What do you think?
Rate this book
Unpacking Fake News: An Educator's Guide to Navigating the Media with Students
Since the 2016 presidential election, the term fake news has become part of the national discourse. Although some have appropriated the term for political purposes, actual fake news represents an inherent threat to American democracy given the ease through which it is consumed and shared via social media. This book is one of the first of its kind to address the implications of fake news for the K–12 classroom. It explores what fake news is, why students are susceptible to believing it, and how they can learn to identify it. Leading civic education scholars use a psychoanalytic lens to unpack why fake news is effective and to show educators how they can teach their students to be critical consumers of the political media they encounter. The authors also link these ideas to the broader task of civic education and critical engagement in the democratic process. “Inside this book you will find descriptions of simple lessons practiced by experts that can help make students more critical news consumers.”
—From the Foreword by Rebecca Klein, HuffPost “One of the notable strengths of this book is its emphasis on concrete approaches to help students protect themselves and the larger democracy from the insidious influence of fake news.”
—Diana Hess, University of Wisconsin–Madison “This book is both an important contribution to social studies education and a timely response to the demands of our current political moment.”
—John Rogers, Institute for Democracy, Education, and Access, UCLA
—From the Foreword by Rebecca Klein, HuffPost “One of the notable strengths of this book is its emphasis on concrete approaches to help students protect themselves and the larger democracy from the insidious influence of fake news.”
—Diana Hess, University of Wisconsin–Madison “This book is both an important contribution to social studies education and a timely response to the demands of our current political moment.”
—John Rogers, Institute for Democracy, Education, and Access, UCLA
176 pages, Kindle Edition
Published March 8, 2019
3 people are currently reading
16 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
March 21, 2023
This was a great book for future and current educators! The only con I can say is that it was a little repetitive. I would definitely recommend it to my cohort!
January 12, 2022
An informative and relevant collection of essays on information literacy and civic engagement.
Key Quotations
Introduction: Fake News and the Imperative of Civic Education (Wayne Journell)
• “For a democratic society to protect the rights of all citizens, it is essential that people move beyond simply advocating for policies that protect their own self interests. Rather a healthy democracy is one that adopts policies based on reason, evidence, and the strongest arguments (Habermas, 1981/1984, Rawls, 1993)” (3).
• “News networks have become corporate entities, and news directors realize that the most effective way to increase viewership (and thus profits) is to consistently present clear partisan narratives” (5).
• “From a pedagogical standpoint, it would be tempting to just tell students that InfoWars is actual fake news and that they should get their information from mainstream media outlets. Such an approach, however, is too simplistic. Creating a dichotomous ‘good’ versus ‘bad’ distinction does not allow for the possibility that mainstream news outlets may peddle false information or that less credible outlets may occasionally break legitimate stories” (7).
• “Even when individuals are presented with evidence that a news source may regularly present misinformation, they may choose to still frequent that source because it speaks to a worldview, and likely a community, with which they identify” (7).
• “Recent research by the UCLA’s Institute for Democracy, Education, and Access (Rogers et al., 2017) has found that students are increasingly coming to their classes armed with fraudulent information they have encountered online” (8).
• “Classrooms are an ideal space for [media literacy] learning to occur, particularly if one takes the Deweyan view of schools as laboratories for democracy in which students learn to experience aspects of democratic life (Dewey, 1916, 1938)” (8).
Why Does Fake News Work: On the Psychosocial Dynamics of Learning, Belief, and Citizenship (H. James Garrett)
• “Fake news operates through sophisticated microtargeting practices predicated upon analysis of metadata and created for the nefarious purpose of further calcifying partisan division. Fake news works because of the ways that media literacy and civic education are underattended and undervalued” (15).
