Media Literacy for Student Fact Checkers

July 11, 2019July 17, 2019

Politics of post-truth: Demagoguery

Front matter

Tomorrow we are meeting individually to talk about your revisions for Fact-checks #1-4 and my assessment of them: conference schedule.
Next week we are talking about the economics of post-truth; you should listen to a podcast and complete a holistic annotation for it (which we’ll talk about in class today)

July 10, 2019July 12, 2019

The rhetoric of fact-checking

Reminder that we are meeting at Trillium (in Kennedy Hall) at 8:15 this morning. Get your coffee and omelets and then get ready to talk about the rhetoric of fact-checking.

July 8, 2019July 8, 2019

Move 3 (cont’d): Reading laterally on recent studies

Most studies are data points–emerging evidence that lends weight to one conclusion or another but does not resolve questions definitively. What we want as a fact-checker is not data points, but the broad consensus of experts. And the broad consensus of experts is rare.
Mike Caulfield, Chapter 20

July 3, 2019July 3, 2019

Move 3: Read laterally

Lateral readers don’t spend time on the page or site until they’ve first gotten their bearings by looking at what other sites and resources say about the source at which they are looking.
—Mike Caulfield, Chapter 16

July 1, 2019July 1, 2019

Move 2: Go upstream

Going upstream means following a piece of content to its true source, and beginning your analysis there. Your first question when looking at a claim on a page should be “Where did this come from, and who produced it?” The answer quite often has very little to do with the website you are looking at.
Chapter 10 of Web Literacy for Student Fact-Checkers