Fake news. We’ve all heard tell of it at the very least, publicized by certain politicians and popularized from 2016 to the present day. Often, to me at least, it meant nothing. It was the hallmark of conspiracy theory. If a trusted news organization (Washington Post, CNN, The New York Times) published it, I would believe it. They wouldn’t let any of their journalists publish something blatantly false, right?
Let’s make an experiment: suppose that someone believes most of what they read on the news if they trust the news organization reporting it. Suppose they tend to scroll past the top banner and skip to the meat of the story after briefly reading the headline.
Now let’s make another experiment: suppose that you are a news organization that is in desperate need of ad revenue. People just aren’t clicking on banner ads or pop-ups, and advertisers are paying less for their ads to appear there. You need companies to pay for these spots if you want to remain in business. What’s the solution?
As Mike Caulfield & Sam Wineburg state in Verified (Chapter 9, page 180 specifically), “Make advertisements undetectable. They do this in a simple way: just make the ad look like an editorial or a news article. Yes, while they do have to technically state that it’s an ad somewhere on the page, they don’t need to state that explicitly, and there’s no rules stating that they can’t try their best to hide it. Just put it right above the banner that everyone skips in small text. No one will notice. And no one does.
Now that I know that’s something to look out for it’s something I do check when I read news articles, but it has sown a level of distaste. I can’t help but think about all the essays I wrote in the past. How many of them used blatant advertising and I cited it as a proper source? How many teachers were fooled too?
Beyond just editorials formatted to look like news or new information, videos of course can’t be fully believed either. They can be cropped, cut, have dialogue added or changed, and in general present something far different than what actually happened.
If you can’t believe your eyes and you have to be careful of magazines that are supposedly bastions of journalistic integrity, how does one quickly and accurately determine something that they doubt to be true?
Surprisingly enough (and against all currently taught academic knowledge) Wikipedia is a fantastic tool. It has its problems, as almost all things do, but the mistake-riddled encyclopedia that anyone on the internet could edit is not the correct picture of the online encyclopedia anymore. There are strict rules on editing, and bots that roll back the edits from unknown IP addresses. On top of that, there are protected pages, or “Wikipedia’s most trafficked and most controversial pages.” (Verified again, page 139) These pages are not editable by the public at large and can only be edited by specific people who have access. It’s a well-managed site, with plenty of back-up sources and resources for researchers, as a good encyclopedia should be.
Personally, I’m delighted to hear about this. I’ve been using Wikipedia for years and always felt a little guilty about it. I mean, I was taught that it’s not a good resource, and here I am getting information about the Love Canal Disaster from it. It’s somewhat a relief to hear that the nonprofit has reached its ideal.
If only online news sources could say the same.
Comments
3 responses to “This Sponsored Content is Brought to You by a Brand Partner in Association With Your News”
I didn’t talk much about Wikipedia in my post, but I do agree that there was this sense of relief to know that not all of Wikipedia is bad like we’re told. I tend to use Wikipedia as a fact checker of sorts where if something I read elsewhere seems a little suspicious I check in with Wikipedia to make sure that there is truth behind it. Of course there’s that dded step of checking the sources to make sure Wikipedia didn’t just get it from whatever it is I’m reading. Having this new gained knowledge of how Wikipedia editing works makes me feel a little more confident.
To me, it is super discouraging to know that I have to police almost everything that I come across. I know it isn’t a perfect world, but it blew my mind that I have to look for the tiniest clues, like ‘with’, to simply find reliable information. It’s simply the way the world is now. It’s a challenge that we all have to face if we want good, reliable news. I feel like Verified has been a great tool for detecting fake news. I wont be perfect, but I feel more equipped to internet surf without feeling overwhelmed.
I love how you explained how easy it is for news publications to publish ads that look like articles for a quick buck. I think its 1) scary and 2) harmful how much things like this occur, and also how little people seem to realize they are getting their “facts” from an ad. Your post has me thinking a lot to my past projects and research essays. I am wondering if I used any ads, and if I did how did I not catch it, and also how did my professors not catch it… This upsets me, because it shows that even professionals and scholars don’t realize their “facts” and “statistics” are actually coming from ads sometimes.
I like how you mentioned Wikipedia in this post. I agree that Wikipedia is a helpful tool and has an awful reputation. I think Wiki should be more accepted for the starting point of research. Obviously, it is not smart to get all your information from a Wiki page, but it should be a starting place to find sources.