• “Motivated reasoning is a term of engagement signifying how individuals interpret newly encountered information in ways that advantage their already-held views. Motivated reasoning points to a process where ‘once people have developed a worldview . . . they are extremely resistant to information that would require them to change that worldview’ (Dusso & Kennedy, 2015, p. 62). People are not, researchers find, considering what they see on the news as functions of multiple perspectives used to update their understanding of current political issues. Rather, information that bolsters their view is accommodated and that which challenges it is dismissed. / In most cases, people are not conscious of the process. In other words, it is not done intentionally. Political scientists Charles Taber and Milton Lodge (2016) noted that the processes involved in motivated reasoning ‘are often unnoticed forces and processes that occur in the early, unconscious phases of information processing’ (p. 62) / While many people prefer to view themselves as rational interpreters of information, Taber and Lodge (2016) explain that ‘our explicit reasoning processes serve to rationalize behavior rather than cause it’ (p. 62)” (20).
• “Marshall Alcorn (2013), a faculty member at the Washington Center of Psychoanalysis, has elaborated on the process by which people, when primed by being asked to remember a time during which they were successful at something, were much more open to new and contradicting information” (23).
• “There is much more to ‘knowing’ than whether we do or do not know something. There is the ‘what’ of learning, but there is also the ‘how’ and the ways that what we know attach to our values, personal histories, and emotional investments. At different times, and in different contexts, we seek out information, incorporate, refuse, or dismiss it” (24).
• From psychoanalyst Steven Tublin on feelings of certainty about politics: “‘Through a long campaign of vigorous procrastination, I have accumulated a vast storehouse of information about government, political figures, and public policy options. But the truth is, I don’t know nearly enough to justify the certainty I have long felt about how to run this country . . . These giant gaps in my understanding tell me that I—along with everyone else—ought to be far less confident about my politics than I am’ . . . What Tublin is articulating is that in all matters where deep convictions are held, we are in the midst of irrational processes of accommodating and dismissing evidence and placing emotional value not only on the information we possess, but also how it stands in relationship to others and the knowledge they possess and deploy . . . What Tublin (2017) acknowledges is that his knowledge is partial, as all of our knowledge must be. He is saying that such partiality is all of our burden to bear and that learning about social and political issues informs us of our own wishes as much as it does the matters of the day” (25).
• “Psychosocial theories suggest that we understand thought as comprised of our rational cognitive abilities, as well as the feelings and affective states that accompany or precede them. In other words, there is never a solely rational moment devoid of affect, feeling, or emotion. However, there is a type of thinking that is solely nonrational—what psychoanalyst Thomas Ogden (2010) has called ‘magical thinking’—and can help offer one final way to understand why fake news works. Magical thinking refers to ‘thinking that relies on omnipresent fantasy to create a psychic reality the individual experiences as ‘more real’ than external reality’” (25).
Teens, Social Media, and Fake News (Ellen Middaugh)
• “Assessments of credibility—whether a source legitimately represents the issue being written about—involve more than simple factual accuracy. Rather, definitions of credibility have included fairly objective criteria such as comprehensiveness, recency, accuracy, and author credentials, as well as judgements about the motives of the author and whether those motives align with the best interest of the reader” (42).
• “Research has found large gaps between reasoning ability (how one performs when given a task) and reasoning in everyday situations (Kahneman, 2011). In the context of assessing the credibility of information, communication scholars Miriam Metzger and Andrew Flanagin (2015) have argued that it is more common for people to rely on heuristics and gut feelings than to engage in effortful analysis, which may be explained by both motivation and background knowledge” (47).
• “Another concern raised about social media and news is the growing use of outrage discourse within news stories and in commentary as news is shared (Berry & Sobieraj, 2014). The term outrage discourse is used to capture language intended to provoke strong emotional responses (e.g., anger, disgust, moral indignation, and so on) through a range of tactics such as providing misleading facts, overgeneralizations, and personal attacks on the person in the story. Research has found a growing presence of this type of discourse in the media over time (Berry & Sobieraj, 2014)” (47).
• “Adolescents do often act before thinking, which is explained in part by changes in the limbic system and prefrontal cortex that lead them to temporarily experience heightened sensitivity to rewards and emotions while still developing the cognitive control needed to resist the urge to act on first impulse (Dwyer et al., 2014). Applying these findings to media use and impact, scholars have hypothesized the resulting increase in sensation seeking may lead youth to seek out risky media or share media that gets attention or ‘likes’ from peers, thus providing a social reward (Konijn, Veldhuis, et al., 2015)” (48).
