Educational Leadership

WHAT TO DO

Developin trust in mediated information requires effort on our part. While technological advances make it more challenging to determine the accuracy of information, there are a few things we can do whether we're listening to general news sources, reading informative books or articles, talking to others or conducting scolarly research.

1. After reading or listening to an article, tweet, podcast or Youtube video, ask yourself what you just learned. What do you still want to know? Starting with this basic step can be very enlightening.
2. If you're reading or watching a popular information source, consider how the news item tries to make you feel. What emotional language is used?
3. What do you know about the author or creator of the information? What is their background and area of expertise? How might they be trying to position you? What do you know about the organization or business that's sponsoring the information? What people are connected to the organization; who is on their board? What is their bias?
4. Read, watch, and listen very widely. Be diverse in the news that you listen to. Don't exist in a "filter bubble." This easily happens to us when we rely up online sources to feed us information. We can also enter 'filter bubbles' when we rely on citation lists at the end of dissertations and scholarly articles for a large portion of our research.
5. Do you notice basic spelling or grammar errors in the material? This is a clue that you're on a "fake" site.
6. Whenever possible, go to the original report, video, image, filing or brief mentioned in the news article or story. This primary source material will provide you with unmediated, unbias information.
7. Pay attention to the methodology in quantitative research. If the research is not conducted well, then the results are questionable at best.
8. A good qualitative study will use a well formulated question to address clinical problems. It will also use more than one research method (referred to as 'triangulation'). Analysis of qualitative data should be conducted using explicit, systemic, and reproducible methods. (Greenhalgh and Taylor, 1997)
9. Who funded the research?
10. Who published the journals? Who are the editors and what are their affiliations? Just because a journal is peer-reviewed doesn't mean it contains accurate information.
11. Can you determine for whom the story was meant; who is the intended audience? Who is left out in terms of race, income, gender, education level, political party or area of specialization?
12. How are you being positioned; what do that want to you believe?  What is the bias? All mediated information contains a bias. What do they want you to think? feel? Pay attention to graphics, adjectives and pejorative language.
13. What do you know about the source that delivered the news item; the journal the website, NGO or news network? Who is on their board? Who are their main contributors? What is there stated purpose or mission?

Greenhalgh, T., & Taylor, R. (1997). How to read a paper: Papers that go beyond numbers (qualitative research). Bmj, 315(7110), 740-743. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.315.7110.740

WHAT TO AVOID

1. Fake, false, and regularly misleading sites that evoke an emotional response by using distorted headlines and decontextualized or dubious information in order to generate likes, shares, or profits. Examples:

• Newslo

2. Websites that may circulate misleading and/or potentially unreliable information.  Examples:

• Conscious Life News

3. Websites that use "clickbait" headlines and social media descriptions.  Examples:

• Bipartisan Report

• The Free Thought Project