OPINION: Importance of media literacy

Two weeks ago, Mark Zuckerberg announced his company Meta was getting rid of all their fact checkers. Meta is the parent company that owns Facebook and Instagram. Instead, posts on these social media sites will rely on its user. With a world full of people who don’t believe in science and AI faking photos and videos, user-fact checking will inevitably result in misinformation galore.

Media literacy is defined as “the ability to critically analyze stories presented in the mass media and to determine their accuracy and credibility.” This was probably easier before social media, but now anyone can post anything online. Without fact checkers, media literacy becomes that much more important.

For those of us who have grown up with the internet and social media, there are certain things we find easy to spot as fake that older generations have a harder time with. Some are not harmful, just annoying, such as the chain shares.

If something comes up on your Facebook feed telling you to copy and paste as your own post to get rid of ads or keep Meta from saving your information, please know none of those are real. If you want to get rid of ads, you would have to use an ad blocker, something that is certainly not free. And in regards to your personal info, you likely agreed to handing it all over in the terms and conditions when you first joined Facebook. Unfortunately, you can’t do anything about it now.

However, some stuff on social media can be much more harmful than that. With modern AI technology, people can create realistic photos and videos of basically anything happening. I could use this technology to make it look like any U.S. politician is doing the Cotton-Eye Joe and not everyone would be able to tell that it was fake.

There are some indicators that a photo or video is fake to help you pick out the misinformation. Though not quite as common as it once was, AI is notoriously bad at figuring out hands. If you feel suspicious about a photo, make sure the person’s hands look like real hands. Other clues that a photo or video is AI includes blurry outlines, features that are too smooth, repetition in the background and lighting or shadows that defy the laws of physics.

Social media isn’t the only place where information can be confused. When it comes to professional media bases, it can be hard to figure out what is the most accurate and least biased. Some are obvious, like Fox News and Left Voice. However, to get the most fact-filled, truest information, it’s important to look at information sources that are neither right- or left-leaning, media that focuses on information and not opinions.

Ad Fontes Media is a company that focuses on media bias and is known for its media bias chart. I learned about this annually-updated chart in college, and it can be found on the websites for various esteemed universities. The information and data gathered by Ad Fontes (Latin for “back to the sources”) is widely revered as the best place to find news on media bias. Please feel free to look up the interactive chart on your own time. For now, I want to share a brief description of it.

The media bias chart rates the bias from right to left, including most extreme, hyper-partisan, strong, skewing and the middle. From top to bottom, value and reliability is scored going from the best of “thorough fact reporting OR fact-dense analysis” down to “contains inaccurate/fabricated info.” It shouldn’t come as a surprise that the chart looks like an upward facing arrow, with the media reporting thorough facts at the center of the bias, with media being more extreme the closer to misinformation and fabrication they go.

In reality, you should only be getting your news from media in the first two categories, “thorough fact reporting OR fact-dense analysis” and “mix of fact reporting and analysis OR simple fact reporting.” These categories are in a green box.

None of the media in the green box goes further than strong left or right. Media found here in the most recent version of the media bias chart includes ABC, BBC, PBS, National Public Radio, NBC, Wall Street Journal, CNN and the Associated Press. The media at the very top in using facts also happens to be directly in the middle: the Pew Research Center.

No matter where you’re getting your information from, know it’s important to check for bias and where the facts are coming from. As a small town newspaper, we know many of the people we write about. I can assure you that when it comes to news and information, we try our best to get the most accurate information out there. However, we’re only human. Whether you get your information from us, the Pew Research Center, an extreme right- or left-leaning news source or even social media, make sure to do your own research on topics important to you.