They went looking for crap, and by golly they found plenty of it.
Students in Howard Rheingold’s journalism class at Stanford recently teamed up with NewsTrust, a nonprofit Web site that enables people to review and rate news articles for their level of quality, in a search for lousy journalism.
The students, along with other NewsTrust users, spent the last week of February engaged in the “News Hunt for Bad Journalism.” The idea was to highlight work that fell victim to poor sourcing, bias, inaccuracy, spin, or other journalistic lapses. Each day was dedicated to a different type of reporting, from straight news reports to opinion columns to the work by partisan media watchdogs like Media Research Center and fact-checkers such as PolitiFact. A listing of the least-trusted stories is here. Some of the news organizations that fell into their crosshairs include The New York Times, the New York Post, the Washington Times, The Nation, Reuters, and the Associated Press.
Much like the fact-checking program at the Tilburg School of Journalism in the Netherlands that I wrote about last year, the News Hunt is a way of getting young journalists to critically examine the work of professionals. For Rheingold, an influential writer and thinker about the online world and the man credited with coining the phrase “virtual community,” it’s all about teaching them “crap detection.”
Taking inspiration from a famous quote by Ernest Hemingway—”Every man should have a built-in automatic crap detector operating inside him”—last year Rheingold wrote an important essay about the topic for the San Francisco Chronicle’s Web site. Crap detection, which could be considered part of the family of skills that help ensure accuracy, is essential for journalists. And in this age of collaboration and citizen journalism, it’s also an important skill for members of the public.
“With the Internet we have so many people who are not traditional journalists breaking so many stories, so we have to face the fact that it’s no longer just people in the newsroom who are providing the first look at the news,” Rheingold told me. “And we need to improve their skills.”
He said a focus on information literacy is the “natural conclusion” to his long career of writing and teaching. What’s at stake is no less than the quality of the information available in our society, and our collective ability to evaluate its accuracy and value.
“Are we going to have a world filled with people who pass along urban legends and hoaxes?” Rheingold said, “or are people going to educate themselves about these tools [for crap detection] so we will have collective intelligence instead of misinformation, spam, urban legends, and hoaxes?”
Rheingold’s essay offers a variety of advice that, collectively, is a useful guide to verifying information online, be it in a Web site, tweet, or article. From his essay:
The answer to almost any question is available within seconds, courtesy of the invention that has altered how we discover knowledge - the search engine. Materializing answers from the air turns out to be the easy part - the part a machine can do. The real difficulty kicks in when you click down into your search results. At that point, it’s up to you to sort the accurate bits from the misinfo, disinfo, spam, scams, urban legends, and hoaxes.
Journalists often make mistakes because we fail to properly evaluate Web sources, or because we lack the skills to drill down into search results and find the best information. (That’s a skill possessed by news librarians, but many of them are losing their jobs.) When we fail to find the proper information online—or unwittingly advance a hoax—we pollute the information stream, and also open ourselves up to the ever-growing cadre of amateur fact-checkers. I previously called fact-checking “one of the great American pastimes of the Internet age.” But, as Rheingold noted, the opposite is also true: the manufacture and promotion of bullshit is endemic. One couldn’t exist without the other.
That makes Rheingold’s essay, his recent experiment with NewsTrust, and his wiki of online critical-thinking tools” essential reading for journalists. (He’s also writing a book about this topic.) The stakes, he said, are high.
Once again I must comment. I attended a major university as a philosophy student, and to get into a Honors class for critical thinking in the English dept, I had to appeal to the dept chair and have at least a 3.50 GPA on a 4.0 scale [critical thinking classes were not available to everyone] . I found this class to be very helpful, but to assume that every one has access to critical thinking classes or understands the need for critical thinking skills is naive at best .
Critical thinking skills and informal logic should be taught at all levels of education.
#1 Posted by jacques nicole, CJR on Mon 15 Mar 2010 at 07:56 PM
The problem isn't critical thinking. Virtually all the working journalists I know -- as a popular blogger in Taiwan I know many -- are decent critical thinkers. The problem is that journalists generally construct their stories in a way that reflects and reifies the Establishment orthodoxy on things -- what Greenwald would call the Serious People. That problem is a structural feature of journalism that fact checking isn't going make disappear. To themselves, journalists reconstruct this Establishment bias as an act of "cynicism" -- where cynicism functions not as an emotional buffer against the constant flow of ugly news in the world, but as an analytical stance -- in the service of the Establishment view, of course.
Really, good critical thinking is an act of intellectual integrity that means a commitment to self-reflection, to open admission of error and correction, to critical insight and creativity, to a critical posture toward power, and to methodologically sound knowledge. Fact checking is not even on the critical thinking radar; it goes without saying.
Michael Turton
The View from Taiwan
#2 Posted by Michael Turton, CJR on Tue 16 Mar 2010 at 07:11 AM
Could Howard's class look at the terrifying conflicts of interest betwen the WTO GATS agreement, the corporate push for global privatization of health care and health insurance, selling across state lines, the politicians and their contributors, and the rhetoric on health care, "bullshit promises" and "hope"?
we're drowning in bullshit there!
#3 Posted by Muffin, CJR on Tue 16 Mar 2010 at 01:39 PM
Critical thinking only comes when you are exposed to a variety of views for the same item or subject. Otherwise we take it at face value. Our judgment comes from our life experiences-we always see from a perspective. How can we know something is wrong or false if we don't have the information to lead us to that conclusion. Special interests are doing a great job of monopolizing the information available to the public by controling the media outlets. Fortunatly, the internet has been making gains in the flow of other perspectives, but only when the mass media is made to report fairly will we see an effect on the majority of the public. Will this ever happen? No, the best we can achieve is to battle the crap to keep it to a minimum, otherwise we drown in it. Go back and read the writtings of ancient Greeks-this battle will always be on.
#4 Posted by helena, CJR on Wed 24 Mar 2010 at 11:28 AM