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Copy of today's power point presentation

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media educator Frank Baker's powerpoint from the October 10 webinar for Project Citizen

1. 1. The Importance of Media Literacy in Civics: Engaging Students in 21st C Critical Thinking Frank W Baker Media Literacy Clearinghouse www.frankwbaker.com Email: fbaker1346@gmail.com Twitter: @fbaker

2. 2. www.FrankWBaker.com

3. 3. "Truth is, students who haven't been taught the skills to conduct good research will invariably come up short." Wheaton College Professor Alan Jacobs quoted in The Atlantic

4. 4. Rand Corporation Study "nearly 80 percent (of the secondary teachers surveyed) described (their students') "limited ability to evaluate the credibility of online information" as a moderate or major problem." 92 percent of the teachers said "students must learn to critically evaluate information for credibility and bias-it's a crucial citizenship skill." Source: "Media Use and Literacy in Schools- Civic Development in the Era of Truth Decay." 2020

5. 5. SCREEN EDUCATION

6. 6. Unfortunately, with students' reliance on social media for news, they get "headlines" and seldom know/seek "the source." It's more important than ever than students question what they see, hear, read and get in the habit of verifying.

7. 7. A. Distracted? B. Engaged? C. Something else?

8. 8. "The kids used the iPhones as part of the tour of the museum. Special app..."

9. 9. The health of a democracy depends on an informed electorate Thomas Jefferson

10. 10. Definitions

11. 11. "the ability to know when there is a need for information, to be able to identify, locate, evaluate, and effectively use that information for the issue or problem at hand". ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- -------------------------- "the ability to use information and communication technologies to find, evaluate, create, and communicate information, requiring both cognitive and technical skills."

12. 12. "the acquisition of 21st-century, critical- thinking skills for analyzing and judging the reliability of news and information, differentiating among facts, opinions and assertions in the media we consume, create and distribute."

13. 13. News Literacy Movement

14. 14. Media Literacy

15. 15. Media Literacy= Critical Inquiry

16. 16. Concept: Omission

17. 17. Wall Street Journal Headline, November 21, 2016 Stanford Study Reveals "Dismal" Student Ability to Read Media

18. 18. Some 82% of middle-schoolers couldn't distinguish between an ad labeled "sponsored content" and a real news story on a website Stanford Study Reveals "Dismal" Student Ability to Read Media Source: https://www.wsj.com/articles/most-students-dont-know-when-news-is-fake-stanford- study-finds-1479752576

19. 19. Stanford Study Reveals "Dismal" Student Ability to Read Media More than two out of three middle-schoolers couldn't see any valid reason to mistrust a post written by a bank executive arguing that young adults need more financial-planning help.

20. 20. When asked which (a news story or an opinion piece) would provide the most facts, 60% chose the opinion piece or failed to give a clear reason for choosing the news story. Stanford Study Reveals "Dismal" Student Ability to Read Media

21. 21. Stanford Study Reveals "Dismal" Student Ability to Read Media And nearly four in 10 high-school students believed, based on the headline, that a photo of deformed daisies on a photo-sharing site provided strong evidence of toxic conditions near the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant in Japan, even though no source or location was given for the photo

22. 22. "Many people assume that because young people are fluent in social media they are equally perceptive about what they find there. Our work shows the opposite to be true."Sam Weinberg Stanford lead researcher

23. 23. 2019 Stanford Followup Study More than 96 percent of high school students surveyed failed to consider that ties to the fossil fuel industry might affect the credibility of a website about climate change More than half believed a grainy video on Facebook that claimed to show ballot stuffing (which was actually shot in Russia) constituted "strong evidence" of voter fraud in the United States SOURCE: https://news.stanford.edu/2019/11/18/high-school-students-unequipped-spot-fake-news/

24. 24. The inability of students to gauge the credibility and accuracy of online information poses a serious threat to "the vitality of American democracy." Quote from Stanford researchers quoted here: : Palo Alto Weekly, November 29, 2019

25. 25. How to Help Students be Better Researchers of Information

26. 26. True Story: Teaching Zack to Think  Fourteen year old: "I'm working on a history paper about how the Holocaust never happened."  Long pause. "Zack, where did you hear that the Holocaust didn't happen?"  "The Internet. It's on a Web page at Northwestern University."  Zack found his "information" from a Web page at http://pubweb.northwestern.edu/~abutz/di/intro.html, titled "Home Web page of Arthur R. Butz."

