Lesson video

Hi, there I'm Mr. Joy.

Today, we're going to continue our series of lessons, looking at the impact that the media has on us.

In today's lesson, we're going to be considering whether or not we can really believe everything that we read.

In today's lesson, you're going to need a pen or pencil and some paper.

Try also if you can to find a nice quiet space where you're not going to get distracted and make sure that any items like phones or other devices are out of eye sight as well.

Today, we're going to be thinking about who and what you might trust.

We'll be asking the question is what we read reliable? And we'll be trying to find out how we can all be confident that what we read is accurate as well.

So to start off with, it's really important to get an understanding initially about what trust is before we can look at who or what we might trust.

So the definition that I've got here for you is from the Oxford English Dictionary and it says "A firm belief in the reliability truth or ability of someone or something." Trust is something that's really important in relation to media because we are reliant on the media to tell us the truth.

We are not in a war zone or in 10 Downing Street, speaking to politicians to be out to gain that information firsthand.

So we rely on journalists to pass on the correct information.

And of course, that also then relates back to the responsibility of journalists and the wider media to ensure that they are countable for publishing accurate information in their news reports.

For your first task, I would like you to have a look at the sources of information that is shown in the worksheet, and think about how much you trust them.

So there are different sources that might be part of the media and other sources, such as teachers, family, and friends.

What I then want you to do, is to put them into the Trust Tower template that I've got here on the side for you.

And you can see your most trusted source will go at the top and your least trusted source will go at the bottom.

Where there are boxes of the same colour on a row that shows that they're roughly similar in terms of how much you trust them.

When you've managed to put all those sources into the Trust Tower, I then would like you to write a really short sentence to explain why you've chosen one source as your most trusted and the other source as least trusted as well.

So I'm going to give you some time to be able to click on to the worksheet, look at the nine sources and to then put them into the Trust Tower and write your sentences.

I've just got an example here that I did quickly to show you what you might have come up with.

So I've got BBC listed here at the top, and my reason was I think that they are impartial and they give good information.

And at the bottom I have listed family because they've been wrong before, because I have an older sister who often told me made up stories about me trying to get me into trouble or trying to get me to believe things when I was younger.

In 2019, an organisation called IPSOS today, research project in 27 countries around the world.

And this graph summarises the findings for the research that was to be performed in great Britain.

So you can see that the dark green section refers to having a great deal of trust in these different types of media.

The lighter green is about a fair amount of trust.

The orange section is about not having much trust at all.

Pink is not having any trust and people who weren't so certain of how much trust they had would have gone with the purple.

And obviously we've caught linking back to what we did at the very start this topic about the different types of media we've got print media.

So books, newspapers, and magazines, broadcast media, so television and radio and then new media things that are predominantly on the internet so streamed content and websites as well.

The fourth one there, which is really interesting as a point of comparison is about people that they know.

So possibly friends or family, other people they regularly meet with or know of in person.

And you can see that those people that they know of in person, are the sources that they have the most trust in.

Over a quarter of respondents from great Britain saying they have a great deal of trust in those people.

And another half of the population who responded saying that they have a fair amount of trust.

So you can see the green for that bottom section or known people is quite large.

There's a lot less trust in print media and new media in comparison.

There were two particularly interesting pieces of information that came out from the global analysis of results.

One of those was that new media is slightly less trusted than traditional forms of media.

So print and broadcast when compared across the globe which probably isn't far off the results that came up for great Britain particularly when comparing print media with new media.

The other thing that was really interesting is that when the results were compared to previous surveys that have been run in past years, they actually found that trust in traditional media so print and broadcast has decreased over the last five years.

And so even though we still have a considerable amount of trust for broadcast media actually it's a lot less now than it was before.

And sometimes people will point to examples like this as to why they may not trust specific sources of information.

In 2019, the Daily Mirror was forced to apologise to Jeremy Hunt, who was the health secretary at the time, about an article that they published.

And in the article, they said that he was arrogant and had refused to apologise to the public about how the NHS was struggling with all the winter admissions.

