Fake News is Not New
From the desk of Alice,
I was consuming my daily dose of social media and came across this post from the Washington Post.
The general gist of the article is that kids are having a hard time understanding what is real and what is not real in the news. This is one of many pieces that are on the Fake News Bandwagon floating around cyberspace.
This Fake News business is not actually new news to anyone. Kids have had a hard time understanding what is real news for years and truth be told, I also know several adults who cannot tell the difference either. None of this is part of modern day technology problems, reality TV or our political climate.
The real crux of this Fake News issue is that readers need to be taught to think critically about sources of information and writers need to carefully evaluate the perspective and craft of the writer. And they need to actually apply this knowledge when reading on-line. In the age of the internet, it seems like everyone has lost their collective minds along with everything they ever learned in a high school English class.
I went to high school in the 1980’s. Back then, students actually wrote papers on paper, moved on to typing them on typewriters, used correction ribbon and white out, and by the end of the decade had learned to word-process. I did not have to wrangle information from the internet but I did have to write old fashioned term papers and cite sources.
It was during this time that “someone” in our high school (it remains a legend) cited The National Enquirer as a source for their senior term paper. Shocking. Our precious teacher gave us a stern reminder that The National Enquirer was not a credible source for news. It was not to be used as a source for information on anything we submitted to her and it was really nothing more than entertainment. Her tone implied that The National Enquirer was total garbage compared to the masterpieces of Shakespeare, Orwell and Steinbeck she so eloquently helped us digest.
During those years, The National Enquirer had been at the center of several celebrity lawsuits that involved lies they printed. And to make things even more confusing to a young high school writer, The National Enquirer would take nuggets of real news and twist them as well as participate in unethical journalism practices like paying people for fake stories. Sound familiar?
Fast forward to 2017 when Fake News is supposedly new news and the crisis of the day. It is not. The sky is not falling. There is nothing new about the printed word being used for personal agendas, being half-true, or omitting key pieces of information. Our saintly high school English teachers have been fighting this fight for a full generation now- maybe even longer.
The solution here is simple. Students need to continue to read, write, and cite sources until the cows come home. This is the only way students are going to get really good at being critical readers and writers. And I also propose teachers explicitly talk to our young readers and writers about the art of persuasion, propaganda, and author’s word choice. Students need to know how to recognize the chinks in the armor of writers and when to move on to other solid sources.
I am not saying this is easy given the lengths people and businesses are going to in order to get clicks, shares, and likes. I am saying it is worth the time in our schools to stay focused on quality literacy instruction. We need students to spend the majority of their time reading and writing and thinking critically in a variety of subjects. Although the science and social studies departments might not be happy with me saying this, they need to be teaching this, too. This whole Fake News business is primarily informational print related to the content areas. Thank goodness most of our students realize that fiction is supposed to be fake and that non-fiction is the genre that is a mine field.
So thank you high school English teachers. If your students followed your instructions, they essentially could eliminate the Fake News forever.
Now that would be news.