27. 27. " I'm afraid that kids use the Internet without being taught how to use the Internet. To survive in the future economy, kids must learn how to research, publish, and communicate working with the Internet and other information tools. What skills will be important for kids to learn and for schools to teach?" "one of the most important skills will involve evaluating the resources you decide to use." Alan November, 1998 True Story: Teaching Zack to Think

28. 28. If Zack ran a search for "Arthur Butz," he would find Butz's name on a page titled "Holocaust Deniers" If Zack looked at Butz's URL - http://pubweb.northwestern.edu/~abutz/di/intro.html - he'd see the "~," a dead giveaway that this is a personal Web site. Instead of assuming that Butz's Web site was sponsored by Northwestern, Zack would know that it was equivalent to a bulletin board posted outside an office. True Story: Teaching Zack to Think

29. 29. My step-daughter's story

30. 30. Assess sources using the following criteria: Timeliness Authority Audience Relevance Perspective SOURCE: https://guides.lib.byu.edu/c.php?g=216340&p=1428399

31. 31. Assess sources using the following criteria: Timeliness-resources need to be recent Authority Audience Relevance Perspective SOURCE: https://guides.lib.byu.edu/c.php?g=216340&p=1428399

32. 32. Assess sources using the following criteria: Timeliness Authority- is the source an expert? Audience Relevance Perspective SOURCE: https://guides.lib.byu.edu/c.php?g=216340&p=1428399

33. 33. Assess sources using the following criteria: Timeliness Authority Audience-who are intended readers? Relevance Perspective SOURCE: https://guides.lib.byu.edu/c.php?g=216340&p=1428399

34. 34. Assess sources using the following criteria: Timeliness Authority Audience Relevance- Does it relate to your topic? Perspective SOURCE: https://guides.lib.byu.edu/c.php?g=216340&p=1428399

35. 35. Assess sources using the following criteria: Timeliness Authority Audience Relevance Perspective: is there evidence of bias? SOURCE: https://guides.lib.byu.edu/c.php?g=216340&p=1428399

36. 36. Photo Fact-Checking

37. 37. Recommended Resources Building Good Search Skills: What Students Need to Know https://www.kqed.org/mindshift/20062/building-good-search- skills-what-students-need-to-know Conducting Research Teaching Study Guide https://powerupwhatworks.org/strategy-guide/conducting-research 50 Mini-Lessons For Teaching Students Research Skills http://www.kathleenamorris.com/2019/02/26/research-lessons/

38. 38. Question (pre-submitted) Is Wikipedia (now) a reliable source?

39. 39. The Importance of Media Literacy in Civics: Engaging Students in 21st C Critical Thinking Frank W Baker Media Literacy Clearinghouse www.frankwbaker.com Email: fbaker1346@gmail.com Twitter: @fbaker

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Published on media educator Frank Baker's powerpoint from the October 10 webinar for Project Citizen 1. The Importance of Media Literacy in Civics: Engaging Students in 21st C Critical Thinking Frank W Baker Media Literacy Clearinghouse www.frankwbaker.com Email: fbaker1346@gmail.com Twitter: @fbaker 2. www.FrankWBaker.com 3.

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Online Verification Skills — Video 2: Investigate the Source

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Essential Google Search Tricks for Research

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An interactive quiz to determine if information is from a legitimate source

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Learn the signs of online disinformation and internet trolls. The Spot the Troll quiz asks you to examine real social media profiles and posts and decide whether they are legitimate.

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He can be reached at fbaker1346@gmail.com
Twitter: @fbaker

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You can do a reverse image search in Google Image. Google Image is especially useful for identifying the author/artist of an image and for finding similar images so that you can see how they were used. It's also pretty good at showing you previous uses of the image online.

To do a reverse search in Google Image, you can click on the small camera icon and past in the web address for the image you are investigating.

This will bring up a results screen showing similar images as well as listing other uses of the image. Some images are used a lot and you may have to look through a few results screens before you find the first usage of the image online.

Here's the results screen from a sample image search. You can see that, while the image was being used in January of 2017, it isn't a new photo; it was also used in February 2016.

TinEye is especially good at showing how and how often an image is being (or has been) used online. While it won't show you similar images like the Google Image reverse image search does, it will allow you to how an image may have been edited for use by different people online.

