Fake News on the Rise.
There has been the incidence of fake news everywhere in the world, especially in the United States. The fake news range from politics to magazines of news about the celebrities and so on. People are now making a living out of the fake news, which in other words are called "new yellow journalism". The journalists themselves know that the news they post are fake, but to entice people to rush and buy magazines or go to the site of the news to read, they have to be pushed by what will be able to force them to rush to it. Something really has to there, which will make readers eager to find out, by means of reading. Fake news in its sense, raise the curiosity of readers.
In an article "For the 'new yellow journalists,' opportunity comes in clicks and bucks" by Terrence McCoy on November 20, 2016, Wade and Goldman admitted "You have to trick people into reading the news.".
In terms of politics for example, each political party tries to make its policies and ideas captivating by making headline news that will create a very impressive news about them and then blackmail the other by any means possible, with something that is never true. Once something is boldly written in the headlines seems interesting, readers think reading it is worthwhile.
Fakes news are broadcasted in almost all the social media avenues, ranging from Facebook, twitter and so on.
There has to be a means by which the general public and students in particular would be able to make a distinction between the news of what is fake and what is real. According to an article "5 Ways Teachers Are Fighting Fake News" by Sophia Alvarez Boyd on February 16, 2017, fives ways are adopted as a means of teachers showing students how to sieve information, the real information from the fake ones. With this, one of the major criteria is to teach students skills needed for media literacy, which include the source of the information. Again information has to be compared with what you already know about the subject, in other words, your previous knowledge, is the information current? can the sources be verified, does it have a copyright? among others.
In as much as we like to read the news and get information, we as academic readers have to find means of sifting the true from the fake information so we can make academic judgement about issues.
Just like people copy information from Wikipedia for academic work, so do readers just read information of the internet without checking the quality of the sources.They make it very persuasive that readers are likely to believe it and that is where they make their money
ReplyDeleteJulia,
ReplyDeleteI wonder--is this "especially in the United States" or at this point, is fake news global? Of course, much depends on one's internet access to get to much of this content, but even in North Korea there is a prevalence of the state releasing fake news about the world (see this link: http://www.globalresearch.ca/american-media-hacking-fake-news-about-north-korea/5574827).
I like your approach in the last paragraph when you discuss Boyd's list of ways to fight fake news. The question I have now is, how to we get students to adhere to the rules? What if they slip back to old habits?
This fake news is becoming a serious issue! It's really frightening to know that more and more yellow journalism is beginning to emerge. It really seems like we just can't trust anything/anybody anymore. You did a good job shining the light on this issue. I can tell that you did lots of research on this topic. Just work on your format and perhaps include some pictures to make it a little more appealing.
ReplyDelete