A Fragile Trust | Jayson Blair Plagiarism Scandal | Independent Lens Film Credits A Film by Samantha Grant Co-Produced by Brittney Shepherd Edited by Richard Levien Music by Justin Melland Director/Producer/Editor Samantha Grant Associate Producer Jessica Jones Cinematography by Singeli Agnew Jason Blalock Charlotte Buchen Julie Caine Joshua Fisher Joelle Jaffe Stephanie Johnes Mark Rublee Austin De Besche Additional Camera Todd Dayton Brian Pollack Winnie Wong Alexandra Cummings Title Design and Motion Graphics Mike Nicholson Hand Drawn Animations by Stuart Langfield Assistant Editor Jason Sussberg Additional Graphics Ryan Padgett Jake Mendez Color Finishing by Gary Coates Sound Edit and Mix Philip Perkins Online Editor Heather Weaver Production Assistants Savanna Salter Creative Advisors Jon Else Deborah Hoffman Story Consultants Karen Everett New Doc Editing Ezra Edelman Suze Allen Jean-Philippe Boucicaut Adam Keker Jamie Meltzer Actor Sinclair Swan Transcribers Sophia Emigh Jayesh Parmar Legal Justine Jacob Richard J. Bookkeeping Juliet Mason Carol Wallace
Fake News Or Real? How To Self-Check The News And Get The Facts : All Tech Considered Guido Rosa/Getty Images/Ikon Images Fake news stories can have real-life consequences. On Sunday, police said a man with a rifle who claimed to be "self-investigating" a baseless online conspiracy theory entered a Washington, D.C., pizzeria and fired the weapon inside the restaurant. So, yes, fake news is a big problem. These stories have gotten a lot of attention, with headlines claiming Pope Francis endorsed Donald Trump in November's election and sites like American News sharing misleading stories or taking quotes out of context. Stopping the proliferation of fake news isn't just the responsibility of the platforms used to spread it. The idea is that people should have a fundamental sense of media literacy. Sam Wineburg, a professor of education and history at Stanford and the lead author of the study, said a solution is for all readers to read like fact checkers. That's the framework for professionals, but there are ways for everyone to do a bit of fact checking themselves.
A decent breakdown of all things real and fake news. Fake Facebook News Sites to Avoid As Facebook and now Google face scrutiny for promoting fake news stories, Melissa Zimdars, a communication and media professor from Merrimack College in Massachusetts, has compiled a handy list of websites you should think twice about trusting. “Below is a list of fake, false, regularly misleading, and otherwise questionable ‘news’ organizations that are commonly shared on Facebook and other social media sites,” Zimdars explains. “Many of these websites rely on ‘outrage’ by using distorted headlines and decontextualized or dubious information in order to generate likes, shares, and profits.” (Click here to see the list.) Be warned: Zimdars’s list is expansive in scope, and stretches beyond the bootleg sites (many of them headquartered in Macedonia) that write fake news for the sole reason of selling advertisements. She also includes some helpful tips for spotting fake news: • Watch out if known/reputable news sites are not also reporting on the story.
Save The Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus Help Save The ENDANGERED From EXTINCTION! The Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus Rare photo of the elusive tree octopus The Pacific Northwest tree octopus (Octopus paxarbolis) can be found in the temperate rainforests of the Olympic Peninsula on the west coast of North America. An intelligent and inquisitive being (it has the largest brain-to-body ratio for any mollusk), the tree octopus explores its arboreal world by both touch and sight. Reaching out with one of her eight arms, each covered in sensitive suckers, a tree octopus might grab a branch to pull herself along in a form of locomotion called tentaculation; or she might be preparing to strike at an insect or small vertebrate, such as a frog or rodent, or steal an egg from a bird's nest; or she might even be examining some object that caught her fancy, instinctively desiring to manipulate it with her dexterous limbs (really deserving the title "sensory organs" more than mere "limbs",) in order to better know it. Why It's Endangered
How to Spot Fake News Fake news is nothing new. But bogus stories can reach more people more quickly via social media than what good old-fashioned viral emails could accomplish in years past. Concern about the phenomenon led Facebook and Google to announce that they’ll crack down on fake news sites, restricting their ability to garner ad revenue. Not all of the misinformation being passed along online is complete fiction, though some of it is. A lot of these viral claims aren’t “news” at all, but fiction, satire and efforts to fool readers into thinking they’re for real. We’ve long encouraged readers to be skeptical of viral claims, and make good use of the delete key when a chain email hits their inboxes. In 2008, we tried to get readers to rid their inboxes of this kind of garbage. Those all still hold true, but fake stories — as in, completely made-up “news” — has grown more sophisticated, often presented on a site designed to look (sort of) like a legitimate news organization. Consider the source.
