It's 2018 and anyone with an Internet connection can produce "news." But wouldn't it take a media literate person to recognize its validity?

 

Joshua Hyman, a vendor relations specialist at the University of Pittsburgh, is creating Standard 7011 through IEEE, the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers. It is a standard for the process of identifying and rating the trustworthiness of news sources.

 

Aspects of "fake news" have affected culture, Hyman told IEEE, but there is a new level with social media maturation in the past ten years and the development of the internet in the past 20 to 30 years. He also said newspaper production wasn't always a cheap operation, but now anyone with WordPress and a laptop can produce news for almost nothing.

 

Media literacy is about understanding media messages on websites and social media feeds, according to Deidre Pike's journal article "Media Literacy: Seeking Honesty, Independence, and Productivity in Today's Mass Messages." It's about exploring different news mediums because they affect the way audiences view and engage with the real world.

 

Pike compares the influence of mass media to the Hunger Games series about an undemocratic government that controls the media and convinces its citizens they must participate in a gruesome reality TV show. It offers an "honest independent and a productive glimpse into the consequences of media control and how it can affect people's lives."

 

Obviously, this isn't how the United States' government operates, however, Pike says the media is certainly still subject to control from corporate ownership, the audience's influence, and its unwillingness to challenge traditional public attitudes about social values.

 

Therefore, we must analyze all news purveyors based on their level of honesty, we must question their independence, and we must gauge their level of productivity. It's important to develop an opinion or perspective based on research.

 

IEEE's Standard 7011 uses an algorithm that analyzes news medium's article content and determines whether the headline is accurate. This eliminates the clickbait effect, which utilizes paid ads to increase traffic to a website. The standard will also give every news medium a letter grade, A through F, to inform readers on social media platforms of how accurate the medium is.

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Pike says people need to explore the stories told to them through media, read them, listen carefully, and apply the skills of a media critic. For example, viewers need to understand the persuasive tools used in campaign commercials and analyze the features that excite or bore them during a sporting event.

 

It's not always about what you watch and listen to, but how you watch and listen to it. This allows you to construct your own ideas and messages instead. 

 

Which brings me to my next point: the next generation must be educated on media literacy. In Linda Jacobson's "Assessing News Literacy in the 21st Century," she studied high schools and universities incorporating this type of education into their curriculum. Jacobson mentions a survey conducted by MindEdge of 1,000 millennials earlier this year, an educational technology company. It showed that 37% acknowledged that they had inadvertently shared information on social media that turned out to be false.

 

California's state Senate passed a bill in 2017, whereby the state's Instructional Quality Commission will incorporate a media literacy curriculum and the California Department of Education will implement it. Washington Governor Jay Inslee also signed legislation in 2018 that requires schools to develop a policy to support media literacy content in schools. Media Literacy Now, an organization in Watertown, Massachusettes, is working to create legislation based on the Washington law.

 

In "Polarization, Partisanship, and Junk News Consumption over Social Media in the US," the authors analyzed what kind of social media users read junk news. They did this by examining the distribution of the most significant sources of junk news in the three months before President Donald Trump first State of the Union Address.

 

"Junk news" publishers deliberately publish misleading, deceptive or incorrect information purporting to be real news about politics, economics or culture, according to the authors. Some of the websites listed include BipartisanReport.com, Clintonemail.com, EUTimes.net, Hannity.com, and OccupyDemocrats.com. They found that there is an even distribution of junk news across the ideological spectrum, but they made three conclusions.

 

1. Trump supporters on Twitter shared the widest range of known junk news sources than all other groups combined.

2. Extreme Right pages on Facebook circulate the most junk news than all other groups combined.

3. Twitter audiences for junk news share a wider range of these sources than Facebook.

 

Social media platforms have attempted to combat "fake news," but it hasn't been as successful as promised. In my next section, I'll analyze their efforts.