• “One approach to teaching youth to be critical consumers of news is to . . . have students track their media use over a period of time, noting what catches their attention (e.g., social media posts, topics brought up in TV shows, statements by celebrities in addition to news media)” (54).
How Students Evaluate Digital News Sources (Sarah McGrew, Joel Breakstone, Teresa Ortega, Mark Smith, and Sam Wineburg)
• “Reliable information is to civic health what clean air and clean water are to public health” (60).
• “Research on how young people make judgements online suggests that there is reason to be concerned. Communication studies scholars Eszter Hargittai, Lindsay Fullerton, Erika Menchen-Trevino, and Kristen Thomas (2010) observed more than 100 college students as they searched online for answers to questions for which the Web provided contradictory information. / The disturbing upshot of this work was that students ceded to Google the responsibility for making judgements of credibility. Students believe that a website’s position on a page of search results corresponded to its trustworthiness—the higher up, the more trustworthy” (60).
• “The core competencies of civic online reasoning:
1. Who is behind this information?
2. What is the evidence?
3. What do other sources say?”
• “We administered the assessments of civic online reasoning to thousands of students across the country. Their responses were troubling. From middle school through college, students struggled to evaluate online sources. They could not distinguish between news sources and advertisements, had trouble verifying social media accounts, and came up short when asked to determine which groups are behind websites. Responses to these tasks cast doubt on whether students can make the types of informed judgements needed for responsible civic engagement in our current digital landscape” (63).
• “We discovered that fact checkers approach unfamiliar digital information differently than other users. For example, they prioritized investigating the sources of the websites they were asked to evaluate. Rather than scrolling up and down to read the content of the page, fact checkers read laterally: they left the original site within seconds and opened up new browser tabs to examine what other sites said about the original source. Only after they had a sense of whether the source was reliable did they return to the original site, better oriented to the information at hand. Fact checkers read less than other groups but learned more” (70).
How Students Evaluate Digital News Sources (Sarah McGrew, Joel Breakstone, Teresa Ortega, Mark Smith, and Sam Wineburg)
• “Oxford Dictionaries declared post-truth as its word of 2016, defining it as the state of affairs when ‘objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief’ (para. 1). Fake news consists of deliberate misinformation or disinformation disseminated with the intent to mislead readers about a topic or issue. The label has also been used as an ‘accusation leveled at facts one doesn’t like’ (Young, 2017)” (74).
• “According to Angie Drobnic Holan (2016), the editor of PoltiFact, fake news is ‘the boldest sign of a post-truth society. When we can’t agree on basic facts—or even that there are a such thing as basic facts,’ she asks, ‘how do we talk to each other?’ (para. 12). Indeed, much of the talking in our post-truth, partisan society has been at each other rather than to or with each other. / This divisive discourse has been driven, in part, by the ubiquity of politically motivated untruths, half-truths, misinformation, and fake news—what used to be called ‘lies’—and their acceptance by large portions of the population as true. The widespread circulation of such disinformation has broken down the boundaries between real and fake news (Kavanagh & Rich, 2018) and undermined standards of evidence and verification. Of even greater concern, perhaps, is the confirmation by social scientists that fake news circulates faster and more widely than real news (Lazer et al., 2018)” (74).
• “As Marshall Alcorn (2013), a faculty member of the Washington Center of Psychoanalysis, noted, people ‘do not abandon beliefs called into question by factual information; they resist modes of reason that threaten their identities’ (46). Political scientists Brendan Nyhan and Jason Reifler (2010) argued that, more often than not, corrections to misperceptions fail to change minds; instead, they may actually result in a ‘backfire’ or ‘boomerang’ effect (Garrett, 2017) whereby initial views are often further entrenched rather than abandoned in the face of additional information (Flynn, Nyhan, & Reifler, 2016; Sharot, 2017). / The inability of facts, as true and verified as they may be, to persuade and change minds, is partly due to what is called ‘motivated reasoning’ (Kahne & Bowyer, 2017) or ‘confirmation bias.’ Both help explain why students (and the public more broadly), regardless of ideology, might gravitate toward fake news and accept it as true (Kahne & Bowyer, 2017)” (76).