Blue Feed, Red Feed What is this? Recent posts from sources where the majority of shared articles aligned “very liberal” (blue, on the left) and “very conservative” (red, on the right) in a large Facebook study. In 2015, the journal Science published a research paper by Facebook scientists (Bakshy, Eytan; Messing, Solomon; Adamic, Lada, 2015, “Replication Data for: Exposure to Ideologically Diverse News and Opinion on Facebook”, Harvard Dataverse, V2) which looked at how a subset of the social network’s users reacted to the news appearing in their feeds. For six months, Facebook tracked and analyzed the content shared by 10.1 million of its users (who were anonymized). For a site appearing in the Journal’s red feed, a majority of the articles shared from it were classified in the study as “very conservatively aligned.” To appear in the Journal’s blue and red feeds, posts must have at least 100 shares, and come from sources with at least 100,000 followers. No. No. No.
RationalWiki 10 Ways to Spot a Fake News Article - EasyBib Blog For many of us, 2016 is going down as a year to forget. Election upsets, Zika, the Syrian crisis, and unfortunately tons of fake news about all of the above and everything in between. Denzel Washington was recently quoted as saying, “If you don’t read the newspaper, you’re uninformed. If you do read the newspaper, you’re misinformed.” 1. Links and citations allow us to easily access, read, and explore more about the information found in the article. Many big name news sites, such as CNN, do not include links or citations, but other sites do. 2. An article without an author’s name is another red flag. 3. Do a Google search on the author’s name to find their occupation and locate other articles that the author has composed. 4. On the top or bottom of most websites, you should see a section titled “About Us.” 5. Authors tend to read and re-read their articles numerous times prior to posting. 6. Copy and paste a quote from the article into Google’s search bar. 7. 8. 9. 10. References:
for Schools | AllSides Preparing students to participate thoughtfully in democracy - and in life. Students need to learn how to sort through mass media and social networks, think critically about the issues, and engage with each other in a healthy and positive way, even when there are differences in opinions and backgrounds. AllSides for Schools helps educators teach these valuable lessons and skills. With its unique focus on maintaining healthy relationships and revealing multiple points of view across the political spectrum, it also avoids the potential problems around bias or disrespecting individual beliefs. Let's teach the next generation how to see diverse perspectives, value differences and benefit from everyone’s best ideas. Contact Us to Sign-Up See Overview of School Program Elections and Relationships The climate for elections and political issues is so divisive, how can classrooms discuss hot-button issues effectively and with mutual understanding? Relationships First Dictionary Term Lesson Plan
How To Spot Fake News Critical thinking is a key skill in media and information literacy, and the mission of libraries is to educate and advocate its importance. Discussions about fake news has led to a new focus on media literacy more broadly, and the role of libraries and other education institutions in providing this. When Oxford Dictionaries announced post-truth was Word of the Year 2016, we as librarians realise action is needed to educate and advocate for critical thinking – a crucial skill when navigating the information society. IFLA has made this infographic with eight simple steps (based on FactCheck.org’s 2016 article How to Spot Fake News) to discover the verifiability of a given news-piece in front of you. Download, print, translate, and share – at home, at your library, in your local community, and on social media networks. The more we crowdsource our wisdom, the wiser the world becomes. Download the infographic Translations
Fake News Antidote: Teaching Kids To Discern Fact From Fiction : NPR Ed By now, you've probably heard about one very real consequence of fake news — the infamous "pizzagate" conspiracy theory that ended with Edgar Welch, 28, firing a real gun inside a real Washington, D.C., pizzeria filled with real people. When The New York Times later asked Welch what he thought when he realized there were no child slaves inside the restaurant, as one fake news story had led him to believe, he responded: "The intel on this wasn't 100 percent." Welch isn't the only one struggling to tell fact from fiction in this digital age. "How do they become prepared to make the choices about what to believe, what to forward, what to post to their friends," Wineburg asked on NPR's All Things Considered, "when they've been given no practice in school?" And he's right. "Like a flu in the winter" "The question that many of you asked on your annotation of pizzagate was 'Why would anyone start a rumor?' Hunt teaches U.S. and Virginia government. The students' first test comes from Facebook.