To do a reverse image search in TinEye, you can upload an image that you've saved or enter the url for the image in the search box.

TinEye will pull up a list of other places where the photo has appeared online. You can sort the list by "Best Match" but also by "Most Changed," "Newest," and "Oldest." You can also filter by collection, to get an idea of how a particular website used the image.

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LibGuides: Evaluating news: Fake News & Beyond: Identifying Fake Images

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You can do a reverse image search in Google Image. Google Image is especially useful for identifying the author/artist of an image and for finding similar images so that you can see how they were used. It's also pretty good at showing you previous uses of the image online.

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Research Guides: Evaluating Sources: The CRAAP Test

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Use the resources in this guide to help you develop the critical evaluation skills to select the best books, journal ariticles, and web sites to support your research projects.

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Free lessons and assessments that help you teach students to evaluate online information that affects them, their communities, and the world.

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Welcome to Newsably, a fictional social media site focused on news and information. Your mission? Maintain the site, grow traffic, and watch out! You’ll also need to spot fake posts that try to sneak in through hidden ads, viral deception, and false reporting. For the best play experience, click “Play Fullscreen” in the upper right area of the screen.

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Support the transition to distance learning and help students think critically and compassionately about what they see online.

As many parts of the U.S. and world continue with distance learning because of the coronavirus pandemic, setting expectations for this new way of teaching and learning is essential. It's important to remember that even if students are comfortable with technology, learning online requires its own norms and procedures, many of which will be new to students who are used to learning in a face-to-face classroom.

In addition, teachers and students alike are spending more time checking news and social media in an effort to understand the coronavirus and its effects. Now more than ever, students need key digital citizenship skills, including news and media literacy, the ability to recognize and respond to cyberbullying, and an understanding of how their media habits affect them.

To help you establish a culture of digital citizenship for distance learning, we've collected our most relevant digital citizenship lessons for this moment. The lesson plans listed here are all available for free as part of Common Sense Education's K-12 Digital Citizenship Curriculum. If you're able to share resources with your students, you can assign our lessons using Google Classroom, download student activity sheets and send them as virtual activities to students, or share links to our videos with your students (lessons with videos are noted with an *).

Short on time? Check out our quick digital citizenship activities: discussion-based activities that take only 15 minutes. These are available on every lesson with a video (noted below with an *).

We hope these resources are helpful to you during this challenging time.

Online Communication

As you set up the communication channels for your virtual classroom, it's important for students to understand the norms and expectations for online communication. They may be used to texting or chatting with friends on social media, but how they interact in the online school setting will be different. Help them learn what to do if they encounter hurtful language online, how to switch their communication style based on the setting, and ways to debate and communicate with civility.

*The Power of Words (Grade 3): Focus on social and emotional learning as you help students learn how to process their feelings when they see or read something online.

*Digital Drama Unplugged (Grade 6): Students can learn how digital drama develops and how to de-escalate contentious situations.

Connecting with Digital Audiences (Grade 11): Help high school students rethink how they use their devices as they transition to a virtual learning environment. Students think about how they should adjust the way they communicate with one another as well as how they use their devices depending on the setting.

*We Are Civil Communicators (Grade 12): This lesson helps students identify the best ways to meaningfully and respectfully engage in online discussions.

News & Media Literacy

For many students, the coronavirus pandemic has them worried. While there is reason for concern, some of their anxiety stems from incomplete or incorrect information they're seeing on social media. Now is an important time to help them build critical thinking skills so that they can identify what information is credible and what isn't. Use these lessons to support news and media literacy:

Finding Credible News (Grade 6): Help students differentiate real news articles from misleading ones.

This Just In! (Grade 8): When breaking news happens, information may not always be accurate. Students can learn the importance of stopping, thinking, and reflecting on what we see in breaking news.

Hoaxes and Fakes (Grade 9): Help students ask critical questions when they encounter information online, and decide which sources are credible and which are not.

Media Balance

When school happens online in addition to kids' already-busy online social lives, they may start to feel like they're staring at a screen 24/7. Talk with students about how much time they're spending on devices and help them reflect on how their media use makes them feel. Try these supporting lessons:

*Finding My Media Balance (Grade 5): Students out of school, staying home, may be using more media than ever. Plus, the bombardment of news media can be overwhelming. This lesson helps students think through what their own media balance should include, for their own well-being.

