Recognizing Bias in the News

Many of you have probably seen the picture on the right in the form that shows up on this Patheos blog post. The group who runs this blog got to discussing it, and then Sandy recreated it adjusting the labels to be more neutral in tone for possible use in the classroom (Thank you Sandy!).

Given the issues with fake news during the election and our president's predilection to call reporting he disagrees with fake news, I felt doing something with this in my classroom would be worth the time.

To put this in context, we've spent much of the year on rhetorical analysis, but are moving into a practice of argument. My students have been very aware of the election, but less savvy about where they get their information. I teach in Washington state in a county that is less reliably liberal than Seattle is a mere 40 minutes or so to the north. My county goes democratic on many issues, but republican on others. My AP Lang classes are primarily more liberal with a very small handful who supported Trump. Those who support him feel in the minority. As many of you wherever you may live, I would have to tread lightly. So, this is what I did.

I began by distributing a black and white version from our school copier and put a color version up using my projector. We walked through it, navigating from the middle outward and from clickbait to complex. I let them know when I wasn't familiar with a news outlet, when I'd only heard of them, when I accessed them regularly, or when I had a subscription in the case of The Atlantic. I told them about how my father gets his information primarily from Breitbart and Facebook and we discussed how that created holes in his knowledge, caused him to believe things were true that had long been proven false, and made it difficult to talk to him. Living in one of the lower corners can skew your understanding of the world and even cause you to make decisions based on falsehoods. We also discussed how the BBC and The Guardian were British-based and that this list was not exhaustive by any means or completely authoritative.

Their assignment was this.

Where we get our news seems to matter more and more. Many people, like my dad, live in news bubbles of questionable or downright low quality driven by partisan fervor and advertising profits. To be an educated person in our increasingly fractured society requires that we understand what the news landscape looks like and how the various entities form their arguments.

Your task is this:

• Pick a news story that will have been reported on and discussed across the spectrum.
• Read about that from one or more mainstream sources.
• Then read about it in one or more partisan sources on each side.
• Lastly, write up you observations about how their bias manifests itself. Refer to the texts to do so. Are the fringe sources telling the whole truth? Lies? Hyper-focusing on something and blowing it out of proportion? Using inflammatory diction? Mocking the other side? Etc. Etc.

Post this on your blog.

News Source Chart in Color (PDF)

As a side note, Bucknell University has this site to help figure out how to determine whether a site is credible or not. http://researchbysubject.bucknell.edu/framework/auth

The next day in class, we pulled up their blogs on the projector, and students talked us through where they went and what they discovered. This made of a very interesting class period. I invited people to ask questions of the presenters, and I modeled that as well.

What they discovered was that the center sources were noticeably balanced. On the other hand, the sources on the fringes had recognizable problems, often only providing one side of the story. They noticed this particularly when the fringe sources were going negative on something. A few kids found deceptive stories with "facts" only reported by a single source on either the far right or the far left. They were actually quite scandalized at how poor the writing and editing was on the fringes (I confessed to them that that warmed my English teacher heart). Where the Economist stretched them intellectually, InfoWars might only quote a bunch of tweets from random people with commentary that amounted to "See what we mean?"

We ended our day with the encouragement that no matter where you live, be in Fox News or Huff Post (no one felt it safe to live in the lower corners), as educated, thinking individuals we should spend significant time in the middle so we can get all the information and have access to mainstream, balanced views of issues and the world we live in.

This activity was very positive. My students told me it was very helpful and made them feel empowered. One of my AP Lit classes saw it when I turned on the projector before I could switch the input to the document camera. They wanted to know what it was and why they didn't get to do it last year. Their take was that it sounded like a great assignment, and they wanted to do that instead of Heart of Darkness (can you believe it!?). If I do this again next year, I will likely place our local news sources (print, TV, and radio) on this chart as well.

I'd be interested to know what your students think should you choose to try this or something similar. Please leave feedback in the comments below.