Reading News across the Political Spectrum

Last spring, I had to confront a gaping hole in my professional knowledge. But that is jumping ahead. Let’s start at the beginning, with our students.

It began with a project in the 10th grade American Political Systems class. Working in pairs, students were to select two articles with differing viewpoints about a contemporary issue, then lead a current events discussion. Last spring was the first time I had the opportunity to meet with students about their article choices. Inspired by Nora Murphy’s work on source literacy, I asked students to talk to me about what types of source they were looking at, and why they felt each article was sufficiently authoritative.

Repeatedly, I found myself facing students’ inability to distinguish between what felt good and what was good quality. Generally falling along a political spectrum, articles that aligned with what students already believed earned a rating of “reliable” … and the other sources were all considered equally foreign and indigestible. Certainly, they were applying no particular standards to finding authoritative expressions of the opposite viewpoint, beyond maybe a shrugged: “Well, it was in the library databases,” as if that assured authority, or “It was ranked high in my search results.” In these discussions, students generally knew how to think about the authority of authors, but it was clear that it did not occur to most of them to consider how the identity of the publisher shaped a piece. As their research skills educator, I found myself demanding, again and again, that there were standards of rigor to which we must hold every publication, which provided a way to identify quality sources at many points along the political spectrum.

The first step we covered was simply learning a bit more about what possible points along the political spectrum were, and identifying where a particular publication situated itself. Wikipedia was invaluable in these investigations. In many cases, the first few sentences of entries on a specific media outlet provided a lot of vocabulary (progressive, libertarian, neoconservative, paleoconservative) that gave us good talking points for getting started. Sections on editorial staff, board members, funding, and past controversies were also helpful, if not taken in isolation. “About” pages could sometimes be useful, but were often so full of obfuscating language as to be impossible to parse (we first addressed this difference in readability in 9th grade, when students tried to decode what Sputnik News was). However, a publication’s media kit for advertisers and their submission guidelines for writers were often much clearer indicators. These tools helped us build a crucial understanding about the nature of the source we were encountering. It did less to help us understand rigor.

One trouble is that the standards of rigor remain, well, elusive. One high school student and I spent the entire subsequent summer debating how to define those qualities in a manner that would be findable and useful: If we cannot find out about editorial process, what is a reasonable way to measure the same thing? What role does the size and demographic of readership play in our understanding of a publication? How does it matter if a publication was “born digital?” If most people view media by clicking through from social networks, what weight do we give to how clickbait-y their headlines feel? What does the publication articulate as its own claim to authority? But we barely scratched the surface.

Blur: How to Know What’s True in the Age of Information Overload better helped me frame my thinking. It identified four forms that “news” reporting might take. Two, in particular, caught my eye. “Journalism of verification” requires journalists to examine evidence relating to a question to determine what conclusions to draw, whereas “journalism of affirmation” is “a new political media that builds loyalty less on accuracy, completeness, or verification than on affirming the beliefs of its audiences, and so tends to cherry-pick information that serves that purpose” (34). While I wanted my students to be selecting sources that followed the model of verification, they tended to encounter and be attracted to sources that were rooted in affirmation. Reading journalism of affirmation is rewarding; it articulates the reader’s feelings clearly, makes her feel smart, and is widely available. So not making a practice of identifying a source’s model — verification, affirmation, or other — is how we end up with a gulf between what feels good and good quality.

As a result of these conversations, this fall I had the opportunity to have an hour with the now-11th graders to help them set up news feeds. My assignment was to make sure every student was regularly following some kind of news. After thinking long and hard, I turned back to Blur and decided to break the lesson into two parts: 1. Practicing how to identify sources and evidence in journalistic writing, and 2. Giving every student an opportunity to identify a method for following news on a regular basis. It was a first time through this topic; the lesson plans linked to above have a great deal of room for growth. The lesson culminated in a plea that students commit to reading a variety of good quality sources that could help them experience a range of perspectives.