Social Media and How You Feel (Grade 10): Social media plays a big role in most teens' lives, and research shows that it causes intense feelings -- both positive and negative. This lesson helps teens think through how social media use is making them feel, and come up with a plan for more beneficial use.

Cyberbullying

Some students might witness or be the target of cyberbullying based on misconceptions about COVID-19. It's important for educators to teach students how to identify, respond to, and avoid cyberbullying. In addition, when you address what is and isn't acceptable online behavior, you promote a positive and safe learning environment for your students.

Putting a STOP to Online Meanness (Grade 2): Focus on social and emotional skills as you help younger students process mean behaviors or actions they witness online.

Upstanders and Allies: Taking Action Against Cyberbullying (Grade 7): This lesson prepares students to respond to situations that involve cyberbullying by encouraging them to be upstanders.

Responding to Online Hate Speech (Grade 8): Students likely encounter a lot of negative content, fear, and even hate of others online and on social media. Students will learn to identify online hate speech, and define specific actions they can take to positively impact a situation involving hate speech.

*Countering Hate Speech Online (Grade 10): Students can learn to understand the connection between xenophobia and online hate speech. Students analyze how the internet can contribute to the spread of xenophobia, and develop strategies to combat hate speech.

Quick Digital Citizenship Activities for K-5 Distance Learning Quick Digital Citizenship Activities for Middle and High School Distance Learning

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Essential Digital Citizenship Lessons for the Coronavirus Pandemic | Common Sense Education

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As many parts of the U.S. and world continue with distance learning because of the coronavirus pandemic, setting expectations for this new way of teaching and learning is essential. It's important to remember that even if students are comfortable with technology, learning online requires its own norms and procedures, many of which will be new to students who are used to learning in a face-to-face classroom.

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From the Annenberg Center

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A Project of The Annenberg Public Policy Center

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Fact-checking journalism is the heart of PolitiFact. Our core principles are independence, transparency, fairness, thorough reporting and clear writing. The reason we publish is to give citizens the information they need to govern themselves in a democracy.

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PolitiFact is a fact-checking website that rates the accuracy of claims by elected officials and others on its Truth-O-Meter.

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Newseum ED is provided as a free educational resource and contains copyrighted material. Registration is required for full access. Signing up is simple and free.

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"The idea that you can merchandise candidates for high office like breakfast cereal is the ultimate indignity to the democratic process."
-Democratic candidate Adlai Stevenson, 1956

"Television is no gimmick, and nobody will ever be elected to major office again without presenting themselves well on it."
-Television producer and Nixon campaign consultant Roger Ailes, 1968

In a media-saturated environment in which news, opinions, and entertainment surround us all day on our television sets, computers, and cell phones, the television commercial remains the one area where presidential candidates have complete control over their images. Television commercials use all the tools of fiction filmmaking, including script, visuals, editing, and performance, to distill a candidate's major campaign themes into a few powerful images. Ads elicit emotional reactions, inspiring support for a candidate or raising doubts about his opponent. While commercials reflect the styles and techniques of the times in which they were made, the fundamental strategies and messages have tended to remain the same over the years.

The Living Room Candidate contains more than 300 commercials, from every presidential election since 1952, when Madison Avenue advertising executive Rosser Reeves convinced Dwight Eisenhower that short ads played during such popular TV programs as I Love Lucy would reach more voters than any other form of advertising. This innovation had a permanent effect on the way presidential campaigns are run.

The 2020 edition of The Living Room Candidate has been made possible in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities: Exploring the human endeavor.

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"The idea that you can merchandise candidates for high office like breakfast cereal is the ultimate indignity to the democratic process." -Democratic candidate Adlai Stevenson, 1956 "Television is no gimmick, and nobody will ever be elected to major office again without presenting themselves well on it."

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(for use as a HANDOUT, print as LANDSCAPE or HORIZONTAL ) Political Ad Analysis Worksheet
by Frank Baker, revised 2015
Teachers: Have your students view a campaign commercial first with no instruction. Next, distribute this page as a handout.
Assign different students one of the columns; play the ad again. Have each student report and share their observations.

