FAKE NEWS THE WORKSHOP Craig Finlay Scholarly Communication

FAKE NEWS: THE WORKSHOP Craig Finlay, Scholarly Communication Librarian at the Franklin D. Schurz Library

■ This presentation will focus on teaching students to critically analyze fake news articles. ■ We have to keep in mind, however, that, for some, “fake news” has an entirely different meaning: Any news stories they don’t like. Sourse: Knight Foundation Gallup Poll, American Views: Trust, Media and Democracy, 2018 ■ Today, President Trump is unveiling his “Fake News Awards, ” which will likely focus on any media outlets who have published unflattering stories about his administration.

Fake news is now an ad-hominem attack to counter negative press

“I think one of the greatest of all terms I’ve come up with is ‘fake. ' I guess other people have used it, perhaps over the years, but I’ve never noticed it. ” President Trump to Mike Huckabee, October 7, 2017. As of December 2017, Trump had tweeted about FAKE NEWS over 150 times.

This puts information literacy on the defensive ■ Rather than starting with examples of actual false news stories and tactics for recognizing them, we need to begin with a debate over what the term actually means ■ That negative press is not fake news if it is factual reporting ■ That fake news is a term that should be reserved for factually false news stories ■ We can do this by running both negative reporting and actual fake news through the same vetting checklists, some of which we’ll explore here today.

First: game.

Who can identify this?

Now, the idea of paid protesters has entered the popular consciousness For an in-depth examination of the Austin bus story, see: How Fake News Goes Viral: A Case Study by Sapna Maheshwari, New York Times.

So, the question: Why is this idea so attractive to people on both sides? And why immediately believe a random tweet or a Craigslist ad, both of which can be made by anyone?

Any lesson plan about fake news should talk about confirmation bias ■ Why Facts Don’t Change our Minds - Elizabeth Kolbert, The New Yorker ■ Why should people believe they’re not susceptible to fake news if they don’t know the mechanism behind it? ■ An academic discussion about the psychology behind confirmation bias and motivated reasoning can help students distance themselves from it. Theoretically.

Three slides from the fake news presentation in my class at IU South Bend:

Confirmation Bias ■ “The tendency to interpret new evidence as confirmation of one's existing beliefs or theories. ” ■ In short – we accept things as true if they support our beliefs. Worse, we accept them without question. ■ Everyone is susceptible to this. It might be the most powerful bias at work our daily lives. ■ Evidence that does not support our beliefs is either dismissed as wrong or an aberration. ■ How it works is this – “I’m right. Therefore anything that disagrees with me is wrong. ”

Examples of confirmation bias ■ Samuel Goerge Morton – Measured skull volume with sand – Believed Caucasians had the largest brains, Africans the smallest. ■ Phrenology – the “science” of bumps on the head. – There were no shortage of skulls to fit the narrative. Ones that didn’t were dismissed as aberrations. ■ Astrology -- if you believe that Mercury in retrograde means things are goings to go wrong, you’ll notice things that go wrong. Accept them as proof. If things don’t go wrong, you’ll think, “Whew, dodged a bullet. ” – And really, worrying that things will go wrong because of a tiny planet 100 million miles away might just make you mess something up.

How does this affect us? ■ This is why. ■ Facebook sharing behavior might be the single largest observed data set of confirmation bias at work. § Most people don’t bother to read articles they share on Facebook. They simply share them because they agree with the headline, and assume that the article must be true. § This is dangerous.

Let’s run one of these through the checklist from the News Literacy Project: IT’S OVER: Hillary’s ISIS Email Just Leaked & It’s Worse Than Anyone Could Have Imagined… Source: PBS

Two breakdowns from ■ Nope Francis: Reports that His Holiness has endorsed Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump originated with a fake news web site ■ Reports that an FBI Agent investigating Hillary Clinton’s Use of a private e-mail server killed himself after murdering his wife are just fake news

■ Liberty Writers: Run by Paris Wade and Ben Goldman, who happily gave an interview to the Washington Post about running a fake news site. ■ World News Daily Report: Fake news site focusing on outlandish, shocking headlines. ■ Now 8 News: Designed to look like a local television news outlet.

Lateral research, vertical reading: tools for vetting news stories Source: Learning To Spot Fake News: Start With a Gut Check, by Anya Kamenetz, NPR

Using this article as an exercise for students, have them search for the first line of the story, in quotes.

Useful links: ■ Snopes Field Guide to Fake News Sites and Hoax Purveyors ■ Politi. Fact’s guide to fake news websites and what they peddle ■ New York Times Lesson Plan for evaluating fake news sites ■ NPR: Stanford University Study Finds Most Students Vulnerable to Fake News ■ For the New Yellow Journalists, Opportunity Comes in Clicks ■ How Teens in the Balkans Are Duping Trump Supporters with Fake News