“Fake news,” misinformation, and political bias: Teaching news literacy in the 21st century

ABSTRACT

In an era where claims of “fake news” abound and more people turn to social media for their daily updates, knowing how to find and critically appraise information is more important than ever. The workshop discussed in this article aims to provide college students with the news literacy needed to make educated decisions about the information they find online.

Courses: This workshop is relevant for courses that address the evaluation of information, the value of different sources, the role played by personal biases, and the provenance of ideas, including Introduction to Communication, Public Speaking, Persuasive Communication, Health Communication, and Media Studies.

Objectives: This activity aims to help students compare and contrast the different meanings of “fake news” and misinformation; identify the various biases that impact selection and interpretation of information; develop a set of guidelines with which to evaluate information quality; and apply evaluation guidelines to contemporary news items.

ORCID

Jennifer L. Bonnet http://orcid.org/0000-0002-4075-5630

Judith E. Rosenbaum http://orcid.org/0000-0003-1295-5325

Notes

1 Penn State University’s (PSU) slides provided inspiration for our workshop (of note, their content grew out of a session held at the University of Minnesota–Duluth). Building on this foundation, we omitted some original material in order to design new content for our local audience. While maintaining the general organization of ideas created by PSU, our workshop included modified introductory poll questions, a revised approach to defining “fake news,” and additional, relevant resources that demonstrated the many expressions of “fake news” (step 2). We developed step 3 to align with our focus on news literacy, and created the “which one is real” headline activity to give attendees additional practice wrestling with assumptions of credibility (step 4). To expand on notions of 21st-century news artifacts, we added a meme discussion in step 4. Lastly, we inserted unique examples into our discussion of cognitive biases (step 5), created step 6 to engage students in their own ideas of information assessment, and transformed the activity in step 7 to focus on locally relevant content.

2 The most recent version can be found here: https://www.adfontesmedia.com

3 Examples of relevant, short videos on confirmation bias can be found here: https://larryferlazzo.edublogs.org/2018/02/20/the-best-videos-explaining-confirmation-bias A list of cognitive biases can be found here: https://www.kqed.org/lowdown/26829/quiz-how-good-are-you-at-detecting-bias-with-lesson-plan

4 See http://libguides.library.umaine.edu/fakenews/identification