Which brings us back to the gaping hole in my professional knowledge that I mentioned at the outset. Because the truth was that last spring, while I was urging students to pick sources based on rigor rather than emotions, I found myself limited in the rigorous sources I knew to recommend. Let me be more honest: because I had not cultivated my own knowledge of good quality conservative sources, I knew of only three. Three sources that I kept pointing to, again and again. Frankly, I had to struggle continually with my own snap judgments. My knowledge proved completely insufficient, and I barely sounded convincing, even to myself. How could I stand for a rule of rigor across the spectrum if I was unable to point students to acceptable options?

So, I decided I had to educate myself, which is what I was trying to do when I attended my first AISL conference in Los Angeles last year. Many of you kindly allowed me to question you about your collections, and your thoughts on a variety of news sources.

Slowly, my list of sources from around the spectrum began to grow. It is still smaller than I would like. But I am fortunate to have three learners in my life who are particularly committed to notions of source literacy, reading broadly, and engaging with multiple narratives. One student and I had conversations about how floods of articles from two or three favorite news sources started to feel like seeing the same stories over and over again; it was taking 90 minutes a day to weed through and find new ideas or events. We determined that it was better to select a small number of media outlets representing differing perspectives, so that each article would offer a new point of view, even if the topic repeated. Another argued that there were more varieties of narratives than just international and political; sources from various US geographic regions and affinity groups (news from ethnic, religious, and other groups) went on my list. Work with each of those students — including my Research TA, who chose to focus on source literacy — is messy and ongoing, and would be a post unto itself. Each of them did, however, respond to the questions I was asking of myself with a passion and commitment that transformed my curiosity into something I actually needed to live up to. They made me do more than just make lists — they made me expand my reading.

The final element of the 11th graders’ lesson this fall looked at what it might mean to access multiple perspectives through news. Given the fractious environment at the time, I decided simply to share a selected list from the sources I was following (at the time, I was testing close to 150 different news sources) and let students explore for themselves. I am grateful to colleague Connie Williams for making me realize that the list I shared with students is not founded on consistent standards. For example, my list of international sources includes many options that fall under what Murphy would term “necessary bias,” aimed at assuring exposure to various narratives being promoted around the world. My affinity group media options similarly look to expand my own ability to access and hear the multiplicity of narratives experienced by the United States’ diverse population, while my regional newspapers attempt to balance that same need with a sense of editorial rigor. My political spectrum is where I look most critically at the use of sources, evidence, and careful argumentation. It seems that, in the process of writing these words, I have discovered the next stage of work I have to do on my own thinking.

Nevertheless, I am gaining something deeply important from both investigating potential sources and reading those I selected on a somewhat regular basis. It is a time-consuming process, and it can be quite unsettling to encounter religious, political, or ethnic viewpoints to which I have not really been exposed before. Yet I also find it immensely enlightening to read about an issue in an expressly paleoconservative, African-American, or Catholic leaning publication, or any publication outside my regular media diet. Seeing a reasoned argument proceeding from a different set of values or experiences often provides me with crucial details that are lost when filtered through more familiar media. Often, I encounter statements that make a lightbulb go off for me — I’ve found myself reading and re-reading a portion of the Constitution, until I can finally figure out what someone else is seeing in the words.

Ultimately, it comes down to a real question of what my professional values — and my human values — really are. Just as journalistic ethics require not neutrality but that conclusions should arise from fact-based evidence, every time I work with students I drill into them that research is not about starting with something you believe to be true and cherry-picking evidence to prove it. Rather, we look at a range of rigorously supported viewpoints and draw evidence-based conclusions. Our library teaches students to use close reading and a knowledge of logical fallacies to unpack how word choice and argumentation impact readers’ emotional responses to nonfiction. In our program, those are becoming core source evaluation skills. If I actually stand by all parts of this curriculum, then it seems reasonable to me to expect that I should be accessing multiple, rigorous, and diverse viewpoints in my own reading of news, before drawing conclusions. When I hold myself to those standards, I can do more than just telling students to avoid fake news; I can offer them a positive range of news options on which to draw. When I do that, I model for students that I live by what I teach.

NOTE: I should have asked this initially, but I would love for anyone to share ideas for sources with me. I hope to build a much more rigorous list over time.