Judging Credibility in Un-Credible Times: Three Educational Approaches for the Digital Age (Erica Hodgin and Joseph Kahne)
• “A Pew Research Center study conducted just after the 2016 presidential election found that 64% of adults believe fake news stories cause a great deal of confusion, and 23% said they had shared fabricated political stories themselves—sometimes by mistake and sometimes intentionally (Barthel, Mitchell, & Holcomb, 2016). Similarly, a 2017 Knight-Gallup survey found that 73% of Americans say the spread of inaccurate information on the Internet is a major problem with news coverage today; this percentage is higher than for any other potential type of news bias (Knight Foundation, 2018). / Not only has the information landscape changed, but so has the political landscape. The rising distrust in government and institutions, as well as intensifying partisanship, dramatically increased the challenges with ‘post-truth’ politics in which the public relies less on objective facts when forming opinions and perspectives, especially when it comes to controversial or contentious issues (Anderson & Rainie, 2017). / In this context, one’s views and opinions often cloud one’s judgement, and individuals frequently favor ideas that align with their previously held beliefs independent of whether or not they are accurate. The Rand Corporation has described these dynamics as truth decay, which includes four key trends such as ‘an increasing disagreement about facts and analytical interpretations of facts and data; a blurring of the line between opinion and fact; an increase in relative volume, and resulting influence, of opinion and personal experience over fact; and declining trust in formerly respected sources of factual information’ (Kavanagh & Rich, 2018)” (93).
• “John Dewey (1922) posited that schools should prepare ‘young people to forge an active and empowered relationship to news and information’ (Rogers, in press)” (93).
• “In a BBC article on ‘Lies, Propaganda, and Fake News,’ Kevin Kelly, cofounder of Wired magazine, said: ‘Truth is no longer dictated by authorities, but is networked by peers. For every fact there is a counterfact and all these facts and counterfacts look alike online, which is confusing to most people’ (Gray, 2017)” (97).
• “In order to understand the biases that influence the way individuals process information, scholars underscore two fundamental motivations: directional motivation and accuracy motivation (Kunda, 1990; Taber & Lodge, 2006). Individuals can be guided by directional motivation or the desire to justify conclusions that align with prior beliefs. In this case, information that is consistent with one’s prior preferences tends to be accepted uncritically and judged positively, whereas information that counters one’s prior beliefs is scrutinized and often evaluated negatively (Ditto, Scepansky, Munro, Apanovitch, & Lockhart, 1998). On the other hand, when guided by accuracy motivation, individuals will exert more effort to carefully and deeply analyze information in order to understand issues (Kunda, 1990). / Directional motivation is particularly common when processing political information. For example, political scientists Milton Lodge and Charles Taber (2005) found that emotions often surface when engaging with sociopolitical concepts that, in turn, trigger ‘hot cognition,’ whereby positive and negative feeling bias subsequent processing information. This process leads individuals to seek out evidence that aligns with their preexisting views (confirmation bias), to attempt to dismiss perspectives that contradict their beliefs (disconfirmation bias), and to consider claims that align with their views as stronger and more accurate (prior attitude effect) (Kunda, 1990; Taber & Lodge, 2006)” (98).
• “It is important for educators to help students recognize when they have strong beliefs and learn how to counteract the impact of directional motivation on their judgement of political content” (99).
• “Drawing on studies we have conducted, we describe three approaches to civic media literacy education that our findings suggest are key for attending to the relationship between digital media and misinformation:
1. Educators can support youth in developing metacognition related to judging the accuracy and credibility of online information.
2. Educators can provide youth with more nuanced skills and strategies for assessing the accuracy of truth claims.
3. Educators can provide young people with ongoing opportunities to reflect and practice the skills and strategies they have learned in order to instill habits that will transfer across various settings” (100).