Types of Political ads :
Negative - One candidate portrays the other in an unfavorable ligh
Warm and Fuzzy - Candidates make the viewer feel good about the country or his/her campaign.
Biography & Vision: emphasize the candidate's life or "vision" for America
Humorous - Candidates elicit a laugh or smile from the viewer.
Scary - Candidates evoke images of fear (usually combined with a Negative ad)
Advocacy- advocates for/against a certain position(s) on an issue/person
Trust: seek to convince voters that the candidate is someone they can trust to lead them during challenging times

* Things to pay attention to:
Colors
Superimposed Words
Props Code Words
People Music
Symbols Clothing

Techniques: Appeals to fear/prejudice; bandwagon; card stacking; fancy figures; flattery/insincerity;
glittering generality; image transfer; loaded words; name calling; negativity; inferences as facts; quotes out of context; repetition; rumor mongering; warm and fuzzy image; catchy words/phrases

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Political Ad Analyzing Worksheet - Media Literacy Clearinghouse

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Political Ad Analysis Worksheet ©2004 by Frank Baker, revised 2015 (for use as a HANDOUT, print as LANDSCAPE or HORIZONTAL ) Teachers: Have your students view a campaign commercial first with no instruction. Next, distribute this page as a handout. Assign different students one of the columns; play the ad again.

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HANDOUT #2 - Media Literacy Analysis Worksheet Created by Karen Zill & Frank Baker
Print this out and distribute to your students. It is not designed to be a scorecard of who won or who lost but is meant to assist students in their analysis of both the rhetoric as well as the images during the debates. Individual students, or groups of students can be assigned one of the rows or candidates. Students should use the blank spaces under each candidate's name to denote what they've seen or heard.

Rhetoric: Argument/Evidence
What specific argument(s) and evidence does the candidate use to bolster his/her case on a specific topic?

Rhetoric: Content
What new ideas/proposals did
the candidate propose, if any?

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Debate: Media Literacy Analysis Worksheet - Media Literacy Clearinghouse

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HANDOUT #2 - Media Literacy Analysis Worksheet Created by Karen Zill & Frank Baker Teachers: Print this out and distribute to your students. It is not designed to be a scorecard of who won or who lost but is meant to assist students in their analysis of both...

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Overwhelmed by your news feed? Use tools from science to evaluate what's true and what's fake, suggests researcher Emma Frans.
This post is part of TED's "How to Be a Better Human" series, each of which contains a piece of helpful advice from someone in the TED community. To see all the posts, go here.
In our daily reading, we encounter all kinds of claims. Depending on the news story and the week, Chinese imports, coffee, large-cap stocks, snacking, and eggs should be embraced - or they should be avoided altogether. What's a person to do when bombarded with confusing, contradictory information?

Try thinking like a scientist, says Emma Frans, who's an epidemiology and psychiatry researcher at Oxford University in the UK and Karolinska Institutet in Sweden.

"In present times, our risk of being fooled is especially high," she says. There are two main factors at play: "Disinformation spreads like wildfire in social media," she adds, "and when it comes to news reporting, sometimes it is more important for journalists to be fast than accurate."

Which is why it's useful to know how to evaluate news the way a scientist does. Scientists labor under a burden of proof. They must conduct experiments and collect data under controlled conditions to arrive at their conclusions - and be ready to defend their findings with facts, not emotions.

"We all have gut feelings and biases that sometimes cloud our judgment," says Frans. But scientific thinking offers us tools for "evaluating information in a rational way."

Try these 6 tips to read the news like a scientist:

1. Cultivate your skepticism.

Science moves forward by challenging accepted wisdom. You can do the same. When you learn a new piece of information through social media, think to yourself: "This may be true, but it also may be false," Frans says. "This kind of healthy skepticism does not mean you're dismissing everything as false - it simply means remembering the things you hear could be false, but they could also be true ... or they could be something in between."

2. Find out who is making the claim.

"In science, researchers have to declare potential conflicts of interest before publishing their findings," says Frans. When you encounter a new claim, look for conflicts of interest. Ask: Do they stand to profit from what they say? Are they affiliated with an organization that could be swaying them? Two other questions to consider: What makes the writer or speaker qualified to comment on the topic? What statements have they made in the past?

