Fake News, Bias & Post-Truth

WNYC's Breaking News Consumer's Handbook: Fake News Edition. In this 9-minute episode, Melissa Zimdars discusses "how to be a savvy news consumer in a misinformation-filled world." Zimdars has made a list of more than a hundred problematic news sites.

Oxford Dictionaries named Post-Truth as the 2016 Word of the Year. According to Oxford, the definition of Post-Truth is "Relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief." Objective facts are becoming less significant than click-bait stories that elicit emotion and validate what we already believe, while Post-Truth politics has picked up steam across the world, most notably in the United States, Germany and the UK.

The OCOM Librarians believe the search for the truth is a process, one that takes work. In an era of "Alternative Facts" and fake news, you can't just wait for the truth to show up in your Facebook feed. This guide will provide a basic understanding of "Fake News" and bias, and will give you the tools to decipher the noise from the facts. It is work, but in a Post-Truth era, being information literate has never been so important.

NATIVE ADVERTISING

To be fair, Native Advertising isn't necessarily false information. But it is biased information. Native Advertising is the process of hiding advertisements so they blend in with regular content. Some Native Advertisements are blatantly biased ads, while others are well-researched and informative -- but it is important to remember that even "good" Native Ads are still ads.




Example of "good" Native Advertising

(click to view full piece)

CLICKBAIT & FAKE NEWS

During the 2016 election cycle, there was a huge increase in fake news sites. Some were created to generate income as clickbait, while others were used to falsely discredit political opponents. Both had the same outcome, though: the completely made-up and fake news reports were believed and shared by our nation, vastly changing the way we view news media in the United States.

One of the most concerning things about Fake News is that we now know that people have a difficult time parsing truth from lies, recognizing reliable resources, and double-checking the validity of news stories. According to a Stanford study¹, more than 80% of the 203 middle-schoolers studied could not differentiate Native Advertising from regular content. Over 40% of the high-schoolers surveyed believed pictoral evidence was irrefutable, while college students had a difficult time explaining the reliability of information shared on social media. And according to a 2014 study² by the American Press Institute, six out of ten Americans had not delved deeper than reading headlines in the past week.

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Between 2002-2005, Elsevier was paid an undisclosed sum to publish an academic medical journal by Merck, a large pharmaceutical company. The journal issues were a compilation of journal articles that painted Merck products in a positive light. Some of the articles appeared to be reprints from peer-reviewed journals, while the origin of others was unclear. The journal was marketed to look like a peer-reviewed journal, and did not disclose that Merck was paying for its publication.

Though the articles in this case may have gone through the peer-review process, the fact remains -- the articles were paid for by a pharmaceutical company to act as an advertisement, and this fact was not disclosed. By curating a collection of articles that were only favorable to Merck products, physicians and medical researchers were being presented with a biased view of the research.

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1. Singer N. Merck paid for medical “journal” without disclosure. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/14/ business/14vioxxside.html. Published May 13, 2009. Accessed February 21, 2017.