• “In order to assess the credibility and accuracy of information, young people may benefit from developing an awareness of the role their individual thinking plays in understanding and evaluating information and in reflecting on their own personal biases in relationship to that analysis. Metacognition—the awareness of one’s leaning process—often takes the form of an internal dialogue where students are thinking about their own thinking (Biggs, 1987; Bransford, Brown, & Cocking, 2000)” (101).
• “Studies has found that high-quality civic media literacy education can be beneficial (Kahne & Bowyer, 2017; Martens & Hobbs, 2015). In addition, research shows that large numbers of students are not receiving the civic education necessary to support informed and active participation in civic and political life (Gould, Jamieson, Levine, McConnell, & Smith, 2011)” (104).
Key Quotations
Introduction: Fake News and the Imperative of Civic Education (Wayne Journell)
• “For a democratic society to protect the rights of all citizens, it is essential that people move beyond simply advocating for policies that protect their own self interests. Rather a healthy democracy is one that adopts policies based on reason, evidence, and the strongest arguments (Habermas, 1981/1984, Rawls, 1993)” (3).
• “News networks have become corporate entities, and news directors realize that the most effective way to increase viewership (and thus profits) is to consistently present clear partisan narratives” (5).
• “From a pedagogical standpoint, it would be tempting to just tell students that InfoWars is actual fake news and that they should get their information from mainstream media outlets. Such an approach, however, is too simplistic. Creating a dichotomous ‘good’ versus ‘bad’ distinction does not allow for the possibility that mainstream news outlets may peddle false information or that less credible outlets may occasionally break legitimate stories” (7).
• “Even when individuals are presented with evidence that a news source may regularly present misinformation, they may choose to still frequent that source because it speaks to a worldview, and likely a community, with which they identify” (7).
• “Recent research by the UCLA’s Institute for Democracy, Education, and Access (Rogers et al., 2017) has found that students are increasingly coming to their classes armed with fraudulent information they have encountered online” (8).
• “Classrooms are an ideal space for [media literacy] learning to occur, particularly if one takes the Deweyan view of schools as laboratories for democracy in which students learn to experience aspects of democratic life (Dewey, 1916, 1938)” (8).
Why Does Fake News Work: On the Psychosocial Dynamics of Learning, Belief, and Citizenship (H. James Garrett)
• “Fake news operates through sophisticated microtargeting practices predicated upon analysis of metadata and created for the nefarious purpose of further calcifying partisan division. Fake news works because of the ways that media literacy and civic education are underattended and undervalued” (15).
• “Motivated reasoning is a term of engagement signifying how individuals interpret newly encountered information in ways that advantage their already-held views. Motivated reasoning points to a process where ‘once people have developed a worldview . . . they are extremely resistant to information that would require them to change that worldview’ (Dusso & Kennedy, 2015, p. 62). People are not, researchers find, considering what they see on the news as functions of multiple perspectives used to update their understanding of current political issues. Rather, information that bolsters their view is accommodated and that which challenges it is dismissed. / In most cases, people are not conscious of the process. In other words, it is not done intentionally. Political scientists Charles Taber and Milton Lodge (2016) noted that the processes involved in motivated reasoning ‘are often unnoticed forces and processes that occur in the early, unconscious phases of information processing’ (p. 62) / While many people prefer to view themselves as rational interpreters of information, Taber and Lodge (2016) explain that ‘our explicit reasoning processes serve to rationalize behavior rather than cause it’ (p. 62)” (20).
• “Marshall Alcorn (2013), a faculty member at the Washington Center of Psychoanalysis, has elaborated on the process by which people, when primed by being asked to remember a time during which they were successful at something, were much more open to new and contradicting information” (23).
• “There is much more to ‘knowing’ than whether we do or do not know something. There is the ‘what’ of learning, but there is also the ‘how’ and the ways that what we know attach to our values, personal histories, and emotional investments. At different times, and in different contexts, we seek out information, incorporate, refuse, or dismiss it” (24).
