It’s happened before, and with another American presidential election looming next year, it’s going to happen again and again. The spread of “fake news,” the incorrect labelling of real news as “fake,” and overall confusion as to how to tell the difference.
The Poynter Institute is offering some guidance via its International Fact-Checking Network, which has compiled a list of unreliable news sites it’s calling “UnNews.”
Here’s how they did it:
To create the index, we combined five major lists, then eliminated the sites that were no longer active. We only used lists that were public and curated by established journalists or academics, contained original data (rather than information from other lists), stated their criteria for inclusion and defined how they graded different sites (see our methodology for more).
There are more than 500 “UnNews” sites on the list in “phase one” of the index. The next phase will work to “automatically remove inactive sites, add sites by following URL redirects (which often lead to new fake news schemes) and harvest related domains,” the report says.
The list is searchable and the sites have tags that label them as biased, unreliable, conspiracy, satire or clickbait.
Comments
3 responses to “How To Tell If A News Site Is Reliable”
Lol, come on… news site, really?
What’s this, Lifehacker is not on the list. Just kidding.
Thank you Meghan for your editorial, I think it will help more than anyone thought. Our commercial TV stations, and their sister newspapers need to be on the list. After all, apart from Aunty, they either fail to bring in all the facts, over dramatise, or are bias. To that end They are just gossip magazines.
I will go as far to say Australians have not had a democratic election for tens of years, because our media is incapable of presenting real news. So we go to the polls with that rubbish.
People, you should also add Facebook, Instagram and Twitter to the list.
Step 1: check how many ads appear between the article and the comments section. It is understandable that a news website would contain some ads, but when the volume actually exceeds the length of the articles, it is likely that the website has gone overboard.