In an effort to provide students with an open space to learn about and discuss recent national concerns over “fake news,” we offered four sessions of the workshop “Keepin’ It Real: Tips & Strategies for Evaluating Fake News” during LMU’s Inauguration Teach-In on Friday, January 20, 2017.
During this session, students had the opportunity to talk about how misleading news sources (encompassing misinformation, disinformation, click-bait, propaganda, etc.) have affected their views on civil discourse, specifically relating to the recent U.S. presidential election. By the end of the session, students were more confident in their ability to use critical thinking skills to judge the reliability of news reports, whether they come via print, television or the internet.
Materials from this workshop can be found in our open assignment repository called CORA.
post-truth adjective
Relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.
Oxford Dictionaries recently announced post-truth as its 2016 international Word of the Year. The Oxford Dictionaries Word of the Year is a word or expression chosen to reflect the passing year in language. The concept of post-truth has been in existence for the past decade, but Oxford Dictionaries has seen a spike in frequency this year in the context of the EU referendum in the United Kingdom and the presidential election in the United States. It has also become associated with a particular noun, in the phrase ‘post-truth politics’. Read more...
truthiness noun
Is a quality characterizing a "truth" that a person making an argument or assertion claims to know intuitively "from the gut" or because it "feels right" without regard to evidence, logic, intellectual examination, or facts.
American television comedian Stephen Colbert coined the word in this meaning as the subject of a segment called "The Wørd" during the pilot episode of his political satire program The Colbert Report on October 17, 2005. By using this as part of his routine, Colbert satirized the misuse of appeal to emotion and "gut feeling" as a rhetorical device in contemporaneous socio-political discourse...Truthiness was named Word of the Year for 2005 by the American Dialect Society and for 2006 by Merriam-Webster. (Wikipedia)
*According to a survey by Pew Research Center, most Americans suspect that made-up news impacts decision-making. This sense is shared widely across incomes, education levels, partisan affiliations and most other demographic characteristics. These results come from a survey of 1,002 U.S. adults conducted from Dec. 1 to 4, 2016. For more information, visit: http://www.journalism.org/2016/12/15/many-americans-believe-fake-news-is-sowing-confusion/