• From psychoanalyst Steven Tublin on feelings of certainty about politics: “‘Through a long campaign of vigorous procrastination, I have accumulated a vast storehouse of information about government, political figures, and public policy options. But the truth is, I don’t know nearly enough to justify the certainty I have long felt about how to run this country . . . These giant gaps in my understanding tell me that I—along with everyone else—ought to be far less confident about my politics than I am’ . . . What Tublin is articulating is that in all matters where deep convictions are held, we are in the midst of irrational processes of accommodating and dismissing evidence and placing emotional value not only on the information we possess, but also how it stands in relationship to others and the knowledge they possess and deploy . . . What Tublin (2017) acknowledges is that his knowledge is partial, as all of our knowledge must be. He is saying that such partiality is all of our burden to bear and that learning about social and political issues informs us of our own wishes as much as it does the matters of the day” (25).
• “Psychosocial theories suggest that we understand thought as comprised of our rational cognitive abilities, as well as the feelings and affective states that accompany or precede them. In other words, there is never a solely rational moment devoid of affect, feeling, or emotion. However, there is a type of thinking that is solely nonrational—what psychoanalyst Thomas Ogden (2010) has called ‘magical thinking’—and can help offer one final way to understand why fake news works. Magical thinking refers to ‘thinking that relies on omnipresent fantasy to create a psychic reality the individual experiences as ‘more real’ than external reality’” (25).
Teens, Social Media, and Fake News (Ellen Middaugh)
• “Assessments of credibility—whether a source legitimately represents the issue being written about—involve more than simple factual accuracy. Rather, definitions of credibility have included fairly objective criteria such as comprehensiveness, recency, accuracy, and author credentials, as well as judgements about the motives of the author and whether those motives align with the best interest of the reader” (42).
• “Research has found large gaps between reasoning ability (how one performs when given a task) and reasoning in everyday situations (Kahneman, 2011). In the context of assessing the credibility of information, communication scholars Miriam Metzger and Andrew Flanagin (2015) have argued that it is more common for people to rely on heuristics and gut feelings than to engage in effortful analysis, which may be explained by both motivation and background knowledge” (47).
• “Another concern raised about social media and news is the growing use of outrage discourse within news stories and in commentary as news is shared (Berry & Sobieraj, 2014). The term outrage discourse is used to capture language intended to provoke strong emotional responses (e.g., anger, disgust, moral indignation, and so on) through a range of tactics such as providing misleading facts, overgeneralizations, and personal attacks on the person in the story. Research has found a growing presence of this type of discourse in the media over time (Berry & Sobieraj, 2014)” (47).
• “Adolescents do often act before thinking, which is explained in part by changes in the limbic system and prefrontal cortex that lead them to temporarily experience heightened sensitivity to rewards and emotions while still developing the cognitive control needed to resist the urge to act on first impulse (Dwyer et al., 2014). Applying these findings to media use and impact, scholars have hypothesized the resulting increase in sensation seeking may lead youth to seek out risky media or share media that gets attention or ‘likes’ from peers, thus providing a social reward (Konijn, Veldhuis, et al., 2015)” (48).
• “One approach to teaching youth to be critical consumers of news is to . . . have students track their media use over a period of time, noting what catches their attention (e.g., social media posts, topics brought up in TV shows, statements by celebrities in addition to news media)” (54).
How Students Evaluate Digital News Sources (Sarah McGrew, Joel Breakstone, Teresa Ortega, Mark Smith, and Sam Wineburg)
• “Reliable information is to civic health what clean air and clean water are to public health” (60).
• “Research on how young people make judgements online suggests that there is reason to be concerned. Communication studies scholars Eszter Hargittai, Lindsay Fullerton, Erika Menchen-Trevino, and Kristen Thomas (2010) observed more than 100 college students as they searched online for answers to questions for which the Web provided contradictory information. / The disturbing upshot of this work was that students ceded to Google the responsibility for making judgements of credibility. Students believe that a website’s position on a page of search results corresponded to its trustworthiness—the higher up, the more trustworthy” (60).
