• Quick connections

• Craig Silverman, BuzzFeed News’ media editor, tweeted a thread showing how Your News Wire — a website described by The Hollywood Reporter as spreading “murky fact and slippery spin” — blends partisan takes on actual events with completely fake news.
  • Note: This trend of blending fabricated pieces of information with legitimate news reports (in this instance with a partisan spin) is a strategy that students need to be aware of as they learn to evaluate sources of information.
• Jordan Klepper’s new Comedy Central show, The Opposition, may have its fans, but I have concerns about the language in its social media promotions.
• Shahak Shapira, a Israeli comedian who lives in Berlin, recently gained admin control of several right-wing Facebook groups in Germany and changed their names (and their focus).
  • Note: This is an interesting flip on the trend of clickbait accounts that spread “amazing” content to get followers, then change their names and begin posting political content.
• Twitter accounts with suspected ties to Russia were active on the NFL controversy this week, tweeting on all sides of the issue with hashtags such as #boycottNFL, #StandForOurAnthem and #takeaknee.
• Tweets from President Trump’s personal account (@realDonaldTrump) expressing support for Sen. Luther Strange in Tuesday’s Alabama Republican primary runoff were deleted after Strange lost the race. (This is why Politwoops, from ProPublica, is such an important archive.)
  • Discuss: Is it OK for politicians to delete tweets? Why or why not?
  • Idea: Use Politwoops to see whether your students’ senators and representatives have deleted any tweets (and make sure your students know who their elected officials are!). For more on this, see "@MrSilva Suggests" below.
• Axios reported that the Federal Election Commission is considering new disclosure rules for digital political ads.
  • Discuss: Is this a good idea? What possible drawbacks might result from these new rules? What are the drawbacks of not imposing new rules?

• 'Frida Sofia'

The New York Times this week reconstructed the spread of what turned out to be a false story about a girl trapped alive in the ruins of a Mexico City elementary school after the Sept. 19 earthquake. Widespread public concern began, the Times said, with a report broadcast on the country’s largest television news network, Televisa, that cited rescue workers on the scene. The Televisa reporter, again citing workers on the scene, subsequently told viewers that rescuers had made contact with the girl and that her name was Frida Sofia; the Associated Press soon followed with a similar report, quoting another worker. Rescue efforts focused on the area where the girl was believed to be, while stories of hope and a frantic race against time spread across social media. In the end, the girl did not exist.

• Note: This is a useful case study in just how much can go wrong at the scene of a breaking news event, especially one that involves tragic loss of life. In this case, journalists, whose access to the scene was restricted, relied on eyewitness accounts that turned out to be inaccurate. It’s remarkably similar to the Sago Mine disaster in January 2006, in which a relayed message from inside a collapsed coal mine in West Virginia resulted in an announcement that the 13 miners trapped in the mine were alive when, in fact, only one was.

• Health care hot seat

Two pieces about the health care bill proposed by Republican Sens. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and Bill Cassidy of Louisiana (the most recent attempt to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act) raise some interesting news literacy questions.

First, Rich Noyes from NewsBusters (the blog of the Media Research Center, a conservative-leaning media watchdog) wrote last Friday that both ABC News and NBC News had aired reports on the legislation that featured parents of children who have serious medical conditions — but neither disclosed that those parents had engaged in advocacy on the issue of health care: One was featured in an ad urging a Republican senator to vote “no” on earlier repeal/replace legislation, and the other participated in a June protest on Capitol Hill.

Second, the Daily Beast reported on Saturday that late-night talk show host Jimmy Kimmel, whose son was born with a heart defect that required immediate surgery and who has been outspoken in his opposition to the Graham-Cassidy bill, has received guidance and talking points from Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and other opponents of the legislation.

• Discuss: News organizations should try to present a variety of views in their news reports, but do they need to disclose any partisan or activist activities that the people featured in those reports have participated in? Should the people who are interviewed be truly unbiased, or should news organizations specifically look for a range of opinions? Should Kimmel have disclosed the fact that he was getting research from Schumer and others who opposed the Graham-Cassidy bill? Why or why not?
• Idea: Collect and examine recent coverage of the health care legislation from ABC News and NBC News (perhaps using the TV News Archive from the Internet Archive) and see if you can find evidence of systematic bias. Do the allegations made by the Media Research Center hold up?
• Note: These topics may make the concept of “false balance” available for discussion. Also note that it might be good to advise students not to judge a news organization’s overall coverage of an issue based on a single report; instead, they should look at a range of reports over time.

 Crowdsourced

Last week, I called attention to a Brookings Institution survey conducted by John Villasenor, a Brookings senior fellow and UCLA professor. It found, among other things, that nearly 20 percent of college students believe that violence is an acceptable response to a speaker who makes “offensive and hurtful statements.”

Sift reader, sociologist and educator Corey Remle pointed out that the way the study was conducted has been called into question. Critics of the survey, including polling experts, note that it was not administered to a random sample of students, the methodology was unclear and no part of the work was subjected to peer review.

• Note: If these criticisms hold up, the attention the study received — including an op-ed column in The Washington Post, an editorial in The Wall Street Journal, a report by Breitbart and comments made elsewhere — is a good example of the way that fact patterns (in this case, colleges canceling guest speakers after student protests) can sometimes solidify into storylines that can influence news coverage. In other words, once an idea gains traction — such as the notion that college students may be intolerant of ideas they don’t agree with or find offensive — journalists, along with everyone else, need to guard against the innate tendency to read this idea into events when it may not be present. This headline in The Weekly Standard demonstrates how this can happen: “Survey Confirms What Many Suspected.”
• Related and relevant: Attorney General Jeff Sessions spoke about the state of free speech on college campuses at Georgetown University Law Center on Tuesday.

Other Stuff We Read This Week

• “Of course, it's a good practice to edit out a mistake, so it doesn't get repeated. And sometimes NPR will edit out a mistake and then acknowledge it on the digital transcript page. That's what happened in the case of this Morning Edition interview that mischaracterized the violence in Charlottesville, Va. But often, NPR's mistakes, along with material that is either confusing or inappropriate, are simply edited out and never acknowledged.”
  • Elizabeth Jensen, NPR: "Airing The Dirty Laundry: Too Few of NPR's Corrections Are Heard On The Radio"
     
• VIDEO: “VOA Director Amanda Bennett presented ‘The Power of Truth in a World of Disinformation’ at the ‘Media Meets Literacy’ conference in Sarajevo, Bosnia. In her talk, she noted the difference between fact-based journalism and propaganda. ‘What do we do at the Voice of America? ... We are doubling down on traditional journalistic values, on fairness, on facts, because we believe that in the end, people recognize the truth.’”