Fake News: Home

Explains how to use critical thinking to identify common features and trends among misinformation campaigns.

Anyone who needs or wants to learn how to verify names, numbers, quotations, and facts is largely on their own. Enter The Chicago Guide to Fact-Checking, an accessible, one-stop guide to the why, what, and how of contemporary fact-checking.

Evaluating Media Bias is a brief, supplemental resource that provides an academically informed and broadly accessible overview of the major concepts and controversies involving media bias. Engaging and informative, this text reviews what we know about media bias, offers timely case studies as illustration, and introduces an original framework for conversations about the shortcomings of political news.

Daniel J. Levitin shows how to recognize misleading announcements, statistics, graphs, and written reports revealing the ways lying weasels can use them. This field guide has two parts - statistical information and faulty arguments - and shows how science is the bedrock of critical thinking. We need to think critically about the words and numbers we encounter to be successful at work, at play, and make the most of our lives.

News coverage is the first draft of history. But preservation of news content has had challenges. This book covers the history of news preservation (or lack thereof), the decisions that helped ensure (or doom) its preservation, and the unique preservation issues created by each new form of media. In fifty or a hundred years, what will we be able to retrieve from today's news output? Will we have better access to news produced in 1816 than news produced in 2016? These are some of the questions Future-Proofing the News aims to answer.

"This is a very practical guide for the student fact-checker. It supplements generic information literacy with the specific web-based techniques that can get you closer to the truth on the web more quickly. How to use date filters to find the source of viral content, and how to assess the reputation of a scientific journal in less than five seconds. How to find pages that have been deleted, and figure out who paid for the web site you're looking at. How to check a Wikipedia page for recent vandalism, and how to search the text of almost any printed book to verify a quote. Parse URLs and scan search result blurbs so that you are more likely to get to the right result on the first click. And how to avoid baking confirmation bias into your search terms. Learn web literacy by through the unique opportunities and pitfalls of searching for truth on the web.”