Don't Be Fooled

When anyone can be a journalist, anything can be news.

As professional journalism recedes and anything goes on cable, talk radio and the Web, it's becoming much more difficult to know what to trust. This guide will equip you to become an information detective. With simple, easy-to-remember rules of thumb, you can build your own BS (Bald Sophistry) meter to spot unreliable information conveyed by any source through any medium from face-to-face to FaceBook, Fox to NPR, the Daily Kos to Drudge, even Breitbart.

Learning to filter the digital deluge has become a necessary skill of citizenship because mis- or malinformed votes count as much as wise ones.

Ironically, the democratization of journalism is eroding the nation's informational common ground and shredding our social fabric. Democracy requires consensus. But Congress can no longer agree on what's real, much less what to do about it. Even science can't penetrate partisanship.

The only solution that respects freedom of speech and press is to help all citizens develop their critical thinking skills -- habits of mind -- to separate fact from clever fiction.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

A Confession of (my own) Bias; 1) The Communication Revolution; 2 The Age of Information Paradoxes; 3) Truth vs. Truthiness; 4) Where Bias Comes From; 5) The Covert Bias of Institutions; 6) Setting Realistic Standards for Judging News and Information; 7) The SMELL Test; 8) Detecting Bias in Images; 9) The Spinmeister's Art: Tricks of the Misinformation Trade; 10) Online Tools for Sniffing Out Bias, Including Our Own