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Mediabiasfactcheck Com As A Tool For Lateral Reading

Bonisiwe Shabane
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mediabiasfactcheck com as a tool for lateral reading

Katie Odhner, Reference and Instruction Librarian at Penn State Abington In our current media landscape, we find ourselves inundated with news content from innumerable unfamiliar sources, often presented out of context on social media platforms or through news aggregator apps. When we follow the good instinct to investigate an unknown source, our first step is often to examine it vertically—in other words, to evaluate the website by gathering information from the source itself. For instance, we may inspect the website’s appearance, or read the “about page.” However, all sources, and particularly those engaging in poor journalistic practices, are likely to portray themselves in a positive light, so... Instead, research from Stanford University suggests that we should first read laterally—go outside a source to see what others are saying about it. Consulting reliable sources with questions like “Who funds this source?” “How are other sources reporting on the same claims?” or “Does this source have a history of good reporting?” can help contextualize and verify...

Reading laterally to assess the credibility of a publication can start with a Google search, or it could start with consulting information from websites which report on media. One such website is Media Bias/Fact Check (https://mediabiasfactcheck.com). Media Bias/Fact Check (MBFC) is a non-partisan site which provides two scores for over 8000 media sources: a bias rating and a factual reporting rating. Each entry also provides information which explains or contextualizes the rating. For example, the entry for The Guardian (pictured below) explains its “Left Center” rating by pointing to a column in which an editor explicitly stated that the publication is “centre-left,” citing surveys which found... To explain the “MIXED” factual rating, the analysis brings up a list of failed factchecks, and mentions that the publication has relied on sources that have failed factchecks in the past.

“These media sources have a slight to moderate liberal bias. They often publish factual information that utilizes loaded words (wording that attempts to influence an audience by appeals to emotion or stereotypes) to favor liberal causes. These sources are generally trustworthy for information but may require further investigation. See all Left-Center sources. Overall, we rate The Guardian Left-Center biased based on story selection that moderately favors the left and Mixed for factual reporting due to numerous failed fact checks over the last five years.” –MediaBiasFactCheck.com This page hosts daily news stories about the media, social media, and the journalism industry.

Get the latest Hirings and Firings, Media Transactions, Controversies, and… Fact Check, FactCheck, Least Biased, Original Media Bias Fact Check selects and publishes fact checks from around the world. We only utilize fact-checkers that are either a signatory of the International… Welcome to our weekly media literacy quiz. This quiz will test your knowledge of the past week’s events with a focus on facts, misinformation, bias,…

Fact Check, FactCheck, Least Biased, Original Lateral reading is a simple and effective means of evaluating online information sources to help you learn if an unfamiliar website is conveying worthwhile, trustworthy information. When you come across a site new to you, don't start by actually looking at the page itself, or looking for artificial markers of "legitimacy" like the About page, URL, or citations. Instead, move laterally away from the page by opening a new tab in your browser and conducting a web search for the site or its author to see what others have to say about... Bad actors on the internet will, of course, tell you they're trustworthy, but newspaper stories, fact checking sites, or even Wikipedia articles about them may help you discover the site's ill intentions. The following short videos explain lateral reading in greater detail:

Crumb Library: 315-267-2485 Crane Library: 315-267-2451 library@potsdam.edu Text Us!: 315-277-3730 SUNY Potsdam College Libraries 44 Pierrepont Ave Potsdam, NY 13676 About 2.5 quintillion bytes of new data are created every day, according to IBM. Scientist David Helfand says that is equal to 5 trillion books, enough to stretch around the equator on a bookshelf over 1,600 feet high. In other words, the internet is constantly updated with new articles, videos, photos, posts — and even websites — every day. In the age of so much information, it’s getting harder and harder to distinguish between good and bad sources.

So, if you want to evaluate a site’s reliability, how should you do it? Most people determine the credibility of a website by reading vertically, staying inside the website to decide if it’s reliable. We have always been taught to read this way— from the top to the bottom. “When trying to determine who is behind online information, people … make judgments based on features internal to a website like its URL, design, functionality or content. However, these features are not effective ways to evaluate a site and need to be explicitly challenged,” researchers at Stanford History Education Group explain. After studying professional fact-checkers, the Stanford History Education Group found that another approach is far more effective for assessing sites: lateral reading.

In this short video from Crash Course: Navigating Digital Information, John Green teaches you how to employ lateral reading in evaluating your information. Lateral reading means: “instead of digging deep into the site at hand...lateral readers don’t spend time on the page or site until they’ve first gotten their bearings by looking at what other sites and... they get off the page...they open up many tabs in their browser. From Caulfield, M. A. (2017).