The Department of Health then made a complaint that Jeremy Hunt's comments had been paraphrased and taken out of context, and that the Mirror had kind of made it sound like he was saying something that he actually didn't.

That complaint then went to IPSO.

We've discussed IPSO in a previous lesson, IPSO is the Independent Press Standards Organisation.

And in the end IPSO ruled that the mirror had distorted the original comments that had been made.

Once that ruling had been made, the mirror had offered to the Department of Health to make a clarification about this, which the Department of Health didn't really like and the suggestion they felt wasn't appropriate.

And so ultimately what happened was IPSO told the Daily Mirror that they had to meet certain requirements about how this clarification was going to be made.

And one of them was that the font size on the front page needed to be the same size as the font size of the subheading in the original article.

So you can see next to the picture there of Jeremy Hunt, you've got two small subheadings and that font size is the same as the font size that is on the right hand side.

Even after that second front page was published, some people still weren't happy because they felt that it wasn't fair for the Daily mirror to be able to publish such a large headline and gain a lot of attention in doing so, and then have such a small comment on the front page kind of admitting that they were wrong.

One of the most well known examples of a news outlet falsifying information for publication comes from 1835.

So this is almost 200 years ago.

And this picture here comes from a series of articles that was published by The Sun newspaper in New York.

And at the time The Sun was struggling for readership.

They weren't selling huge numbers of copies and they were trying to get a little bit more attention.

So what they decided to do was to run this series of articles that claimed to be coming from a Scottish newspaper.

And in the articles and in the pictures they claimed that there had been life and even civilization found on the moon that there were goats and unicorns and bat winged humanoid people who were living in some sort of society.

It then turned out that all of this had been made up and that it had purely been to try and gain attention to the newspaper.

So you can see that the idea of a newspaper publishing something which is not 100% truthful is nothing new.

And that leads us on to this idea of is what we read reliable? I'm sure that you've had the phrase fake news before but the problem with the idea of fake news, as that saying is that actually not all of what is published is necessarily fake.

Sometimes it's things that people don't want other people to know about.

It's really easy to kind of use the idea of fake news to try and decry someone such a kind of shut down what they're saying.

There are parts of things that are made up, but also it's important to think about the reason behind the actions and whether it's deliberate or not.

So instead of using the phrase fake news, there's three other words that we can use that are going to better describe the information.

And those three words are disinformation, misinformation and malinformation.

And I know that possibly sounds a little bit confusing, but those three prefixes dis, mis and mal are really important.

And so what I'm going to get you to do, is to try and create a spider diagram of different words which start with each of the prefixes.

So try and do me a little spider diagram with a whole lot of words that start with dis, a list of words that start with mis and a list of words that start with mal.

And hopefully in doing that and thinking about what those words mean, you can then start to get an idea about what each of the bigger words, disinformation, misinformation, and malinformation is going to mean and how they're going to be different.

So you've got some time now, you can pause the video to make sure you complete that task.

Get your spider diagram started and write down as many words as you can that start with each of those three prefixes.

So I've got three lists that I've come up with all of different words, starting with each of those prefixes dis, mis and mal, and I'm guessing you're going to have very, very different words I cannot imagine the odds of us having identical lists but to give you an idea, starting off with mis, I've got a variety of different words here, miscalculate, misinform, misplace, mistake, misunderstand.

The common thread here is that mis as a prefix means wrong or incorrect.

And I really want you to hold that in your mind as we start to think about what dis and mal means.

So mis meaning wrong or incorrect.

My dis words, disagree, discriminate, discontinue, disinfect, disprove.

All of these are about a negative or also comes from the word for a part.

But what I want you to do is to think of this as a deliberate act, because if you're disagreeing with someone, you're doing that deliberately, if you are discriminating against someone, you're doing that on purpose as well.

This is about an action that they're taking with purpose.

The last one, mal, malevolent, malfunction, malicious, malnutrition, malpractice.

All of those words have mal meaning bad or ill.

So it's something that is going to have a negative effect.

And these three prefixes are really important when we're talking about the different types of information that are out there.

Misinformation is content which is false but which has been shared in good faith.

