How teachers can train students to discern between fake and real news stories, and encourage healthy skepticism when reading or viewing news stories.

1. OUTTHINKING

3. Examples
• 1835, The Sun newspaper reprints a series of articles
from The Edinburgh Courant revealing the discovery
of a civilization on the moon!
• 1938, news broadcast from the crash site of a metal
cylinder describing tentacled aliens climbing out.
Mass hysteria and panic ensued!
• 1782, Benjamin Franklin cranks out entire fake issue
of a real Boston newspaper, including gruesome story
about American forces recovering bags full of
“SCALPS from our unhappy Country-folks.”

4. Las Vegas Shooting
Social media pictures of
missing relatives…quite a
few were actually porn
stars
“Shooter Identified”
photos of more than one
person completely
unrelated to the shooting
Fake articles on some
news sites

5. Breitbart News
story claiming an illegal
immigrant was arrested
for starting northern
California wildfires.
Story was completely
false, the Department of
Forestry had not even
established a cause for
the fires yet.

6. Do Students Fall for This?
Absolutely

7. What Can Teachers Do?
• Build student experience
• Opportunities to interact with news in the classroom
• Build time into your curriculum for sharing articles
and discussing what makes them news…or not
• Train students to read/watch news skeptically so
they can make sound judgments on their own

8. A Good Reader Will Ask
• What’s below the headline?
• Is the source I’m reading the one I think it is?
• Who is this author?
• What facts are supporting this story?
• Is there any explicit bias here?
• Is the language incendiary or provocative?
• What is the mission of the publisher?
• Is this same story reported elsewhere?

9. Watch Out For
• Obvious spelling or grammar errors
• Headlines (or text) in all caps
• Inflammatory headlines
• Domain names that end in weird letters--lo or .co
• Dates that don’t match—old stories or photos
• Accurate stories used to camouflage fake news
• Satire re-distributed as legitimate news
• Your personal bias

10. Citizen Journalism vs. Grapevine
• Citizen reports are at times the only source (Arab
Spring), but most people are not trained to overcome
their bias. Some sites rely on their audience members
for some or even all their content.
• Axios
• BuzzFeed
• The Conversation
• Medium
• The Verge
• Vox

11. Publisher Bias

12. Simple Fact Checking
• Too lazy to do all this work yourself ?
• FactCheck.org
• Snopes.com
• The Washington Post Fact Checker
• PolitiFact.com
• Reverse image search using Google