3. Watch out for the halo effect.

The halo effect, says Frans, "is a cognitive bias that makes our feeling towards someone affect how we judge their claims. If we dislike someone, we are a lot more likely to disagree with them; if we like them, we are biased to agree." It's such a common human trait that the scientific community has devised a workaround: New scientific papers under review are read "blind," with the authors' names removed. That way, the experts who are deciding whether it's worthy of publication don't know which of their fellow scientists wrote it so they'll be able to react free from pre-judgement or bias. You can try this with your own news feed, too. Maybe you've read about a jobs policy proposed by the candidate you favor, and you think it sounds good. Frans suggests, "Simply question how you would consider the claim if it came from someone else."

4. Look at the evidence.

When evaluating a claim, Frans asks, "Can the sources be traced? Are they reliable? Is the conclusion based on a rational evaluation of the information?" And you should try to consider all of the research on a topic. She says, "For instance, if there is one study claiming that drinking wine is just as good for your health as going to the gym, this finding is not relevant if ninety-nine studies show the opposite." Before you act on or share a particularly surprising or enraging story, do a quick Google search - you might learn something even more interesting.

5. Beware of the tendency to cherry-pick information.

Another human bias - confirmation bias - means we're more likely to notice stories or facts that fit what we already believe (or want to believe). As Frans says, "When you search for information, you should not disregard the information that goes against whatever opinion you might have in advance." Some scientists combat this by seeking out collaborators who, as management thinker Margaret Heffernan puts it, "aren't echo chambers." These are people who will actively try to prove you wrong and can help you check your ideas and assumptions. In your own life, look for friends and acquaintances on social media with alternative viewpoints. You don't have to agree with them, or tolerate misinformation from them - but it's healthy and balanced to have some variety in your information diet.

6. Recognize the difference between correlation and causation.

Frans researches ADHD and autism, and, she notes, in recent decades, "the number of individuals diagnosed with these disorders have increased rapidly." Many possible causes have been raised, including vaccinations, video games and junk food. However, she says, "there is no evidence supporting these claims, and it's important to remember that just because two things increase simultaneously, this does not mean that they are causally linked to each other. Correlation does not equal causality." Keep this in mind when thinking about our world. For example, if there is a rise in violent crime in your area and it's being blamed on gang activity, or if a politician is credited with creating a low unemployment rate, take a wider view and look into the other contributing factors. Frans says, "It's important to remember that there might be alternative explanations to a phenomenon."
Watch her TEDxStockholm talk here:

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This post is part of TED's "How to Be a Better Human" series, each of which contains a piece of helpful advice from someone in the TED community. To see all the posts, go here.

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See Laura's link below regarding an Edpuzzle

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Native Advertising: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)

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The line between editorial content and advertising in news media is blurrier and blurrier. That's not bullshit. It's repurposed bovine waste.

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BROOKE GLADSTONE: The beauty of social media is that it gives instant commentary and reaction to the press coverage.

There was, to me, just a stunningly brilliant hashtag campaign that followed the posting of menacing pictures of Michael Brown called #IfTheyGunnedMeDown. In other words, which picture of me would they use? Would they use the one of me in my marine uniform or the one of me in my hoodie? You know, would they use the picture of me in my business suit or in my disco dress? And so on and so forth.

LARRY MORRIS: This is an issue that African Americans have had with the media for a very long time. It is nothing new. Its not exclusive to St. Louis, Baltimore, Watts, any place theres been riots. When you see pictures of African Americans or black Americans, whatever you may choose, its always in a light thats negative. So #IfTheyGunnedMeDown was just to highlight [that].

Like me, I have my Bachelors degree and Im working on my Masters degree. Now, I dont really post a lot of pictures of me doing anything unsavory, but I have friends that will catch me in the moment. What are you going to put up of me? Because image is everything. A picture is a thousand words. If the first thing you see is me with a red cup in my hand and a bottle of vodka, youre going to automatically make the assumption, Well, he likes to party it up. Hes crazy. But you know, you wouldnt know that Ive been trained in certain things, that Im involved in my community, and thats what that whole movement was about.

How would they depict me? What would they pick and it was just very, very strong, it was a very strong sentiment that the way that they did it was wrong. But, like you said, some people would be like, They were showing him from what he really is. Well, nobodys perfect.

YAMICHE ALCINDOR: #IfTheyGunnedMeDown was a great hashtag, because I think it allowed people in the media to really understand what people were thinking when they see these photos and make kind of understand the complexity that goes into kind of choosing photos and choosing how you define someone and choosing how you really tell the world about someone.

