March 03, 2017

News in a Post-Truth Era

Credible or click-bait? News literacy? Checking facts? "Fake News"? which is, at best, just false or at worst a lie.

How can you tell what's credible and what isn't? This needs to be taught, effectively and without bias. But how? The audience is ... middle- and high-schoolers. College students. Even adults!

I'm gathering the best articles and lesson plans and adding them to a guide I created:
http://guides.lib.unc.edu/mejo153/checkingFacts

It includes resources for evaluating news sources (I love you, AllSides.com!), lesson plans, and fact-checking websites. I'm tweaking a great checklist on evaluating news sites based on Evaluating news sites: Credible or Clickbait? by Candice Benjes-Small. Sooner or later, I'm going to add my favorite articles on the topic.

For now, I'll list some of them here:

I've been pondering this quite a bit lately and am speaking on the topic of teaching news literacy to a few different audiences. First to the North Carolina Scholastic Media Association advisors, then to a group of SILS and MEJO students at UNC on March 31, and to the Society or Professional Journalists Region 2 conference April 8 at Elon University.

Do you have a favorite resource for teaching how to evaluate news credibility? Do share!