So the person who is sharing does not intend to harm anyone.

So remember that mis as a prefix means wrongly or incorrectly that information has been shared, but they haven't been trying to confuse someone or to trick them.

That's different to disinformation.

Disinformation is content which is false but has been deliberately shared and created in order to harm a person, a group or an organisation.

So remember I said about dis, having that intent, that purpose to do something.

And then finally information which is true but could have a negative impact on someone if it became public knowledge, can be called malinformation.

So the big difference here is that misinformation and disinformation are both false, but malinformation is true.

And to help you really understand that, I want to show you a Venn diagram, and I'm hoping that in maps you've covered Venn diagrams and so you'll have an understanding about what this very simple image is showing you.

The circle on the left with the blue and the purple is showing that the information is false or inaccurate.

So misinformation and disinformation are both incorrect in terms of the content that is being shared, it is false, it is wrong.

Malinformation is not in that circle because malinformation is accurate information.

The other circle with the pink and purple is about that the intent to harm.

Disinformation is deliberately shared to try and harm someone.

And the same applies to malinformation.

Misinformation is shared without trying to confuse someone or to trick someone.

And that's why that is outside of the circle.

And I'm hoping now you can understand why I've chosen these three colours for the last few slides to apply to each of these three words because I'm hoping that by seeing the overlap between the blue and the pink, where you get the purple you will see that disinformation is both false and deliberately shared.

And that doesn't apply to both the other words, because misinformation is just false, but is not shared to try and confuse people.

Whereas, malinformation is truthful but is trying to cause harm to a person.

What I'd like you to do is to match each of the words on the left that we've just gone through with the examples on the right hand side.

One of these words describes a situation where a celebrity retweeted a news article without realising that it included offensive comments.

One of them is about a situation where pages from a celebrity's diary are published in a newspaper without their permission.

And one of these words describes a situation where someone starts a rumour on Twitter, accusing a celebrity of being racist.

I'm going to give you a little bit of time you can pause if you need extra time, I want you to figure out which word matches which scenario.

So misinformation was in the correct location.

The celebrity retweeting a news article without realising that it included offensive comments.

That is misinformation, because remember we're talking about wrongly or incorrectly doing something.

It was not a deliberate act in kind of sharing it because of those comments it was shared without really kind of fully reading the article.

And it is something that celebrities have done previously and have then apologised for that afterwards.

The second one about the pages from a celebrity's diary being published are malinformation particularly if those pages from the diary have some sensitive information that could possibly get them into trouble.

And that then means that the last one is disinformation, starting a rumour on Twitter, accusing a celebrity of being racist that is specifically and deliberately trying to get someone in trouble, trying to spread those false stories with the purpose of causing harm.

So, knowing that there's this type of information that's out there, it's really important to try and think about how we can know what we're reading is accurate.

And something that I've done a lot of work with over the last year or so is this model called REVIEW.

and REVIEW is a six step process that you can go through to try and get a sense of whether a source is accurate or not.

And it's not always foolproof.

You can't always guarantee you're going to get it right, but it's going to give you a lot more confidence in terms of being able to think, actually I'm pretty certain that that is accurate or actually I'm not quite sure I think this might be a bit of a dodgy article here.

To help show you how to use the REVIEW model.

I found a news article that I'm not quite sure whether it's truthful or whether it's a bit of a joke.

So I'm going to read through it now with you.

And then we're going to go step by step through the REVIEW process and you can see what I'm going to do.

So the article that I found is from a website called CNBC, and it says that, "Spotify has launched playlist for dogs left home alone." And there's some key information there, three bullet points that Spotify has made playlist and a podcast for dogs to listen to when their owners aren't there after they found nearly 74% of UK pet-owners play music for their dogs.

And the podcast is there to alleviate stress or to reduce stress and that they offer tracks selected by algorithms, which are fancy computer-based calculations to match pets characteristics such as whether they are energetic or slow.

I'm not really sure whether this is real or not.

So what I'm going to go through the process of REVIEW.

And the R in REVIEW stands for reputation.

