comes to digital information.
Led by top practitioners in the field, these one-hour free programs will offer practical insight into these hot topics in tech, with implications for schools and libraries. Session #1: Information Literacy in the Age of Fake News Critical thinking is more important than ever. Panelists Moderator. Media Literacy Clearinghouse | Frank W. Baker. FactCheck.org - A Project of The Annenberg Public Policy Center. Fact-checking U.S. politics | PolitiFact. The definitive fact-checking site and reference source for urban legends, folklore, myths, rumors, and misinformation. School Library Journal. Laura Gardner, 2016 SLJ School Librarian of the Year finalist, updates her lesson plans for the era of fake news. Last week, a new study from Stanford University revealed that many students are inept at discerning fact from opinion when reading articles online.
The report, combined with the spike in fake and misleading news during the 2016 election, has school librarians, including me, rethinking how we teach evaluation of online sources to our students. How can we educate our students to evaluate the information they find online when so many adults are sharing inaccurate articles on social media? While social media isn’t the only reason for the surge in fake news over the last 10 years, it’s certainly making it harder for information consumers of every age to sort through fact and fiction. Rethinking how we teach evaluation Teaching evaluation of information has never been so critical, and I’m thinking fast while updating my unit before relaunching it in January.
Read laterally. Center for News Literacy – Bringing crucial critical thinking skills for the 21st century to teachers and students. Truth, truthiness, triangulation: A news literacy toolkit for a “post-truth” world. We were guaranteed a free press, We were not guaranteed a neutral or a true press. We can celebrate the journalistic freedom to publish without interference from the state. We can also celebrate our freedom to share multiple stories through multiple lenses. But it has always been up to the reader or viewer to make the reliability and credibility decisions. It is up to the reader or viewer to negotiate truth. News literacy is complicated. In our attempts to discern truth, we are confounded by a 24/7 news cycle. News hits us across media platforms and devices, in a landscape populated by all degrees of professional journalists and citizen journalists and satirists and hoaxers and folks paid or personally moved to write intentionally fake news.
Even news that is vetted by editors and publishers sometimes emerges from that process a bit processed, perhaps leaning in a particular direction. And word choice itself is connected to truth. On news literacy Our kids need new types of filters. Checkology® — News Literacy Project. Home — News Literacy Project.