Today, when REAL news is called “fake news”, and “fake news”
is called “real news”, how can you tell which is which, especially if Rudy
Giuliani has said that “truth isn’t truth”?
If you are familiar with the 14 defining characteristics of
fascism (and you should be) , #6 directly applies to FOX “news” today:
“Controlled Mass Media -
Sometimes media is directly controlled by the government, but in other
cases, the media is indirectly controlled by government regulation, or
sympathetic media spokespeople and executives. Censorship, especially
in war time, is very common.”
I’ve always maintained that it is important to consider the
source when attempting to evaluate a particular news article. As a general
rule, I have found that conservative sources are less reliable than liberal
sources, but there definitely are exceptions to the rule.
I’ve seen several lists that analyze the veracity of news
sources, but the vast majority feel that British sources, as well as public
television/radio are the most reliable.
You’ll notice that the Wall Street Journal, a conservative
publication, is ranked fairly high, and Occupy Democrats, a liberal
publication, is ranked very low. However, ALL of the “main stream media”
sources (MSNBC, NBC, CNN, and CBS) are rated higher than FOX,
If you are looking to do a quick fact check, then Wikipedia is
a good place to start. If you are planning to do a research paper, Wikipedia is
NOT a good source, for the following reasons:
1)
Contributors to the site are usually anonymous
2)
The administrators for the site are responsible
for managing an average of 32,000 pages
3)
Sometimes, the information is not accurate
4)
Information on the site can be easily manipulated.
Generally speaking, articles that have been published by
encyclopedias, academic journals, magazines, newspapers and books, should be
fairly reliable because they have been fact checked before they were published.
However, if you are writing a college term paper, or need more accurate
information, then you need to use some databases. Database companies (and there
are many) analyze a variety of news articles, and do FURTHER fact checking.
Once completed, the updates stories are sold to institutions of higher
learning, government organizations, or other interested parties.
Interestingly enough, the best source that I have seen so far
about databases was found on Wikipedia.
Although a number of data bases are free (Google books is one
example) the majority require affiliation with another entity. For example, the
state of Arizona has paid a company called Gale to do further research. As long
as you are a resident of Arizona, access to the digital Arizona library is
available to any resident of the state for free.
If you aren’t a college student, you don’t need to worry about
the format of the article you are writing. However, if you ARE a student, a
good source to use to determine how your paper should look can be found at The
Purdue Writing Lab.
Even the most reliable news sources often have a “slant”. A quick
guide to use in evaluating news sources is Media Bias/ Fact Check.
For example, Infowars – Alex Jones gets this rating:
“CONSPIRACY-PSEUDOSCIENCE
Sources in the Conspiracy-Pseudoscience category may publish unverifiable
information that is not always supported by evidence.”
The
New York Times has won more Pulitzer Prizes than any other newspaper. This is
their rating:
“LEFT-CENTER
BIAS These media sources have a slight to moderate liberal bias.
They often publish factual information that utilizes loaded words.”
If you are looking for accuracy in a newspaper, it’s hard to
beat The Des Moines Register.
“LEAST
BIASED These sources have minimal bias and use very few loaded words
(wording that attempts to influence an audience by using appeal to emotion
or stereotypes.”).
Even
the best newspapers make mistakes, and the most famous example of that is the
November 3, 1948 edition of the Chicago Daily Tribune, which proudly proclaimed
that Thomas Dewey had beaten Harry Truman.
Besides
the New York Times, the Arizona Republic, the Tucson Daily Star, and Al
Jazeera, the other newspaper that I read every day is The Washington Post, which
does a very good job of fact checking individual stories. If a story’s accuracy
is very much in doubt, it gets a “4 Pinocchio
rating”. The paper has also kept a running tally of the “fibs” uttered by a
well know politician. As of today, the total is 15,413 utterances are either false
of misleading.
Now that you know how to analyze news sources, all I can add
is this:
“Be careful out there”.
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