Web Literacy for Student Fact-Checkers. https://collection.bccampus.ca/textbooks/web-literacy-for-student-fact-checkers-361/ GO WIDE: Lateral reading is a strategy for investigating who's behind an unfamiliar online source by leaving the webpage and opening a new browser tab to see what trusted websites say about the unknown... It helps you determine an author’s credibility, intent and biases by searching for articles on the same topic by other writers (to see how they are covering it) and for other articles by the... It's one of the primary strategies employed by professional fact checkers. The lateral reading concept and the term itself developed from research conducted by the Stanford History Education Group (SHEG), led by Sam Wineburg, founder and executive director of SHEG.

The term Lateral Reading was coined by Sam Wineburg and Sarah McGrew in their 2019 study, "Lateral Reading and the Nature of Expertise", on internet source evaluation techniques. The strategy of Lateral Reading employed by expert fact checkers involves opening a new browser tab to evaluate a source based on information from other trusted sources, rather than evaluating the source itself for... Lateral reading is similar to Triangulation but focuses more on evaluating the source of the information rather than the information itself. Search for information about the company or website. Tip: To exclude results from the website itself, use the -site operator. For example "News Target" -site:https://newstarget.com

Wikipedia and established news outlets such as New York Times and Wall Street Journal have standards for reliability and fact checking. Other source evaluation techniques suggest visiting a website's "About" page. This page is usually written to favorably represent the what the purpose of the website. You can use a domain lookup tool like ICANN Lookup to find out who a website is registered to. Use fact checking sites such as Snopes or others listed on this guide to fact check. If claims are proceeded by "research indicates", search for research articles on Articles+ or Google Scholar.

News without bias does not exist. There will always be some level of bias and that is okay as long as we can acknowledge it and take that into account as we consume information. As you select sources for academic research, you want to make sure you are selecting sources that provide accurate evidence and fact-based information. This will ensure the reliability of the information. Media bias checkers provide you with information about known biases and reliability of news publications with an overall rating. They will typically provide information about a political leaning and an overall rating for the reliability of their news reporting.

This is a good lateral reading strategy to use when you are evaluating a news source. Search Tip: If there is a media bias check associated with a source, you can usually locate it by searching for the title of the news source paired with the phrase "media bias." Look... This article is from Bloomberg, a news website, which makes using a media bias check a good option for evaluating with lateral reading. Do an internet search for "Bloomberg media bias." In 2017, a group of researchers in the Graduate School of Education at Stanford University conducted a study in which they asked fact checkers, PhD historians, and Stanford undergraduates to examine the websites of... Each group was asked to evaluate the trustworthiness of the two organizations.

All of the fact-checkers were able to determine that the American Academy of Pediatrics was the legitimate professional organization, while the American College of Pediatricians was actually a cloaked hate group with a hidden... Only 50% of the historians, and 20% of the Stanford undergraduates were able to identify the Academy as the legitimate professional organization. The researchers suggest that the fact-checkers were able to sniff out the cloaked hate group because they didn't just stay on the organizations' websites. They opened new browser tabs and searched for information about each group using Google and Wikipedia. The historians and undergraduates, however, mostly stayed on each organization's website, read the "about" section, and looked for things like misspellings and banner ads to determine trustworthiness. So-called "fake news" websites and organizations with a hidden agenda are getting very good at deception, and, in order to be responsible Internet users, we need to be more vigilant about verifying our sources.

One strategy that we can use is "lateral reading." Good lateral readers use the simple techniques of the fact-checkers in the Stanford study example. If you would like a detailed explanation of how lateral reading works, please watch the video below. For more information, please see: Wineburg, Sam and McGrew, Sarah, Lateral Reading: Reading Less and Learning More When Evaluating Digital Information (October 6, 2017). Stanford History Education Group Working Paper No. 2017-A1 . Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3048994 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3048994

One of the most effective strategies for evaluating information found online is to engage in lateral reading. Lateral reading involves leaving the website, opening a new tab, and seeing what trusted digital sources say about that website and/or claim. The below CrashCourse video explains how you can use lateral reading to fact-check a source. It is important to note that several tools have been developed from lateral reading, most notably the SIFT method. This strategy walks through four "moves" that you need to take before reading and engaging with an online source. For more information, see the SIFT Method infographic.

This video was created by CrashCourse in partnership with MediaWise, the Poynter Institute, and the Stanford History Education Group. This video was created by CNTRL-F with support from CIVIX. ⚠️Is a link not working? Click here to report it. 660-248-6271 library@centralmethodist.edu Starting in 2025, we have a new methodology that aims to assess media outlets’ ideological bias and factual reliability systematically.

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