Evaluating Information in the Age of "Fake News" vs "Real News"

I was all set to write and tweet about how students, and the public in general, should evaluate information sources in an attempt to be able to identify "fake news". This topic has become pretty hot since the November 8th election of Donald Trump with people trying to figure out what went wrong from the democratic side of things.

One of the excuses used was that there was a steady stream of "fake news" that people were being fed through their social media portals. All of us saw many of these articles, posts or memes declaring one thing or another like Hillary Clinton was taking medication for Parkinson's to Trump declaring that he saw thousands of people cheering the attack on 9/11 in Jersey City (no evidence). People reshared them and commented on them as proof to their already established ideology.

I found myself on a daily basis trying to expose the fake news by explaining and pointing out to my "friends" and how much of the information people were posting was either fake or just plain wrong. Remember that there are outlets out there on the internet (and many librarian teaching information literacy and research skills knows) who are just there to make money try to write as much clickable content to draw you into their ad sites.

So the mainstream media has exposed the weakness in people's ability to tell the difference between fake news and "real" news from traditional sources. However, what happens if the mainstream media is exposing this weakness to redefine the category of authority? Matt Taibbi from Rolling Stone exposed how the Washington Post ran a bogus article about "fake news" sites which quoted ProporNot as its source. Their claim is that many of these fake news sources were promoting pro-Russian politics, included many reputable information sources on the left like Counterpunch, Truthdig, etc and clumping them with sites like Infowars (I will not give them traffic; fuck them). Jeffrey St. Clair sees this as a pattern of information manipulation from a long history of the CIA influencing news and information at the New York Times, Washington Post, Miami News, Chatanooga Times etc.

So how do we teach authority in this day in age where it's quite obvious that information is being manipulated by one side or the other? One thing for sure is that our discussions not just in the classroom should push for a more aggressive substantiation of facts and information. We can no longer take a person's word for it or "I heard from somewhere". It's obvious that the ruling elite are trying to win the hearts and minds of working class people through their media and are consolidating power for their capitalist interests, domestically and abroad. They want the media on board to promote their

Librarians must lead the way in the efforts to find truth wherever they may lie. Maybe now is a time to give more validation to news organizations outside the mainstream media especially if they are exposing lies, bias and manipulation.