HOW TO SORT THROUGH ALL THE BS
The first time Melissa Zimdars really noticed the proliferation of “fake news” was the day that she got fooled by it.
During the summer of 2016, the assistant professor of communication and media at Merrimack College in Massachusetts was scrolling through her Facebook feed when she came across an article that said Green Bay Packers quarterback Aaron Rodgers had endorsed Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders. Being both a Packers fan and a Bernie fan, she thought, “Hell yeah!” and quickly shared the article.
Shortly afterward she realized that the story wasn’t true. She had been duped by a viral hit based on lies—or as Kellyanne Conway would put it, “alternative facts.”
After Zimdars fell prey to this “Packer of lies,” she started noticing these stories more and more. Some of the “fake news” stories that went viral during 2016 were totally inconsequential—such as a piece that claimed Star Wars was being shot in northern Wisconsin1—but others were less benign, such as the story that claimed Hillary Clinton was running a child sex ring out of a pizza restaurant,2 or the one that claimed Florida Democrats wanted to impose “sharia law” on women.3
One day, during her Mass Communication class—a lecture course filled with freshmen and sophomores—Zimdars was leading a discussion about media bias. A few of her students commented that liberal news bias wasn’t straightforward. They believed that there was a more coordinated conspiracy behind it. To illustrate this point, a student showed her a photo of a Newsweek cover that he had found online. The cover featured Hillary Clinton, along with the headline “Madam President.”4 In reality, it was one of two covers that Newsweek had prepped before November 8, so that they would be prepared to go to press regardless of how the election played out—pretty standard practice for a magazine. But certain fringe right-wing personalities and news outlets had seized upon the image, declaring it evidence that Newsweek had colluded with the Clinton campaign to “rig” the election. Once Zimdars explained the context of the image, it made complete sense to her students, but the incident made her realize even more deeply the damage that misleading news can do in the Internet age.
“It just demonstrated to me how quickly and convincingly this kind of information can circulate and have huge effects,” Zimdars told me.
So in an effort to help her students more responsibly sort through all the newsy noise they see on social media every day, Zimdars decided to be proactive. She put together a comprehensive Google Doc5 that included tips for analyzing news sources, as well as a list of “False, Misleading, Clickbait-y, and/or Satirical ‘News’ Sources,” tagged with the type of bias each website might present. The list includes news sources that present totally false news, news sources that present credible news through a political lens, satirical news sources, news sources that promote conspiracy theories, news sources that present junk science, news sources that rely on clickbait headlines (that is, headlines that might exaggerate a point or tease the reader with an answer to get that reader to click into an article), and government-run news sources. Zimdars’s list is nuanced and thoughtful, providing real instruction to those who take the time to actually read it thoroughly.
Unsurprisingly, many people didn’t. The list went viral, and because of its virality, it became mischaracterized. The nuance was largely lost, as the list was labeled as a “fake news” list, rather than a list of news sources that contains varying types of bias and satire, carefully and specifically labeled. Eventually Zimdars wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post about the series of events.6
“I’ve noticed, with some concern, that the same techniques that get people to click on fake or overhyped stories are also being used to get people to read about my own list,” she wrote, explaining the original intent of the list: “I wanted to help my students navigate a cluttered, complicated and often overwhelming media environment by alerting them to be skeptical and rigorous at all times.”
Skeptical and rigorous: two things that any consumer of media should be. These traits take work—it’s easier to just retweet or repost without reading an article than to take the time to read it carefully and to make sure that the conclusions it’s drawing aren’t spurious or suspect. But being a thoughtful consumer of media is rewarding. Not only does it make you more informed—always a plus—but it also may help restore your faith in the relationship between “the media,” so often thought of as a distant, coordinated monolith, in direct conflict with the user, and those who need that media most in times of democratic turmoil.
As Zimdars told me: “What I try to remind my students is that skepticism is healthy. We should all be skeptical of information all the time, right? But it can’t become cynicism.”
5 TIPS FOR EVERY RESPONSIBLE NEWS READER (THAT MEANS YOU!)
1. BE YOUR OWN FILTER. Read your news carefully. If something raises your internal antennas or feels a little fishy, trust that instinct and look into it more.
“We’re going to have to really understand instinctively and make our own value judgments of what is right and what smells wrong,” media critic and activist Jamia Wilson advises. “We need to see ‘alternative facts’ for what they are.” And if a story doesn’t seem totally aboveboard? Resist hitting “like.”
2. FACT-CHECK, FACT-CHECK, FACT-CHECK. Before spreading information on a given topic, make sure you actually have a grasp on that information. And if something feels off, look at reliable sites such as Snopes or PolitiFact to double-check the “truthiness” of the info.
3. FIND NEWS SOURCES THAT YOU TRUST. Do your research and decide on a few news outlets that feel steady and reliable to you. Follow them on social media, and read them regularly.
4. BUT MAKE SURE TO READ WIDELY. This doesn’t just mean oscillating between reading news from outlets that are traditionally categorized as left-wing and those categorized as right-wing—though that could be part of it if that’s the variety you’re looking for. The most important thing is to simply vary your media diet. No one should get all of her information from one source. After all, the Boston Globe may have the best reporting on one particular topic, while the Wall Street Journal or The Hill or the New York Times delves beautifully into another. No one media organization will teach you everything you need to know about the world.
5. SUPPORT LOCAL NEWS! News organizations should, at their core, be about holding those with the most power responsible for their actions. The best way for media outlets to be able to do this is to (a) have the funding to dedicate enough reporters to a variety of topic areas, and (b) have enough outlets based in a variety of locations across the country or region they cover. There’s nothing wrong with having national outlets that are headquartered in New York or DC—it only becomes a problem when you consider that they don’t report on local issues, and many local news organizations that aren’t centered in these places are dying.7 Find your local paper—if it still exists—and subscribe to it ASAP. Tell your friends and family to do so as well.