12 thoughts on “Reading News across the Political Spectrum

  1. This is outstanding, and in a perfect world would be required reading by all citizens. I confess I have my favorite sources that I thought met the criteria of rigorous unbiased reportage. However as the presidential campaign unfolded, it was clear that these publications and writers were both biased and blind to the possibility of any outcome but the one they had predicted. Since the election, I am much more cautious about embracing the “news” as presented by any one source. A painful but necessary lesson, even for an old dog like me!

  2. Tasha,
    Thank you for your essay. I am so impressed with the work you are already doing, and this piggybacks nicely with Dave Wee’s recent post about sources that he uses for evaluating news cites. My challenge is getting students (and faculty) to care enough to take the time to dig deeply into their research topics. It seems like we’re celebrating just finding an article on a topic, rather than making sure we understand the perspective of that one writer. I wonder if teaching people more about the news bubbles they live in would help them care more about branching out. Technology has certainly expanded what we can access, but it hasn’t given us any more hours in the day to spend actually thinking!

    • This is always our problem, right? Thinking critically–not to mention learning to do so–takes time and effort. I was extremely fortunate to get the initial opportunity to work with students, which led to earning more such opportunities. But since much of the value arose when I started pushing myself, the issue of time started just with me and my schedule. I had to work in fits and starts, because it is very time-consuming, hard work. But once I started putting in the effort, myself, I began learning enough that I was able to identify more opportunities to teach discrete skills that help with news reading and could communicate what students needed to know with more confidence and something approaching concision.

  3. Vitally important, and very interesting. Will need to add a bit from this discussion in our next ‘information literacy’ teaching session. There is so much to cover!
    Thank you, Tasha!

  4. Thank you for this MUST READ post! This will go out to my faculty via intranet within the week. Two things about your post stand out:

    1) Thank you for sharing your Google Slideshows! I ‘m more than a little in love with the way you used the branching logic in the Following News slides–why didn’t I think of that, like, 5 years ago??!?!? LOL! Aside from that, there’s just so much useful content on news sources to unpack here.

    2) Your post deepened my thinking on how we address the media literacy/filter bubble/fake news challenge. I’m slowly getting my head around the interplay between the issues, but yours is one of the first to give me some concrete tools and strategies to think about putting into the mix of things I’m working to get embeded into our curriculum and culture here.

    Gratefully yours,

    dave

    • Hah–well, when you unpack it, David, please share back! Goodness knows there is so much to figure out and to learn. I’m still working my way through the excellent sources you shared.

  5. Tasha, thank you! I’ve put this in my list to “carefully reread later”. The content makes an excellent discovery tool, I’m very grateful.

    • The discovery portion (along with all the others) is really ongoing. One of my colleagues from our history department (who was helpful in discussing my first additions to my list) and I are thinking we want to go about this is a much more comprehensive and “scientific” manner. So, please share your own ideas, pushback, etc.

  6. Pingback: Teaching News Literacy? Check your Own Bias, Says Librarian | School Library Journal

  7. I’m about to teach media literacy with grade 8 students, and I keep getting tripped up with how to start. Analyze “straight” news to develop a schema for reading news? Compare/contrast a story across the spectrum of bias? Discuss how to spot fake news sites? There are so many points of entry, and I don’t want to overwhelm them.

    Thank you for this very thought-provoking essay.

    • This is really hard, right? If you just have a bit of time and that perpetual one-shot. Personally, my lessons feel the most successful when I pick one concrete idea and try to get students comfortable with that.

      This year, for 10s, I gave them summaries of what a few different publications were and then had them brainstorm different criteria by which they could understand a publication, then they had to negotiate a list of the fine most important ones as a small group (basically used the Question Formulation Technique, but not with questions).

      For 11s, we look at what sources and evidence look like in journalism. Learn to identify them in an article.

      With my 8s (science, not media lit) I teach them to close reading to identify words that give us a hint of what the author thinks about the topic s/he is covering.

      I found that almost no students know about wire services, and the role that AP/Reuters/etc play in bringing us news. Actually, taking a paragraph from an AP story, and then finding other outlets that changed it slightly and talk about that can be interesting. Or, simply comparing/contrasting a story across political spectrum. However, I’ve found that my students have real trouble leaving their own prejudices at the door and engaging productively. I’d love to hear how you overcome that! Maybe with something unexpected?

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