• “The core competencies of civic online reasoning:
1. Who is behind this information?
2. What is the evidence?
3. What do other sources say?”
• “We administered the assessments of civic online reasoning to thousands of students across the country. Their responses were troubling. From middle school through college, students struggled to evaluate online sources. They could not distinguish between news sources and advertisements, had trouble verifying social media accounts, and came up short when asked to determine which groups are behind websites. Responses to these tasks cast doubt on whether students can make the types of informed judgements needed for responsible civic engagement in our current digital landscape” (63).
• “We discovered that fact checkers approach unfamiliar digital information differently than other users. For example, they prioritized investigating the sources of the websites they were asked to evaluate. Rather than scrolling up and down to read the content of the page, fact checkers read laterally: they left the original site within seconds and opened up new browser tabs to examine what other sites said about the original source. Only after they had a sense of whether the source was reliable did they return to the original site, better oriented to the information at hand. Fact checkers read less than other groups but learned more” (70).
How Students Evaluate Digital News Sources (Sarah McGrew, Joel Breakstone, Teresa Ortega, Mark Smith, and Sam Wineburg)
• “Oxford Dictionaries declared post-truth as its word of 2016, defining it as the state of affairs when ‘objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief’ (para. 1). Fake news consists of deliberate misinformation or disinformation disseminated with the intent to mislead readers about a topic or issue. The label has also been used as an ‘accusation leveled at facts one doesn’t like’ (Young, 2017)” (74).
• “According to Angie Drobnic Holan (2016), the editor of PoltiFact, fake news is ‘the boldest sign of a post-truth society. When we can’t agree on basic facts—or even that there are a such thing as basic facts,’ she asks, ‘how do we talk to each other?’ (para. 12). Indeed, much of the talking in our post-truth, partisan society has been at each other rather than to or with each other. / This divisive discourse has been driven, in part, by the ubiquity of politically motivated untruths, half-truths, misinformation, and fake news—what used to be called ‘lies’—and their acceptance by large portions of the population as true. The widespread circulation of such disinformation has broken down the boundaries between real and fake news (Kavanagh & Rich, 2018) and undermined standards of evidence and verification. Of even greater concern, perhaps, is the confirmation by social scientists that fake news circulates faster and more widely than real news (Lazer et al., 2018)” (74).
• “As Marshall Alcorn (2013), a faculty member of the Washington Center of Psychoanalysis, noted, people ‘do not abandon beliefs called into question by factual information; they resist modes of reason that threaten their identities’ (46). Political scientists Brendan Nyhan and Jason Reifler (2010) argued that, more often than not, corrections to misperceptions fail to change minds; instead, they may actually result in a ‘backfire’ or ‘boomerang’ effect (Garrett, 2017) whereby initial views are often further entrenched rather than abandoned in the face of additional information (Flynn, Nyhan, & Reifler, 2016; Sharot, 2017). / The inability of facts, as true and verified as they may be, to persuade and change minds, is partly due to what is called ‘motivated reasoning’ (Kahne & Bowyer, 2017) or ‘confirmation bias.’ Both help explain why students (and the public more broadly), regardless of ideology, might gravitate toward fake news and accept it as true (Kahne & Bowyer, 2017)” (76).
Judging Credibility in Un-Credible Times: Three Educational Approaches for the Digital Age (Erica Hodgin and Joseph Kahne)
• “A Pew Research Center study conducted just after the 2016 presidential election found that 64% of adults believe fake news stories cause a great deal of confusion, and 23% said they had shared fabricated political stories themselves—sometimes by mistake and sometimes intentionally (Barthel, Mitchell, & Holcomb, 2016). Similarly, a 2017 Knight-Gallup survey found that 73% of Americans say the spread of inaccurate information on the Internet is a major problem with news coverage today; this percentage is higher than for any other potential type of news bias (Knight Foundation, 2018). / Not only has the information landscape changed, but so has the political landscape. The rising distrust in government and institutions, as well as intensifying partisanship, dramatically increased the challenges with ‘post-truth’ politics in which the public relies less on objective facts when forming opinions and perspectives, especially when it comes to controversial or contentious issues (Anderson & Rainie, 2017). / In this context, one’s views and opinions often cloud one’s judgement, and individuals frequently favor ideas that align with their previously held beliefs independent of whether or not they are accurate. The Rand Corporation has described these dynamics as truth decay, which includes four key trends such as ‘an increasing disagreement about facts and analytical interpretations of facts and data; a blurring of the line between opinion and fact; an increase in relative volume, and resulting influence, of opinion and personal experience over fact; and declining trust in formerly respected sources of factual information’ (Kavanagh & Rich, 2018)” (93).