As reporters, were up against deadlines, were up against word limits, were up against all this stuff thats kind of making me try to simplify a story. And I think the hashtag #IfTheyGunnedMeDown made me think, even as we simplify, even as we try to tell people stories in 500 words, try to get more of who that person was.

JEAN BUCHANAN: We had one of Michael Brown in his cap and gown that we used a few times. There is a certain segment of the population that was furious every time we used it, cause, you know, Michael Browns a thug and here we are showing him in a cap and gown.

You know, people are many things. Kids pose, they do stupid things. I think you have to be really careful when youre using photos of children and, you know, are you presenting this 13-year-old as a thug? I mean, hes a kid, so I just think you have to be really careful with what you do.

I think its really important that news organizations just be fair and try to be neutral when they choose photos of people, particularly victims in crimes. And perpetrators in crimes.

DAVID CARSON: We had a situation here in St. Louis where a gentleman hadVonDerrit Myershad a run-in with police and it ended up being a fatal shooting by the police officer who shot him.

The family contends VonDerrit did not have a gun. The police investigation showedand I think accurately showedthat VonDerrit did have a gun and was firing back at the police officer that was chasing him.

I think its credible in this case that VonDerrit had a gun and one of the reasons why I say its credible is that if you looked on social media, there were pictures of VonDerrit holding the stolen gun that was recovered at the scene days before thatthat were posted to social media days before thatand we ran with that picture.

We ran that picture in the paper because I think that picture with VonDerrit holding a gun, and it was the stolen gun that was recovered at the scene, was an important piece of the story that was going on here. It sort of backed up and provided validity to what the police saidthat they recovered this gun. It would be very hard to reproduce and fake ahead of time.

People got mad about us choosing the picture with VonDerrit with the gun, but it had been circulated on social media even before we chose it. Its not the only representation of him that we put out. We also have used a mug shot of him. But it is part of this story now. Now there are people saying youre slandering his name. I dont think were slandering his name. This really happened, this was a picture that he and his friends had posted on social media. This is how they were portraying themselves at that particular time.

KENYA VAUGHN: As an African American person, we have this certain way that we intentionally or organically idealize a person that theyve passed away. Its just kind of what we do as people. We want to showcase the best part of them.

But people always say, Well, if it bleeds it leads or the more sensational, the more hits. But we kind of incorporate a sense of social responsibility in our reporting and that goes into selecting photos as well. This is my personal policy: as a human being, what would I want the last photo of my child or my nephew or my niece or something to be? I have the fortunate liberty to be part of an aspirational, advocacy-type news organization where I have that liberty to do that. Not everyone does, but at the same time its like, as a human being what would I want somebody to have as a last picture of me?

BROOKE GLADSTONE: In the day, when a reporter was on the bummer beat, and they were going to get a picture of the victim, generally they let the family choose. That was almost always the case. You know if somebody was gunned down by, you know, some crazy gunman, or even was caught in a crossfire, or for whatever reason, out of respect for the family, they would let the family choose the picture.

DAVID CARSON: With social media, things are different because people are publishing photos of themselves online that are accessible and people can find and sometimes digital organizations are finding the photographs on their own without going through the family.

Theres always a debate there about what photo youre going to use to represent people and I think thats also important for people to remember that these things they post on social media can be seen by many people and images are a powerful thing and they can change how youre perceived.

I dont know what the answer to that is.

YAMICHE ALCINDOR: The solution, as you said, is youre kind of open to bias no matter what picture you choose. Likely youre probably going to have one picture in the paperI work for a newspaper. In broadcast or online you might have multiple pictures. So I think that for one, as news organizations, we should probably strive for multiple pictures of somebody instead of one picture. Weve seen multiple pictures of Trayvon Martin, weve seen multiple pictures of Michael Brown. Its best, I think, to use multiple pictures of someone.

But I think if you have one picture to deal with, I think, one, it should probably come from the family if its something thats relevant and something thats kind of recent. But I also think that it should also be relevant to what was going on at the time. So, if you were a veteran five years ago, but only last year this picture was taken of you kind of hanging out at the beach, I might use the five-year picture, but the most relevant picture and the most recent picture is you on the beach.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Everything conveyed by a picture, and the picture selected via an unconscious bias, a bias that will confirm what it is you think you really understand about a situation that you really dont understand at all.

