News Literacy Results are In!

The Sullivan University Library celebrated National Library Week with the theme of The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly: News Literacy. One part of the news literacy theme involved two quizzes, which tested participants’ knowledge and evaluation skills of news stories. Questions on the quizzes were about subjects as varied as the Pope’s comments on the 2016 U.S. Presidential election to whether or not a major retailer was selling a rock in its stores.

The results are in, and they show that about 20 people took at least one of the quizzes. With average scores on tests A and B at 69% and 40% respectively, these quizzes reflect how tough it can be to determine what is real and what is fiction.

The images below provide a snapshot of each test’s statistics.

Test A

 

Test B

 

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NLW: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly-Get Real

 

Today's post has links to not one but two sites to enable you to become more news literate.

1. BuzzFeed has a checklist people can use to determine if what they are reading is legitimate or not. One of the Sullivan University instructors, Brielle White, recommended the checklist to the library staff.
   
2. The Center for News Literacy has a glossary of terms, like bias and indirect evidence, related to news literacy. Check out the site to see how well you know the lingo. 

 

Selling the News

As the song, "Selling the News" by the band Switchfoot says, “Opinions are easier to swallow than facts, the greys instead of the whites and the blacks.”

The University of West Georgia’s Ingram Library developed a website to raise awareness of what resources are available to help students evaluate the information they see.  .

After visiting the fact-checking site, let the Sullivan librarians know whether or not the site was helpful.

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Source: Foreman, J. (2011). Selling the News. [Recorded by Switchfoot]. On Vice Verses. [CD]. New York: Atlantic Records.

Image from Flickr: https://goo.gl/images/B7kLZi 

NLW: The Good, the Bad, & the Ugly: 60 Minutes Reports

In this 60 Minutes segment that aired on March 26, 2017, CBS reporter Scott Pelley discusses the how easy it can be to generate false news.  

NLW-The Good, the Bad & the Ugly: Real or Altered?

Photo Fact-Checking in a Digital Age

Frog takes a trip during a NASA launch. Real? Or Altered?

1. First, ask some questions about the image? Where did you see it? Is it associated with a news story? Is there an image credit listed? If the image was of a famous person, can you find that specific image on the person’s verified social media accounts?
2. Next, dig deeper and do a reverse image search on the specific image using Google Images or TinEye.com. To do so, right click on the image and copy the image’s url by selecting either the option to Copy (Bing) or Copy Link Address (Chrome).
3. Go to Google’s image search, http://images.google.com, click on the camera icon that is inside the search box and paste the image’s url into the search box. A list of links where the image appears online will come on the screen.
4. On the website TinEye, https://www.tineye.com/, paste the image url in the search box to see links to where the specific image appears online.
5. If the image you searched for looks different from the images that appear in the links found by Google or TinEye, be suspicious of the content of the image you have.

Also, check out this informative video by the News Literacy Project’s Chicago program manager. The program manager walks viewers step-by-step through the process of determining the legitimacy of a photograph.

By the way, the NASA picture at the top of this page is real (Haskell, 2013).

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Sources:

• Haskell, J. (2013, September 12). Flying Frog Caught on Camera at NASA Moon Rocket Launch. Retrieved from: http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/nasa-rocket-launch-accidentally-lifts-frog-space/story?id=20237426
• Owen, M. (2014, June 10). Photo fact-checking in the digital age [Video file]. Retrieved from https://youtu.be/Ewrx1lDhVPE



NLW*: The Good, the Bad & the Ugly-News Literacy

Hoaxy

Hoaxy is a beta website, still in the testing phase, created by the Indiana University Network Science Institute and the Center for Complex Networks and Systems Research. Per the creators of the Hoaxy website it is designed to help users of the web to, “visualize the spread of claims and related fact checking online” (Hoaxy, 2017).

The site also says:
-The claims may be a fake news article, hoax, rumor, conspiracy theory, satire, or even an accurate report. Hoaxy, “does not decide what claims are true or not.” Users are encouraged to select the links to fact-checking websites like Snopes or FactCheck.org to determine the validity of a claim (Hoaxy, 2017). 

Anyone can use Hoaxy to explore how claims spread across social media. Users can select any matching fact-checking articles to observe how those spread as well.

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*NLW = National Library Week

Sources:

• Hoaxy. (2017). Frequently asked questions about Hoaxy.  Retrieved from: https://hoaxy.iuni.iu.edu/faq.html

• Shao, C., Ciampaglia, G.L., Flammini, A., and Menczer, F. (2016). Hoaxy: A Platform for Tracking Online Misinformation. In Proceedings of the 25th International Conference Companion on World Wide Web (WWW '16 Companion). Pages 745-750. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2872518.2890098



National Library Week: The Good, the Bad & the Ugly-News Literacy

Allsides

The library staff found many resources about news literacy. While we were not able to display all of our tips for you, DO come into the Library and Learning Resource Center to check out our display.

Each class day this month we will share a video, a website, or a written checklist that can help you be more informed and news literate. Today's site of interest is AllSides. 

Allsides is a website that, “unlike regular news services, exposes bias and provides multiple angles on the same story so you can quickly get the full picture, not just one slant.”

Visitors to this website can see a news story about the attempt to repeal the Affordable Care Act from a variety of sources from the political right, the political left, and the middle.

In addition to seeing news stories from different political perspectives, the site has a glossary of controversial terms with commentary from multiple viewpoints and a list of different media outlets (NBC, CBS, Fox, Buzzfeed) and their typical biases.

See how news literate you are by taking one of our news literacy quizzes:
News literacy test A

News literacy test B

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Source: Allsides. (2017). All about Allsides. Retrieved from: https://www.allsides.com/about 

News Literacy Quizzes-How Literate Are You?

News literacy test A

News literacy test B