So when you're thinking about the reputation of the source or whoever has published this information, you want to think about if you've heard of them before, I haven't really heard of CNBC, but I've heard of NBC, which I know is an American network.

So I'm not quite certain whether CNBC is real and is connected to NBC or whether it's a bit of a joke website that is kind of a parody.

What I would want to know is whether the source is usually accurate and reliable.

And if there's any experts mentioned in the article that are being relied upon as well.

What I could do, and some really good idea to do is to go to a website called Media Bias Fact Check.

And that's really good for getting a sense of whether or not different websites are reliable.

So I've been on Media Bias Fact Check, and I found out that CNBC is real and that they are labelled as being mostly factual.

There's apparently been a few issues with fact checking previously.

I've done a little bit of googling as well about CNBC.

And I've found out that they're a paid television channel, which means it's like something like Sky or Virgin Media channel in the US and it focuses on business news.

So it might make sense that they're reporting on Spotify, but I still want to go further and double check this because just because it's coming from a reputable source, does not guarantee that it's accurate.

My next step is to look at the evidence.

So what are the facts that are mentioned in the article and try and pick out the bits that are opinions and the bits that are facts and really kind of focus on what information is the most important.

So for me, I've picked out the statistic about the 74% of UK pet-owners playing music for their animals.

That really stands out as something that I could find out whether that's true or not.

Then if it's not true, then the whole article probably falls apart.

I'm going to keep that piece of evidence in mind as I go on to the next step, which is about verifying.

And verifying is about fact checking and trying to see if other outlets are also reporting the same story, or if I can find some sort of other website online that is showing that the facts that I've found in the evidence step are actually correct.

If we're talking about something that relies on a picture, you can do a really nifty trick where you can right click on the picture and you can do a reverse image search and it will show you where else on the internet that picture has been.

Sometimes, if this is a particularly big story, you might be able to go onto websites like Full Fact or Snopes and their job is basically to verify new stories all the time.

So if it's a big thing and you're really not sure you could go there and they're really good to get a good summary.

For my CNBC Spotify article, I've tried to find information about that statistic of the 74% of pet-owners and I can't find a source of that statistic.

All I can find is a few other websites that are also running the same story, but lots of them, I don't know the names of, and only a couple of them I really recognise the source.

So I'm going to keep going through REVIEW just to try and make sure.

The I in REVIEW is about the intent.

So I want to jog your memories back in one of the very first lessons we did when we looked at information neighbourhoods and thinking about what the purpose of this article is, is it trying to sell me something? Is it trying to actually give me information or is it trying to entertain me? Now, I kind of read this article and find it a little bit weird and kind of amusing that Spotify might potentially do this.

I'm not sure whether it's just one of those stories that gets reported because it's real, but it's funny, or whether someone has kind of written a parody piece and they're trying to make a bit of a joke here.

So I've thought about the information neighbourhoods and thought about why the article has been published but I can't really think that there's another angle to this article, unless maybe someone has hacked into the website to publish it.

But I can't think of any other reason that CNBC could be publishing this story.

So I'm going to go on to the next step, which is about emotions.

Sometimes you might really instantly get a reaction when you read a news article.

So it's really useful to stop for a moment and think about how it makes you feel.

And if you can acknowledge those feelings, then maybe you aren't going to want to share that article straight away.

Maybe it's going to help you kind of think, oh, that's really interesting that I felt so warmed up about this.

Why is that? And actually, is that true? Or if you think it's really funny and you want to share it, think, okay, yeah I found it funny who else is going to find it funny as well? Think about how the author of that article wants you to feel and try and pick out if there's emotive language that's being used.

Now, thinking back to that article that I read from CNBC, it's not re-emotive language it all sounds really factual.

So I'm not quite certain that I'm going to kind of get a big emotional response, maybe aside from a little bit of a giggle.

And that leads us to the last step, which is about weighing it up.

And what you do here is you think back to all the things you found in the previous steps of REVIEW and think is information that's been presented accurate and ultimately, do you believe what is in the article? Now, I was fortunate that in the final search that I did online, I actually found a web page from Spotify themselves and they said that it was true that they had done this research.