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BROOKE GLADSTONE: The beauty of social media is that it gives instant commentary and reaction to the press coverage. There was, to me, just a stunningly brilliant hashtag campaign that followed the posting of menacing pictures of Michael Brown called #IfTheyGunnedMeDown. In other words, which picture of me would they use?

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AllSides Headline Roundups™ bring you top news stories from the left, center and right of the political spectrum - side-by-side so you can see the full picture.

We rotate the order of headlines to avoid biasing our coverage in favor of the left, which otherwise would always be listed first.

Learn how AllSides provides balanced news

MSNBC (Left bias) announced it's canceling opinion commentator Mehdi Hasan's Sunday night show on Thursday, drawing opinions from journalists and media outlets. For Context: Hasan is known...

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AllSides | Balanced news via media bias ratings for an unbiased news perspective

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We use media bias ratings to provide balanced news, perspectives and issues across the political spectrum. Unbiased news coverage doesn't exist - there is no such thing as unbiased news or t

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Methodology

What is this?

Recent posts from sources where the majority of shared articles aligned "very liberal" (blue, on the left) and "very conservative" (red, on the right) in a large Facebook study.

In 2015, the journal Science published a research paper by Facebook scientists (Bakshy, Eytan; Messing, Solomon; Adamic, Lada, 2015, "Replication Data for: Exposure to Ideologically Diverse News and Opinion on Facebook", http://dx.doi.org/10.7910/DVN/LDJ7MS, Harvard Dataverse, V2) which looked at how a subset of the social network's users reacted to the news appearing in their feeds.

For six months, Facebook tracked and analyzed the content shared by 10.1 million of its users (who were anonymized). These users had identified their political views in their own profiles on Facebook. Analyzing these users' political labels, the researchers categorized each as very liberal, liberal, neutral, conservative or very conservative. The researchers also produced a list of the top 500 sources of content tracked in the study.

For a site appearing in the Journal's red feed, a majority of the articles shared from it were classified in the study as "very conservatively aligned." How did Facebook researchers calculate that? They examined the self-described political leanings of people who shared links on Facebook to calculate a political "alignment score" for each link. Using that score, they grouped the links into five categories, from "very conservative" to "very liberal." So that site's current content appears in the Journal's conservative column because more than half of its links fell into the "very conservative" category during the period of the study (July 7, 2014 through January 7, 2015).

To appear in the Journal's blue and red feeds, posts must have at least 100 shares, and come from sources with at least 100,000 followers.

The Journal removed sources that were no longer active and others, such as Twitter and YouTube, which were simply mechanisms for sharing a wide variety of content. The reason you won't find The Wall Street Journal or any of its biggest competitors in either feed is that their content was shared by Facebook users more broadly across the political spectrum.

Are you saying these sources are conservative and liberal?

No. If a news source appears in the left column, its links were frequently shared by Facebook users whom researchers classified as "very liberal," based on self-described political leanings. In the right column are sources whose content was widely shared by Facebook users identified as "very conservative."

Are you choosing which post to include on each side?

No. The content is being pulled automatically from these sites' public Facebook pages, once an hour using Facebook's software developer tools (specifically, the Graph API).

Are you saying that these views actually simulate what a conservative or liberal sees?

No. It's possible that users have a wide variety of news items appearing in their feeds. These are simply posts from sources that aligned with a majority of users of a particular political view in Facebook's study.

Why did you build this? Aren't you just reinforcing assumptions about the other side's biases?

We built this presentation because it's hard to see these opposing views side by side. Facebook users who are curious about opposing viewpoints may be apprehensive about recording a like for a particular news source-an action which may be seen by other friends. (You can make likes private in Facebook user settings.) This tool gives people anywhere on the political spectrum the ability to see current discussions about newsworthy topics from both very conservative and very liberal viewpoints.

You can download a list of the sources included in this project here.

Source: Bakshy, Eytan; Messing, Solomon; Adamic, Lada, 2015, "Replication Data for: Exposure to Ideologically Diverse News and Opinion on Facebook", http://dx.doi.org/10.7910/DVN/LDJ7MS, Harvard Dataverse, V2

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What is this? Recent posts from sources where the majority of shared articles aligned "very liberal" (blue, on the left) and "very conservative" (red, on the right) in a large Facebook study.

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ProCon.org - Pros and Cons of 100+ Topics

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Explore both sides of debated issues. Presented in a non-partisan format with supporting background information, statistics, and resources.