Fact-checking sources has become a strenuous task that, too many times, is swept under the rug – creating bumps in the carpet of truth. In a decade of political polarization, the line between what is objective and factual seems to have blurred into a series of conspiracies and lies.
The news of Trump’s attempted assassination attempt on July 13 in a rally in Pennsylvania was distorted into another version that the audience favored. Conspiracies were made about the event being staged, or that President Biden sent the orders.
Fox News, a more conservative news channel, covered the Democratic National Convention, with convenient ad breaks where according to David Bauder in AP News, “Fox personalities called the proceedings ‘boring’ and filled with ‘a lot of hate.’”
Fake news encompasses misinformation, disinformation, as well as malinformation – the publication of private information for personal or corporate reasons, rather than public interest. Misinformation is about facts being misrepresented unintentionally. Disinformation is facts that are intentionally distorted to harm the subject.
What may seem like an insignificant article unable to receive backlash for its writing because of its small scale distribution, could become a global problem. For example, the KGB (the main security agency for the Soviet Union from 1954 to 1991) published an article in New Delhi, India in July 1983, claiming the HIV virus was created by the U.S’s Secret Service to kill African-Americans and homosexuals. The article gained momentum after a few months and eventually ended up on national television.
“In this split-screen republic, Americans are increasingly choosing their own reality, at the expense of a shared understanding of the facts,” David Klepper wrote in AP News.
Mr. Cook, a world history, economics and APUSH teacher at Oak Park High School, has noticed an emergence of conspiracies that, “20 years ago [it] was universally made fun of if anybody even proposed it, like flat Earth stuff, 911 conspiracy theories,” Mr. Cook said. “The stuff that tends to be more interesting to people is the fiction.”
Fake news stories thrive off of their controversy. The more clicks they get, the more profit companies make. When facts are put against fake news stories, the latter usually wins.
“What’s monetized is whatever gets you to stay on the longest. What gets you to stay on the longest are the things that make you angry, things that make you feel bad about yourself, things that make you feel sad, or the things that make you feel elation or super happiness,” Mr. Cook said. “It’s very hard with factual information to compete with the sensationalized stuff, because factualized stuff doesn’t make as much money on clicks as all the garbage does.”
The fastest way to fame in our digitized society is through social media. It takes just one click to delve into a world of opinions masked as facts and facts made to look like lies.
“I would say social media is kind of like the starting point that drives you in a direction, and then once it’s driven you in that direction, then you start going to these rabbit holes,” Mr. Cook said. “But I would also say it’s influencers just as much … they open the door and they show you this store of garbage that they’re selling to you. But the store is very compelling.”
A study conducted by Stanford in 2016 found that in a participation pool of 3,446 students nationwide, 82% of participants could not tell the difference between real and fake news.
So what publications do provide accurate information? While many students rely on news outlets generally praised for their reliability such as The New York Times or AP News, it is worth noting that these publications often carry biases, impacting the perspective of their journalism. To evaluate the objectivity of different publications, one can refer to the Interactive Media Bias Chart, a scale on which outlets are rated on their accuracy and bias out of scales of 0-64 and -42 (left leaning bias) to 42 (right leaning bias) respectively.
Using this chart, the least biased and most accurate podcast was The Journal, run by the Wall Street Journal. This podcast focuses primarily on financial, political and economic issues, with daily episodes ranging from 15-20 minutes. The highest ranking television news program was the CBS evening news with Norah O’Donnell which airs daily at 6:30 p.m.
The written media outlets that rank the best in terms of accuracy and lack of bias are ones relatively unknown to the average teen. Newsnation is a politically focused publication with articles primarily on U.S. politics and crime. World news can be found on BNO News, which covers a wider range of topics alongside entertainment coverage.
In the age of social media, where anyone can claim to be an expert with seemingly no consequences, differentiating between the real and fake is a difficult skill, but one that is all too necessary for students to acquire.
