“Consider the source” is a handy rule when sorting fact from fake news, yet perils lie there as well.
Interview with Donald Barclay
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In the golden age of newspapers, there were broadsheets and tabloids. Printing formats came to be identified with the reliability of the published information found on their pages. Broadsheets were boring and gray, but factual. Tabloids were salacious and sensational, yet undependable.
In the internet age, such simple rules for determining credibility are as hard to come by as jobs in a newsroom.
Apps, blogs, and websites proliferate by the thousands today, making the work of discerning credible sources from fake news ever harder. Easily scalable two-newspaper towns have given way to daunting digital mountain ranges of news sources. There is The Boston Globe, a Pulitzer Prize-winning publication founded in 1872, and The Boston Tribune, called out for fake news and extremism by Politifact and Snopes. The once heroic title of journalist has long lost its luster. Polls regularly lump reporters with insurance salespeople for untrustworthiness.
Fake News, Propaganda, and Plain Old Lies, out this summer from Rowman & Littlefield, is a timely guide to information literacy for professionals and just plain folks who want to sort fact from fiction. Author Donald Barclay is deputy university librarian at the University of California-Merced, the 10th and newest of the University of California campuses, which opened for classes in 2005.
“We all have a cognitive bias. We see the world in a certain way. If you read something or see something that either makes you really angry …, that appeals to your emotions, especially your emotion of fear or your emotion of feeling satisfied, that’s the time you have to be really careful,” Barclay warns. “I could tell you lots of examples where I read something that made me mad or made me happy, and I was so ready to believe it and wanted to believe it, and then took a minute to go, wait a minute, I don’t know if this is true or not. I haven’t checked this out.”
“Consider the source” is a handy rule, yet perils lie there as well. As Barclay tells CCC’s Chris Kenneally, “When we hear something from someone we know – a family member, a friend, a colleague – we tend to believe it. That’s one of the things that happened with the fake news phenomena on Facebook. People were picking up stuff that was created by governments or political parties or corporations. They were posting it and saying, ‘Hey, I believe this is true.’ And then their friends and family shared it, too because– oh, well, if Uncle John believes something is true, well, Uncle John is a good guy. He bought me nice birthday presents when I was growing up.”