And the reason that I couldn't find those statistics anywhere else, was because Spotify had actually done that research themselves.

It wasn't done by an external company and then Spotify acting, Spotify was responding to their own research here.

Their website did say that they had released this podcast and this playlist and so ultimately I've now found that this article was correct.

But sometimes you don't get the same sort of resolution.

You don't get a massive neon sign pointing you in the right direction.

So it's really useful to go through those stages of REVIEW to try to make sure that you can pick out what might be a little bit of a false or a regular piece of information in a news article.

What I'd like you to do here, is to look at the steps of REVIEW that I've got in order on the left hand side, and try to match them to the question that you would best ask within each step.

So for example, I'm going to match reputation to one of the questions on the left.

So trying to think about what I would be asking, would I be asking, what do I think overall? Or would I be asking, what are the facts? Or would I be asking why are they publishing this? You can pause the video here and then rewind a little bit so you can see all the different options that you need to match when you're ready to find out the answers play again.

The correct answers are now up on the screen.

So in the reputation section, you would be asking, who's publishing this and how reliable are they.

In the second section about evidence.

You'd be trying to pick out what the facts are and then also looking at what the opinions are.

When it comes to verifying, you'd be thinking about what you can fact check.

So what information you've got and what you can compare it to elsewhere, either in other forms of media that you might be able to access or online.

Intent is about the reason why they're publishing something.

So thinking about the information neighbourhoods.

Emotions is thinking about how it makes you feel.

And then finally at the very end, when you're weighing it up thinking about what your opinion is overall and whether or not you think it is a reliable article.

Your final task is going to be based around this article here, "Girl suffered collapsed lung after screaming at One Direction concert." What I will like you to do is to read the Source 1 article except in the worksheet.

And then I want you to predict whether or not you think this story is true.

When you've done that, what I would like you to do, is to use the other resources that are also in the worksheet to work your way through the REVIEW process.

And as you do that, I'd like you to make some notes about what you find out because as you start making notes about the reputation and the evidence and verifying and the intent and the emotions, that is all going to be very valuable information for you to then weigh it up at the end.

So you can pause the video here to complete your task, click forward to go to the worksheet and use that to help you through the REVIEW process.

And when you're done, you can then come back and I will go through the answers with you.

Okay, so hopefully you've come to the same conclusions as I have in regards to the information.

If we have a look at the reputation to start off with, the little piece of information from Media Bias Fact Check said that Refinery29 is seen as mostly factual.

So it's probably a fairly reliable source in its own way.

If we then look at the evidence from that initial news article, it had information about the doctor's name and also the fact that it had happened allegedly in Texas.

So those are two really useful things that you might want to use in terms of trying to verify in the next step.

In verifying, hopefully you would have found that the doctor is real because he had a LinkedIn account as one of the sources and it was an actual journal article published that seems to be about the same event.

In terms of the intent, it is about informing.

It's not about entertainment, even though it's about a boy band, it's not really something that kind of comes across as entertaining to find out that someone has hurt themselves.

At least not in that kind of really funny way.

In terms of emotions, it's probably trying to make you shocked.

I mean, for me, it was a bit like, Oh, that's really kind of weird, that's surprising I didn't think that that actually is something that could happen.

So it's trying to draw attention and that is trying to get a response out of you.

Overall, the evidence does suggest that it did actually happen.

And I know that it was also reported on by the BBC and other news outlets as well and the BBC actually tracked down the girl who it happened to and spoke to her as well.

From what we've done in today's lesson, you have reflected upon who and what you trust.

We've thought about whether what we read is reliable and looked at mis, dis and malinformation.

And through the REVIEW process, you've now got a way that you can be more confident that what you read is accurate.

Again, if you'd like to, you can ask a parent or carer to share your work on Twitter tagging @OakNational and using the #LearnwithOak.

I would really love to see some more of your work.

It's been fantastic to see what people have shared already.

We've only got one lesson left we're going to be looking at all the things that we've covered so far, and then coming to a conclusion as to whether or not we think the media does more harm than good.