Throughout your academic career, you have been taught to fact-check your work before turning it in for a grade. But, the fact-checking process isn’t limited to college. There’s a reason your professors demand proof through resource citations. Media bias exists everywhere, even the most common national news outlets.

xsw1

Media bias is not always as obvious as a click-bait headline or false information presented to readers in big red text. This makes it hard to always recognize when you are being fed biased news. Media bias can come in the form of a news story that only uses sources or perspectives from one side of an issue. It can be specific word choices, or words chosen to be left out, framing the context of a situation within a certain view.

At school, think of it like a research paper that only cites one source multiple times, or only cites sources for one side of an argument. The citations can be real and factual, but they lack context against the greater picture of the full news story. This would be considered biased coverage, as the facts are credible but intentionally shaped for a certain viewpoint.

It goes without saying that every news site is unique. They all aim to be the first to cover a specific news story or provide their own unique style to reporting the news. It helps them stand out against other highly competitive news outlets. In today’s modern age, they also need to stand out against social media news outlets, not just other TV stations or newspapers.

To the news consumer, it can be hard to find a news outlet that they deem trustworthy enough to get most of their news from. For those who are hesitant to trust the media, searching through many sites to find the most credible one can be exhausting. You may even find yourself taking tidbits of information from news articles fact-checking them through various other news sites or websites. To fact-check the right way, you need the right strategy to avoid news fatigue.

How to Fact-Check the News Like You Fact-Check Schoolwork

It has been drilled in you to fact check your work throughout your academic career. A few of these habits carry over into fact-checking the news you consume:

• Check the source: Who published the news story? Does the news outlet often share repeated political or personal viewpoints within its stories?
• Check for missing context: Context is key to credibility. In a news story, determine whether they successfully included all perspectives involved in a news story, or whether they only focused on one. Does it feel like any information was intentionally left out?
• Separate fact from opinion: Major news outlets often report using both opinions and news story facts. News articles and op-eds are not the same, even when they come from the same outlet.
• Cross-reference with other outlets: The bigger the news story, the more outlets are likely to have covered the same event. Whether the sources overlap are usually where the facts exist.

Using these skills every time you want to stay up-to-date with recent events can become exhausting. The alternative is to find new strategies to combat media bias. A news bias checker allows you to consume your news in a single place, where AI is used to filter fact from opinion and deliver you the truth in an article, without the added perspectives.