• “John Dewey (1922) posited that schools should prepare ‘young people to forge an active and empowered relationship to news and information’ (Rogers, in press)” (93).
• “In a BBC article on ‘Lies, Propaganda, and Fake News,’ Kevin Kelly, cofounder of Wired magazine, said: ‘Truth is no longer dictated by authorities, but is networked by peers. For every fact there is a counterfact and all these facts and counterfacts look alike online, which is confusing to most people’ (Gray, 2017)” (97).
• “In order to understand the biases that influence the way individuals process information, scholars underscore two fundamental motivations: directional motivation and accuracy motivation (Kunda, 1990; Taber & Lodge, 2006). Individuals can be guided by directional motivation or the desire to justify conclusions that align with prior beliefs. In this case, information that is consistent with one’s prior preferences tends to be accepted uncritically and judged positively, whereas information that counters one’s prior beliefs is scrutinized and often evaluated negatively (Ditto, Scepansky, Munro, Apanovitch, & Lockhart, 1998). On the other hand, when guided by accuracy motivation, individuals will exert more effort to carefully and deeply analyze information in order to understand issues (Kunda, 1990). / Directional motivation is particularly common when processing political information. For example, political scientists Milton Lodge and Charles Taber (2005) found that emotions often surface when engaging with sociopolitical concepts that, in turn, trigger ‘hot cognition,’ whereby positive and negative feeling bias subsequent processing information. This process leads individuals to seek out evidence that aligns with their preexisting views (confirmation bias), to attempt to dismiss perspectives that contradict their beliefs (disconfirmation bias), and to consider claims that align with their views as stronger and more accurate (prior attitude effect) (Kunda, 1990; Taber & Lodge, 2006)” (98).
• “It is important for educators to help students recognize when they have strong beliefs and learn how to counteract the impact of directional motivation on their judgement of political content” (99).
• “Drawing on studies we have conducted, we describe three approaches to civic media literacy education that our findings suggest are key for attending to the relationship between digital media and misinformation:
1. Educators can support youth in developing metacognition related to judging the accuracy and credibility of online information.
2. Educators can provide youth with more nuanced skills and strategies for assessing the accuracy of truth claims.
3. Educators can provide young people with ongoing opportunities to reflect and practice the skills and strategies they have learned in order to instill habits that will transfer across various settings” (100).
• “In order to assess the credibility and accuracy of information, young people may benefit from developing an awareness of the role their individual thinking plays in understanding and evaluating information and in reflecting on their own personal biases in relationship to that analysis. Metacognition—the awareness of one’s leaning process—often takes the form of an internal dialogue where students are thinking about their own thinking (Biggs, 1987; Bransford, Brown, & Cocking, 2000)” (101).
• “Studies has found that high-quality civic media literacy education can be beneficial (Kahne & Bowyer, 2017; Martens & Hobbs, 2015). In addition, research shows that large numbers of students are not receiving the civic education necessary to support informed and active participation in civic and political life (Gould, Jamieson, Levine, McConnell, & Smith, 2011)” (104).
March 21, 2023
Overall I give this book a 4/5 stars. Despite the repetition of content I found it to be both engaging and informative. The information presented is very relevant to our society and it provided me with a lot of insight regarding the term fake news and the dangers present in our media. Previously I had little knowledge regarding the term, so I found that this book caused me to become more aware of myself and others. I would recommend this book to my peers. Although it is targeted towards educators I think anyone who read this would benefit.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews