 Okay, good evening, everyone. Thank you for coming tonight. I'm Christina McGowan, Dean of the Library, and I'm pleased to welcome you to our panel discussion on media consumption, misinformation and media literacy. This panel discussion is the opening event of the Domenna Nicelius Library's Media Literacy Event Series, which aims to generate conversations around media literacy and its importance to our academic, professional, civic and personal lives. The events coincide with US Media Literacy Week, an initiative hosted by the National Association for Media Literacy Education. The mission of US Media Literacy Week is to highlight the power of media literacy education and its essential role in education across the country. Within the librarian profession, media literacy, which provides a framework to access, analyze, evaluate, create and participate with content in a variety of formats is considered essential for citizens of a democracy. Again, thank, allow me to thank you all for joining us. Now, please let me introduce our Fairfield University panelists. Dr. Gail Alberta is an Assistant Professor of Politics and Director of the Masters of Public Administration Program. Her research focuses on election administration and voting. She teaches courses in American political behavior and public administration. Before coming to Fairfield University, Dr. Alberta worked in the political arena in a variety of capacities. She frequently comments on local, state and national politics and elections for the media. Dr. Michael Andrzejczyk is Professor of Psychology and Faculty Liaison with the Center for Academic Excellence. Dr. Andrzejczyk is a social and personality psychologist whose work focuses on understanding the psychological basis of intergroup bias and on debiasing the methods and practices of science more broadly. Dr. Adam Rugg is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication. Dr. Rugg's teaching and research interests include examining the effect of social media and emerging technological platforms on cultural and social practices. In particular, he looks at the ways in which news and information consumption habits are created and manipulated in a digital world, and how those processes can be manipulated or shaped by tech corporations, media companies and private interests. He teaches numerous courses connected to this topic, including social media, news media and democracy and misinformation in digital media. Dr. Jennifer Schindler-Rewish is an Assistant Professor of Public Health in the Egan School of Nursing and Health Studies. Her research focuses on health behavior largely in the area of maternal and child health, including the importance of mobile health and extending the reach of critical health information messaging. Given her work in public health during a pandemic, she is also studying how COVID-19 has transformed our health and healthcare in diverse ways, including the role of messaging and communicating critical pandemic information, undersporing the importance of media literacy. Matt Charano is Senior Research Librarian and the Instruction Coordinator for the Domenna Nicelius Library. Matt is the coordinator of the Library's Faculty Partnership Program and leads our Information Literacy Program. He is the librarian partner to the Dolan School of Business and the Egan School of Nursing and Health Studies. And Matt Tullis is a professor and the Director of Digital Journalism, Co-Director of Sports Media and Associate Director of the Integrated Media Labs. Matt is a former Daily Newspaper reporter who teaches students how to report and write news. He's also the host of Gingery, the podcast, a show focused on reporters who write narrative journalism. This panel will be moderated by Molly Lamondola, a senior art history and politics double major. Molly has written for the mirror since her first year at Fairfield and is now its editor-in-chief. Molly was an honorable mention for last year's Library Research Prize for her work on the Native American Cinderella Tale. Molly, thank you for moderating tonight. I'll hand it off to you. Thank you so much everyone for coming. I'm very excited to be part of tonight and discuss media literacy. I don't know how many of you saw me on the Fairfield U Instagram story kind of highlighting the event. So I hope some of my marketing got some more people to come, but I won't speak too long. I just want to mention that at the bottom of your screen you will see a Q&A function. So if any questions come up during the event, you're more than welcome to add them and we will answer them at the end of this panel. And then just as another highlight, this discussion is also going to be recorded and captioning will be added and it will be available on Fairfield University's YouTube channel soon. So if you or if you're a professor and you want to show this in your class or use it in any capacity, it will be available too. So I just want to start us off by trying to define what media literacy generally is. So I'm going to pass it off to Mr. Shirano to discuss media literacy's definition. Cool. Hey, good evening everybody. So I like the definition that is provided by the Center for Media Literacy. It's also worth pointing out that I'm a good librarian and this is the definition endorsed by the American Library Association. So I'm following that as well. And I'm going to read this straight from them because I think they do a really good job. So media literacy is a 21st century approach to education. It provides a framework to access, analyze, evaluate, create, and participate with messages in a variety of forms from print to video to the internet. Media literacy builds an understanding of the role of media in society, as well as essential skills of inquiry and self expression necessary for citizens of a democracy. There are two words in that definition that I think are worth kind of pulling out and really emphasizing. The first is the word participate. So they talk about skills, like access, analyze, evaluate, create, and participate. And I think it's worth pointing out that participate means that, you know, we all have an active role in this is not media literacy is not a passive set of skills where, you know, news is just washing over us and we're just trying to figure out what to do with it. You know, especially when we talk about social media, you know, we actively engage with the news and help spread it. So I think that that's an important part of that definition. The other part is at the very end when they talk about media literacy being necessary for citizens of a democracy. You know, I always think about definitions like this, and, you know, they're very particular about word choice you know that word necessary they decided that that's the word they wanted to use. It is not an aspirational set of skills it is not something that they think would be nice. If we all could just be a little more media literate. I think it's worth pointing out that they believe that is a necessary set of skills in order to be, you know, a functional citizen in a democracy. So that is the definition that I'm providing here. So now that we kind of all understand a good overall definition of media literacy, I want to fully ask the panel at large, whether or not they have ever shared something with their class or on social media that they later found out was misinformation. So I'm going to ask everyone on the panel if they can just raise their hands. So if that's something that we have all kind of experience then I want to ask what are some good habits that we can use to try to understand how to consume information and news better and I'm going to pass it off to Dr rug and then Professor tell us. Thank you. So as a media scholar, you know I focus a lot in my classes on the way in which, you know, we relate to technology and the ways in which technologies and media infrastructures can change our practices and the way we relate to information. So I kind of take a big picture approach to this question. In my classes, I talked to my students a lot about notions of agency and control right and that you need to control your news gathering process right so I kind of ask them the question. Are you seeking out the news or are you receiving the news. And as we have these kind of longer discussions in classes students often talk about the ways in which they get news sometimes it's coming from their friends on social media or other things that are going viral. And they feel kind of that they're a passenger in this sort of process. So I focus a lot in my class on helping students take control of the process. So some of the tips I give them the first one is really simple which is just build a news reading routine right start out with some credible news sources. I believe through Fairfield is as Fairfield students you get access to free subscriptions to the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, the two excellent newspapers to sign up for. And it can be as simple as just every morning or every lunch period or right before you go to bed you go on one of those news websites and you read the articles on on the website. A lot of these big news institutions as well provide a variety of newsletters and daily podcasts that you can also sign up for and have them kind of delivered to you and that can be built in your routine as well. Once you kind of have a routine of you are going out to the news and you're going to trusted locations and credible institutions that can really help you first understand the entire news environment. And also you can feel more confident in the news that you're reading that it's not something that's just being sent to you from who knows where. The other big thing that I talked to my students about and that I struggle with myself sometimes is kind of setting rules for yourself about how you engage with information and how you talk about information. So the big rule I have for myself is no matter what the story is no matter what I've seen on social media or headlines I've seen. I don't allow myself to talk about a story until I've read a full news article on the story. Which means lots of times I'm having conversations with friends and I have to say, I don't know, even though I'm very tempted to launch in with my perception of the story or how I feel about the people involved in general and things like that. And it's a really hard thing to kind of teach yourself to do, because we live in a culture right now that's very media saturated. And there are cultural pressures and expectations to have an opinion on everything to be aware of everything to be an active participant the moment something hits the mainstream. And to actually slow things down and say, I'm not ready to discuss this yet or I haven't read deeply enough into that kind of goes against the, the, I think the modern cultural feeling. So, so one thing I tried to really do is push my students to take a step back, and to ask themselves what do I need to do to be informed on this topic before I can talk about it. So the role I have for myself is I make sure I read one full article and I'm always surprised how my knowledge of the situation my opinion of the situation changes, even after just reading one one article. My final piece of advice is also figure out the topics you are interested in sort of overall right if you're really interested in politics or you're really interested in education. So start finding out who key people are in that in that area. So one thing I often do when I'm reading articles from credible news institutions about topics I'm interested in, I look up the reporters. Most newspapers assign reporters to a specific beat. So for instance at the New York Times, they have one person or a number of people who just kind of write about educational topics. There's a lot to me so I follow these people on Twitter, and I see them linking to other stories I see them talking about their news research as well. So I also build my social media follows, based on that. So those are kind of my three big tips, build a routine of reading credible information that you initiate. Don't let yourself talk about a topic until you've read a full news article about it. And for the topics you're interested in do deep dives and start finding out the reporters who cover that topic for news organizations, academics who research that topic, and other experts in that area that you can then follow and dive even deeper into those topics. Yeah, and I can go ahead and jump on as well and say that as Professor rug was talking about that it made me think of something that Jim Acosta said when he spoke in the quick centers open visions session, which was a month ago now I can't remember how long ago it was, but but he actually talked about being broad and where you see news information out, don't only stick with one publication or one cable news channel. But but go and look and see how the New York Times covered something and go and look and see how the Washington Post covered it, and how the Wall Street Journal covered it, and how CNN covered it. And obviously now you're thinking oh my gosh I don't have that much time in the day to do all that, but you'd be surprised at how quickly you can kind of look at a couple different couple of the same stories. At the very least the first couple paragraphs to see how they're framed and see to see how that they're going to be covered. One really interesting one tomorrow to do that with is the, the new name of Facebook, which is all over social media right now. And this is one thing I do too because I do get a lot of news through social media I'm on Twitter a lot. And one thing one way I've done to try to really make my Twitter feed better at making sure I'm getting good quality journalism in there is I've heavily curated who I follow. And a couple years ago, I think I follow like 5000 people on Twitter. I've got that number down to 498 I just checked a little bit ago. And it's primarily journalists who I trust news organizations that I trust based on just experience and what I've read what I've watched from their play their their publications before, but even then if I see something interesting that I that I'm fascinated with on Twitter. I generally am not just going to automatically hit retweet. If there's a link I'll click on it, if I'm seeing a bunch of stuff that's interesting but I don't see links, I'm going to Google, and I'm going to search the idea or whatever it is. I'm going to see what organizations are coming back with news stories already. And then I'm going to look at a couple, one or two of those pieces as well to really get a better understanding of what this is that I'm seeing in general, in general tweets on Twitter. But by and large is really I mean, having that broad sense of being willing to look at publications or even cable news channels that you wouldn't normally be willing to watch it's good to see the variety of ways that single stories are covered and then that will help you understand what is going on in a much more deeper, deeper sense. That's interesting. Thank you both so much for that and we're just kind of speaking on when Professor tallest was discussing how he clicks on links to check. I want Dr rug and Mr Shirano to discuss how you can then like if you click on the link and want to evaluate whether or not it's fake news how do you go about doing that, if you wouldn't mind. You know, again, we even if you have total control of your, your, your sort of news process people are still going to send you things. You know, my, my mom, my dad send me articles all the time. I'm in group chats with friends and things get shared. My advice kind of for this is also a little bit big picture. I think it's really important to take a moment, right, take a breather. We often when especially someone share something that's going viral that's very sensationalistic that seems like really big news. I think there's a lot of motivation to to again jump into the fray to share it start talking about it. When, you know, a lot of misinformation that that floats around can generally be debunked pretty quickly easily if we just step back and give it a critical eye. I think a lot of us just don't do that because we get caught up in the moment or or we are just moving too fast. So whenever someone kind of shares news with me. I always kind of just take a moment and slow down right and because I have a routine where I'm seeking out the news I read as my primary way of being informed. But when someone shares something with me or something comes to me it, I'm aware of it I realized that I'm getting something from someone else right and I'm naturally a little bit more skeptical. So just if you know the things I do often I will Google the story and see if other news organizations are covering it. If there's only one place that's covering it. That should increase your skepticism, not that the story is in true but you might ask yourself why is only one place covering it if it's a major news organization. If it's not a major news organization you might ask why are no major news organizations covering this. Is this just circulating in very specific areas of the internet or on message boards or on social media. You know where where's the where's the credible outlets are reporting on this. So just look for yourself as if there's big claims being made in the story what's the evidence that's provided is this evidence that can be verified or fact check or is where is that coming from. Oftentimes I'll Google the story or the idea behind the story and I'll add on the word fake or fact check to see if anyone has posted about this and for at least big pieces of misinformation. I guess I've done a good job about putting up fact checks pretty quickly. So that can be a good tactic as well as to see people who are being critical of the story. The other thing I would also advise is a lot of misinformation is not an outright lie, but it's something that's taken out of context right it's something that's from years ago or it's a quote that on its own sounds really damning but then like at the full interview or speech or something it actually has a totally different meaning. So one thing I always do is when I'm things are shared with me that that are like a video clip and it's only 30 seconds long a minute long. So if you go out and try and find the longer clip or try to find a story about the whole thing to see if it happened the way it has happened. And that's very very common, especially with video clips, because video clips feel true right because you know it's being filmed. So, aside from, you know, elaborate deep fakes and video manipulation technology when people see videos, they kind of aren't as skeptical as something that's just given to them through text. But many, many video clips that go viral in our misinformation are deliberately or deceptively clipped out of context and shared purposely to deceive people so always be wary when you're when you're shared short things or quotes, look for the longer context which often can change the meeting. And I would just add a few more things to that. Some things that we teach sometimes in information literacy sessions. So when we're talking about sources. I kind of think that you can look at that in me one of two different ways. So for example, sometimes the source just isn't legitimate as a whole. For example, a couple years ago there was a website called the Boston Tribune, and it looked great sounds great sounds like a Boston newspaper, but it's not or it wasn't. And it was just basically a place for people to post misinformation and fake news and things like that. And once they got kind of found out they had to change their name and kind of move on and things like that. Another classic example is you'll see an article from abcnews.com.co right so it looks legit but then at the very end there there's a little bit extra that takes you away, you're not going ABC news, you know you're going somewhere else. So that's something to think about I've seen that a lot in particular on social media but then I think about spam email every morning best buy is trying to get me to fill out a survey for $500 you know and that's not you know it's kind of a similar thing. You can also think about considering the source from the angle of, you know, sources might have certain political leanings or they might like to portray a story in a specific way. So that goes back to having that broad base of where you're getting the news. If you feel like you're reading the story and it's like maybe their world you might be painting the way they're presenting this to me, well then go find other stories where they're writing the same thing and compare that information to what you're getting from, you know, the original source that you found. Definitely, I believe it was Professor told us and mentioned kind of checking the author or finding people who do those who are writing things. If you have an article, especially online, you can usually click the author's name, and it's going to show you who wrote for that organization. Sometimes there might even be a bio sort of thing like that so you can see well what are their credentials who are these people. A lot of these bogus websites or fake news websites. Don't tell you who wrote the article or they're making up credentials or things like that. And I would say if you were reading something and you were maybe thinking maybe this person's not real. It's a linked in page, you know, usually journalists and people have a paper trail they want you to see their work. So it's out there to find if you want to find it. And then the last thing I wanted to add is nothing wrong with consulting the experts and maybe that's a librarian that would be great I would love to help you with these things, but there are websites like fact check.org. The Washington Post has a fact checker. My personal favorite when it comes to election election time is political fact.com. And there's a lot of websites like that that are known quantities their quality they're reliable. They pride themselves on that transparency and that kind of independence. And then those can be great places to go to if you have, especially if it's viral and it's new, you know, it's like, you know, this has probably been fact checked by somebody, and you could go kind of get that verification from them. So, yeah, a couple different strategies that I could give. Amazing, and maybe just like I want you to touch upon the idea of how we can evaluate headlines accurately as well. Sure. So, you know, one is definitely and we kind of talked about this before. I think Dr. Rug when you're talking about like reading make sure you read a full article. You know just like don't just go by the headline and that is my personal cardinal sin is I am someone who likes to, you know, I don't really care about this enough to read the whole thing I'm just going to use the headline and go for it. That's not a good habit you really should probably read the whole thing to make sure that that headline really lines up with the reality of what that article is trying to portray. I want you to think about what's the support again sources a legitimate news article. If they are making claims they're going to be backing it up with some sort of evidence some sort of support. And one thing that's very helpful in the age of the internet is a lot of times when available they'll hyperlink directly to that source. So sometimes you don't have that maybe they mentioned oh this is in this recent World Health Organization report. Maybe you've got to be the one to type it into Google and look for it, but a lot of times they'll link directly to that report so if you want to make sure that the claim being made in this article line up with what's being given in the report, you should be able to do that yourself. And then talking about working with students particularly a lot of times you want that report you don't want to just use the article that newspaper article could be very brief and it's like a 30 page World Health Organization report so maybe you want to dig into a little bit more and get some more detailed information. The last thing I would say is checking the date. So, making sure that you know they're backing something up with with a source, make sure that that source is actually legitimate source that can be used. Really good example was from early on in the Trump administration there was an article going around that he had helped he had convinced the Ford Motor Company to bring plants from Mexico to Ohio and all of these articles to CNN.com article from 2015 from before he was president when Ford had decided on their own to move their plants from Mexico to Ohio so these people are hoping that you're not going to do that next step of research and actually click their source they're hoping you just see CNN.com and you trust that, and you kind of leave it there so taking those extra steps can definitely help you with that. That's amazing. And all the panelists so far has kind of discussed social media's impact on how they consume media as well and kind of how everyone uses Twitter or different things so I was hoping that both Dr rug and Mr Sharon can kind of talk about how is social media influences the ways you guys both consume media and kind of evaluate different information. So I'll hand it off to Dr rug. Yeah, I'll be succinct here I think it's been very tough. It's just create a lot of challenges. As I said before social media focuses a lot on speed people move through content very fast contents very short content spreads very quickly, all which I think does a disservice to slow considered critical examination of new stories and events. I love social media. I use it a lot I think it's incredibly valuable for news reporting gathering and consumption, but I also think it's kind of going into the deep end. So my strong advice to students or anyone who feels overwhelmed with kind of the news environment is to start simple with reading credible news institutions and don't start waiting into social media as a vehicle for news, until you can get a landscape better and can get the most value as social media, while avoiding the very many, many, many, many ways in which social media inhibits good informed news consumption. I just wanted to add, mostly just the results of a Pew research survey that they do every year on social media and news usage it came out about a month ago so I thought I'd throw out some of the key findings from that. Of US adults say they get news from social media either often, or sometimes, that's actually a 5% decline from the year prior 31% of us adults regularly get news from Facebook, down from 36%. So Zuckerberg is probably not happy about that 22% go to YouTube and 13% go to Twitter, which I think is interesting I would have guessed that Twitter would have been much higher but there are other social media sites on the single digits. Interestingly, people who regularly get news on Facebook are more likely to be women than men 64% to 35%. And younger adults 18 to 29 are far more likely to regularly get news on Snapchat and TikTok, which I bring up primarily to make us feel old. And then, maybe not super interesting but I worth pointing out the majority of regular news consumers from the top 10 social media sites are Democrat or lean Democratic. So Pew research believes this is related to the relatively young age profile of the news consumer base of these sites, but there was no site that had a majority Republican or Republican leading it was all the other way. So that's pretty interesting. And now it's interesting that we kind of all understand media literacy and all of our panelists today seem to understand what it is and how to avoid it but there still seems to be something kind of interesting or something that attracts us to all these fake news articles so I was hoping that Dr. Adresic can discuss a bit more about the psychological impact on fake news, and specifically what's the psychology behind the ways in which people can kind of consume and interpret media. Sure, thanks. Yeah I mean one of the things that you're going to see pretty quickly as I start going through some of this. There's a lot of parallels between what I'm going to say and what the other panelists have already talked about. And I think one of the things that's really good to point out in terms of connecting was already been said with what I'm going to say. I think a lot of the, the sort of habits that you want to nurture, right to sort of avoid getting sucked in by some some fake news that the panelists pointed out are exactly the types of habits that I'm going to mention that have come out of sort of empirical studies more empirical research in psychology recently on some of these, some of these issues. So, one of the things that we often talk about not just with social media but just in general as people are sort of gathering information and consuming any kind of information is the idea that, you know, generally speaking, human beings are for lack of a better word kind of lazy when it comes to gathering information making decisions if they don't have to expand a lot of effort to do some of these things, they won't. And there are definitely times when we're really motivated to expend the extra effort right like if something if there's an issue that's very important for us, or it's, you know, an issue that's going to be very impactful for somebody that we love or care about, we'll kind of sit down take the time to do some of these things, but generally speaking we kind of use shortcuts judgment shortcuts that work pretty well most of the time. The problem is that some of those shortcuts can lead to errors that can be kind of costly. So, like for example, one of these is something called the availability heuristic is a really well known one so basically the idea is, you know, if I ask you a question, whatever pops into your mind first, it's easy to just kind of assume that it popped into your mind because it's really frequent or common when that's not always the case right there's lots of things that you see in the media that are very, they're flashy, right and they get a lot of attention, but they're not very common at all, and actually kind of paradoxically, you might see more reporting on uncommon things, precisely because they're uncommon and they're interesting. So using one of those shortcuts to try to decide like well what should I do or what should I be worried about or something like that, that shortcuts not going to help you. Most of the time it's sometimes going to lead you into into a wrong conclusion. So that's one example of how this kind of preference for lack of effort or at least effort maybe can can impact you. The thing that we use a lot when we're trying to evaluate sources and information is cues that again aren't really relevant to the argument that we don't always think about the the actual data or the facts. We often will think about what we call peripheral cues so who is it who's saying this or what's the, how many people are saying the same thing so, for example, like what we rely on experts, right if an expert says something we believe it, and we don't actually look at the underlying, the underlying arguments, which of course can be problematic, and consensus to is a cue for us that we will often use in situations where we're not really motivated to put forth the effort to evaluate the underlying arguments. That's a one that we talk about a lot when it comes to social media right because in social media a lot of what you're seeing is based on consensus. Some of the things that are getting shared more are going to turn up more in your feed, things like that so if you're kind of using that consensus, you know how many likes to something have as a shortcut to know what to think that also can send you in the wrong direction. Sometimes. So those are kind of like the shortcut aspect of this but there are other ones to but that's that's something that gets in the way sometimes of us making good decisions and being able to discern what's true from what's false. And also of course more motivated things right so I know one of the things that other panelists talked about already is trying to take control over, you know, what you're being exposed to how you're consuming media. If you do that thoughtfully, I think that works really well. I'm a little skeptical like in general that people are going to do that well because we see again not just with social media but in lots of areas of decision making people just have a bias to seek out stuff that is probably going to confirm what they already believe so that we probably have all heard of the confirmation bias it's a really really well replicated psychological phenomenon. Yeah so you know oftentimes if you're actually saw a cartoon the other day when somebody was trying to evaluate some belief and they were typing into Google to look for basically the first headline that agrees with what they already believe and that was their search right for what they what they wanted to know. And we do that kind of for good reason like we want to think that we're right about things it's actually important for us to have to believe that we know kind of what's going on. But clearly it also is problematic if you're actually interested in truth more than just kind of being, I don't want to use the word truth but in maybe a supportable conclusions will say, rather than just kind of being right about stuff. So that that's something that you have to kind of be really careful of you want to make sure that you're going out there and trying to seek out things really. I think is like a more scientific way, you want to gather all the evidence that's relevant to whatever your hypothesis is, and not just do a buy a search for whatever it is that you're looking for. You can always find evidence for something. But that doesn't mean that you know that one bit of evidence supports what you think there might be 10,000 bits of evidence on the other side you just never looked for them. So you're not going to change your conclusion so that that's important to I think that tendency for people to kind of seek out confirmatory evidence is is something to keep in mind as you're as you're thinking about how to sort of seek out and deal with the media. And the other thing and this this is one that I get asked about a lot as a psychologist is sort of the sort of like, ideological motivations behind some of these things right like are you just going to go out and just get information that sort of agrees with the groups to which you already sort of ascribe to or belong to, and there's there's actually a ton of research that suggests that, you know because group memberships are just so important to us. And we don't really evaluate much of anything in terms of the, like the underlying data, if the group tells us that something is true, we believe it's true. And I know it like at some level that seems weird, but at another level. It's another motivation that's really important for people right like it's important for us to be members of groups, it may even serve probably starts like an evolutionary purpose right we it's important for us to have coalitions and things like that. And that's going to drive your consumption of things and your belief in a lot of areas. And it's not necessarily sort of going against your own, your own desires and your own best interests like I hear people a lot say like, you know this group is voting against their interests or something, but you got to remember humans have a lot of interest that we're keeping in mind all the time right. So yeah you might vote for a policy that might hurt you economically but it also helps you affirm the values that you hold or the values that belong to the groups that you're that you're really dedicated to. So that's another thing that can kind of get in the way, I think of some of these things. And one thing that I think that is important to mention about the previous panelists and what they said, I mean they're basically saying, if you slow down and sort of keep in mind, the fact that you might be influenced in these ways, that's going to help you a lot. And some of the research actually more recent research suggests exactly that, like if you just kind of make people more aware, and they'll do experiments where they'll you know experimentally make people more aware of accuracy or more focused on discerning truth from from falsehood. If you can do that even in subtle ways you find that people are much less likely to endorse fake news, and in particular there must much less likely to share fake news which is also obviously a big problem. So yeah, those are those are some of the big things that the last one that I'll that I'll mention here which is also something that I think the panelists already touched on a little bit. People just are we have a preference for easy solutions easy answers and cause and effect relationships we love seeing cause and effect they everything, everything, we want everything to have a meeting. The problem is that it's so hard to find these one to one cause and effect relationships in the world, especially when we talk about you know complex human kinds of behaviors. And that's, I think problematic because people, if you really have an understanding of sort of how probabilities work and how cause and effect works, you're less likely to fall for these, I think some of these headlines they try to give you simple answers to everything. But that is is problematic and it gives people don't always have a good understanding of how you know statistical relationships work and probabilities work just about the entire world is probabilistic but we don't always appreciate that to a sufficient and so people get to satisfy for example when polling data shows that somebody only has a 27% chance to win, and then that person wins, and everybody gets mad and says polls are worthless. Well, 27% chance to win means that person's going to win 27% of the time right. So that that could be a perfectly reasonable poll. But if you don't understand the statistics that go into those things and how probabilities work, it becomes difficult to be able to discern what was that a bad poll or did somebody try to give me biased information or was that just the kind of chance that sometimes happens, even when you take into account everything and make a really good poll. In that respect, I think, like, you know, statistics education probability education, things like that become become important for us to be giving to people I think maybe earlier in life in, you know, grade school and stuff I wish my nine year old is getting some statistics education, but wishful thinking. Yeah, so those are those are the things that I think are the most relevant to point out there. And then maybe you just want to touch upon how the media's role plays a part in this and how the media transmits and then like reduces social bias as well. Yeah, sure. So, the, the part of this that's most relevant to the idea of sort of social media. I think has to do with just the, the, the environment in which we're sort of living when we're consuming things via social media. So, you know, social media works in a very, I guess kind of like a popularity based sort of a way right so we value attention more than truth in a lot of these domains. So at the end of the time like in most, for example, most most sort of judgment studies in psychology, you find that people actually really care about truth. I mean, even if they have motivations that point in opposite directions, almost nobody is going to endure something that seems patently false for a variety of reasons that just doesn't happen. I find that when you put even when you present people with the same information but in a social media environment, they become less interested in truth like it's just something they're not as, as concerned with anymore. And we think it's partly because of sort of the reward structure in social media right there. I mean it's all, this sounds kind of strange but it's all like a conditioning structure right you get positively reinforced for some things. In terms of likes and social attention and things like that. Yeah, and so that that I think definitely shapes what we end up doing and how we end up sharing things in social media that we might not share in other areas of life so that's important. And then that just the last thing quickly. The big research interest is in social bias like inner group biases and things like that so this isn't biased necessarily in terms of, you know, bias, like political bias or something like that but it is transmitting social biases. And there's a huge literature that suggests that one of them, you know, the main areas, it's probably won't surprise anyone, one of the main areas that are like as ways in which those biases are transmitted is through the media. You grow up in this culture right where you're constantly saturated with stereotypes about certain groups and things like that. And those become a part of you that you may not accept or want even when you become older right. But they become this kind of knee jerk reaction that you have when you're exposed to people from some of these other groups that can impact you in ways that again, you might not be aware of and you might not accept. Interesting work that suggests that as media portrayals of different groups change over time. You see corresponding changes in some levels of bias so like, for example, over the last about 25 years, something that we call implicit bias which is this kind of automatically activated sort of negativity that you might have towards a group implicit bias the LGBTQ community has actually gone down quite a bit. And one of the reasons for that people postulate we don't know but is because they've received much more favorable treatment in sitcoms in television shows things like that. Whereas other groups bias towards African Americans bias towards the elderly bias against even disabled hasn't changed much over that time because media portrayals of those groups also haven't changed. So again that's not necessarily the sort of more social media maybe part of this, but it does talk about and get to I think the issue of societal bias more, more broadly so there's a real role to be played here by. I think the media in shaping and potentially changing bias as well. Interesting. Thank you so much. And so kind of now that we have the psychological impact of media literacy I want to kind of move over to how this impacts our daily life and specifically politics. So I'm going to shift over to Dr Alberta, who's going to tell us a bit more about if there is such a thing as being unbiased with no political agenda and then we're going to move over to Professor tell us who's going to answer the same question. Thank you Molly. Just to build off of what Dr Andre check was saying is that it media rear media rarely changes are pre existing values or opinions when it comes to our political values and opinions in particular coming from that perspective. And that's because of this notion of selective perception. We mentally screen out these new stories that don't align with our beliefs or that we might disagree with and as a result then the media stories we consume is going to influence our values and our attitudes and the opinions that we already hold. And that plays a role in large part with this idea of this unbiased press, right because the press has never really been unbiased and I know I'm Professor tell us we'll talk about that too but the in from the political world, we know that the press has been privately owned, usually by individuals or corporations, and during the nation's most formative years, newspapers were bias, they had a political party affiliation, or a support of a certain party and they rarely hid that fact. As political parties became more formalized to kind of the parties that we know today, which happened around the early 19th century. The newspapers controlled by one specific party, and they would provide favorable information about the candidates about the positions about their stances, the party stances on the issues, and provide very negative and contrasting views about that so you would see through these papers that supported your own viewpoints on the political system. We also had other groups like religious groups or interest groups that became players in this game that would own press entities and would help disseminate their information from their perspectives. And as broadcast media became really popular. The federal communications commissions the FCC required that we had these networks provide a certain amount of time for news programs to or for channels to air news programs in exchange for free airtime or free airwaves and access to that. And then they started implementing things to help kind of create this fairness, such as the equal time rule, which if a media loves a lot gives a candidate of certain free time then they must do the same thing for the other time. But the role only applies to certain programming, not all programming. So for instance talk shows don't have to comply with that. But or really to like presidential addresses to like the nation, but most networks do offer the rebuttal the opposing parties rebuttal as part of that free time. So they've tried to stuff like the fairness doctrine which was implemented in 1949. And that's where if you showed one view you had to show the contrasting view on air as well but that has since been abolished in about the 1980s we abolished that. So there has not really been in a way away for us to navigate that space, but it has also helped us increase our selective perception. Yeah, I want to jump in. I'll jump in and say one thing, and this is coming from the newspaper reporters perspective, and from the newspaper industry but also television news as well. So there's a difference between biasness and opinion, seeping into pieces and newspapers. You what you read the news section and you might say that this newspaper leans to the right, or this newspaper leans to the left, but you're still going to read the articles in the news section and you're not going to find opinion in those pieces. You'll find the opinion on the opinion page newspapers all have opinion pages cable news channels all have news shows and then opinion shows. And that's a delineation that is, it has always been fairly strong and in the news industry reporters who write news articles, don't write opinion pieces for their publications and and vice versa. We'll get some sense of biasness because every reporter has some inbuilt biasness it's impossible to get get rid of that. Generally, you see it and how articles are framed, how they are put together what they lead with. And the best reporting is going to be is going to take that into account, and be a completely fair reporter who's going to talk to as many people as possible to really try to understand the situation. But that reporter is still writing that article in a certain way that is is the way that they feel that it needs to be written. And I wanted to really to keep in mind my students in my news writing classes I have two classes 32 students total. Every single one of them watched the Jim Acosta event and sorry second time I mentioned it every single one of them watch that Jim Acosta event. A couple weeks ago, and they had to write an article about what Jim Acosta said 32 students one event 32 different articles. They read with different things, they use different quotes, they covered various things that lasted an hour so he talked a lot and they could only write 350 words, they were all put together differently. And that's something to keep in mind but but when you're reading a new story, you know I'm looking to make sure there's no opinion in it from the report. The reporter should not be getting their own opinion in there, but there is some framing and how they put it together that's going to show a little bit of where they're coming from and, and honestly, this is something that the journals and world really needs to confront and recognize and kind of work forward on instead of pretending that oh there's no bias here at all because that's impossible it's impossible to do. And then Dr. Alberta, can you just elaborate a bit on what the role the media plays in as a check and balance to democracy. Yeah, absolutely. So, when Edmund Burke once said that the press was the fourth estate. What he really was referring to is that the government in the press can be very natural adversaries. The press, this is big P press. I can't really distinguish that in politics big P press from little, little P press, but it exists outside of other government institutions like Congress and the executive branch and our courts, and in the way in, in doing so they get to exert influence or pressure on government they get to act like a watchdog. That is their check and balance they report on what's happening these inner workings in the political world and they get to tell the public what's going on so that we as the public are informed and hold them accountable through things like the ballot box. And so this in this way like what Professor Charles was just saying is they're not new, the journalists are not neutral players they don't sit on the sidelines they're actively engaged as participants they provide information to us about elected officials and those government candidates policies and other issues that are facing society, and they do, although journalists do often see themselves as holding the sacred trust between themselves in the public. So, and in this way they're going to tell us what is going on with the hopes that we can do that and so part of what I think brings us here today is that many are many people are starting to question the sacred trust because the confidence and reporting has declined, less than 30% of Americans feel the media gets a fact straight, less than 20% of Americans feel that the news is fair to all sides. We also see because of the news media sources that challenge these the social media sources right challenge this traditional media outlets in most democracies provides subsidies to news organization such as the BBC and the United Kingdom. They are watched by the public they have really high viewership and they're paid for by tax dollars. So as a result, these subsidized news outlets don't have to compete for funding through advertising, and they're able to deliver news and documentaries and other civic minded programming and research suggests that when it comes to this in this natural bias that Professor tells was talking about that it, it comes from the journalist political leanings only marginally are going to influence news coverage. But what the researchers suggesting is that the corporations in the reliance on advertisement and the in the need to make profits correlate with the bias that we see in the media. The media as a whole share this common goal right of increasing readerships and and reach and rankings and covering and which often results in this negative attention to politics, in particular, or news in general right so we think about like scandals and things along those lines. So corporate involvement in the news media industry can undermine this objectivity and credibility that we have in the news and then it erodes this sacred trust that we have with the news and so that's one of the ways in which other nations kind of deal with that is through subsidized news making agencies. Amazing. Thank you so much. Now we're just going to move on to to the idea of what is the relationship between news organizations and the people kind of sharing the stories, which both of you kind of discussed briefly during both your responses so I just want to know if you want to add anything to that prompt. I think, I think we covered it pretty good. Then we will move on to Dr. Roush with who is going to discuss coven 19 and kind of how misinformation has impacted the ongoing pandemic which is very newsworthy and something that we're all kind of focusing on now so if you just want to talk about what health literacy is and why that's so important. Absolutely. Thank you Molly so health literacy is really related to what we've been talking about this whole time but it's a little bit more specific to finding and utilizing information specific to our own health care decision. And that is very related to media literacy because the health information that we're finding these days especially we're finding it in news media social media, mobile apps and tools. So media literacy and health literacy are very intertwined. Amazing. And then do you just want to elaborate a bit on how we had to rely on the media and kind of the more virtual ways to stay healthy during the pandemic and then the idea about how this is influenced how we kind of navigate all the media and utilize mobile health things as well. Yeah, absolutely so many of you may have experienced during this pandemic the transition to telehealth or you've had to compliment your in person care your in person care has been disrupted in some way. And you've had to utilize web based sources or mobile based sources to get the health information that you need. And I think the people in here right can say that they've Googled is X, Y or Z a symptom of COVID-19 right and you're looking to find a valid accurate answer but the truth is that's not what always comes up right at the top and so how do we navigate this space right we might ask our assistant like Siri or Alexa, you know, is it normal to get winded after walking up the stairs or are these symptoms I'm having allergies or flu or COVID, and we expect to have this accurate reply. But really, you know, that's not always the case and so we need to use our media literacy and our health literacy to really figure out are these answers credible. How accurate what we can we trust, especially when it comes to our health because that can have a significant impact. Amazing and just kind of moving back to the idea of the COVID-19 pandemic. I was wondering if you can talk about how misinformation has really taken effect on impacting our lives during that. Yeah, so really important question. The WHO, the World Health Organization has called the, you know, time we're living in right now and infodemic, which is this pandemic of not just COVID-19, but the inundation we're experiencing of information nonstop about COVID-19 to the point that it's everywhere right everywhere you look you could get information, social media news media, and how do you figure out what's the truth. And what's in myth and so people read something about a potential COVID-19 treatment or something about vaccines and they may forward it and share it with family and friends like we've been talking about without realizing that we could be perpetuating a whole separate pandemic of misinformation, which has the potential to be just as dangerous as some of the health consequences that we're experiencing right now so if people perpetuate myths about non scientifically proven treatments, or even fears, it can perpetuate things like consistency or, you know, other harmful consequences that we're still grappling with as a field of public health and so even major messengers like the White House and others have been part of kind of perpetuating some of this so I just wanted to share quickly something that the Cornell University Alliance for Science said, which is that a review of 38 million media pieces published worldwide related to COVID, found that prominent US federal officials including those representing the White House, were among the most significant contributors to misinformation during the pandemic. And even further that misinformation was often shared without adequate substantiation or evidence. And so I'm sure some of you have seen this right contradictory information on face masks and vaccine. And a lot of this information had emotional appeals right it tugged at us it pulled at us it made us fearful, it made us feel guilty. It, you know, told us to do something because it was the American thing to do or, and we had to kind of navigate these emotions about a new complex and very overwhelming topic to say what is the truth. And what is the thing that I should do for my well being and our collective well being, and it became really complicated. The Pew Research Center reported in the two months between January and March 2020, a total of 27,000 congressional tweets were related to COVID-19 specifically. And we know that Twitter became, you know, a huge platform for COVID-19 information sharing from, you know, the CDC the surgeon general all of these agencies that were directly involved in prevention and mitigation. This information was being shared so quickly it wasn't always consistent. It wasn't always coordinated. And so it became very hard to navigate, you know, what is the truth and in in these times right now, having consistent coordinated information accurate credible information is our strongest tool for protecting and promoting our well being. So media literacy and health literacy played a tremendous role in how we are and continue to navigate this pandemic. Thank you so much. So we've kind of wrapped up our individual questions of all the panelists so I just want to ask a question of all of the panelists. Coming after having this conversation. I was wondering if each of you can talk through your own disciplines how we kind of move forward from this we've discussed all the ways that this is impacting our lives how we can learn to be more media literate. How do we move forward collectively kind of who can we now trust. So I'm going to go real quick Jen when you're reading that Cornell thing. I just chuckled myself because it's like even the White House needs to have sources where your sources at White House, I like that they get help to that standard to for me, you know, I think about media literacy and I think about, you know, in the library world, you know, we're trying to, you know, in an academic library you're trying to prepare people for college and success but you're also trying to create lifelong learners. So I think about media literacy and our role in a democracy and how that is it's a lifelong thing that you're always going to be learning and you're always going to be, you know, kind of adapting to the changes in the environment so I you know I think it really impresses upon me how this is a lifelong learner kind of thing. And then, you know, in communication, you know, especially media studies we focus a lot on sort of larger structures. And one thing I would add in here is, we talk a lot about individual tactics and individual strategies and that's really important that each person as an individual can face the mountain of misinformation out there. But this is a structural problem this is a problem with our technological platforms that we used to get information, specifically with our major social media companies Facebook, Twitter, even tick tock which goes under the radar for how much misinformation is on there. We need increased scrutiny on the technological platforms we use to share information. We need greater investment in credible news gathering operations and to local news gathering operations which have been decimated in the past couple decades. And importantly we need to invest in the institutions that historically have been trustworthy. We need to invest in the schools put on by the library and libraries are probably one of our greatest, I guess not natural resource, but greatest cultural resources. And, and we need to invest more libraries, universities easy to invest more libraries, Fairfield needs to invest more in its library. The terrible aspects of our current moment is that the institutions that have historically been there to help us navigate information are the ones that are weakest at the moment. So I think long term we need to work on building up institutions of trust and credibility, such as our library here in our great librarians. And I'll jump in and say that this is something that we need to be talking about constantly. Because being able to determine what we trust when we're reading or watching anything is just going to get crazier and crazier and crazier as years go by 40 years ago. We had like three TV channels and some radio stations and one or two newspapers in every town. And now we have an infinite number of websites, social media, millions of tweets, Facebook posts. The information coming at us is is is is infinite, right. And so, and it's just going to keep getting more and more and more and we're constantly going to be battling against. Why do I trust this do I not trust this why so it's something that needs to be talked about on on an absolute almost everyday basis so we can stay try and stay on top of the game. I will just add one of the things that could be helpful is some sort of media literacy training in our K through 12 school system other nations do do that. And I'm not going to touch on that much but they are moving toward that kind of literacy so that students are able to tease the stuff out sooner. The, you know, it's really, we can do everything that we want with institutions and organizations to help better this but I think it's really up to incumbent upon us. We need to make sure that we want the change, we need to make sure that we're seeking out and acting like we in acting out the things in the strategies that were given, as well as finding the resources and having them being provided to us to make those changes. Yeah, and just to close out and piggyback off of that you know I really appreciate the space to have these conversations and the great attendance and the students and colleagues that are here to really think about how to be stewards of the best possible and how can you, you know, continue this trend on our campus and in with your, your networks and the people you interact with so, you know, I would just say if you come across someone sharing something that is potentially inaccurate or misinformation, you know, as non as non confrontationally as possible right just help that person direct them to a credible reliable fact check source. And so we can continue to continue to have these important conversations about topics that are critical, but using credible fact sources that we can all trust. So we start the conversations that we're having using that even playing field. So continue to be doing that good work during this time in this pandemic and always. It's critically important. I'm just going to add one final thing I think to Dr rugs point about that the individual kind of solutions are one thing but the larger scale oftentimes is where you have to actually get at some of these problems right at more at the institutional level. And one of the sort of interesting things that I found as I was looking over some of the literature in preparation for tonight. So fact checking is somebody that something that people talked about and it actually seems pretty effective when when you look at fact checking people usually pay attention to it. A lot of the platforms now are actually using professional fact checkers to take down content right when what in flag it. The problem with that is it's, it's really hard to scale that solution because it takes so much time and effort to professionally fact check everything. But interestingly enough that in some studies they've they found that just kind of your, you know, your, your average person doing fact checking actually seems to be pretty good at it so that the judgments of amateurs actually correlate pretty strongly with the judgments of professionals. That's a scalable solution right that you might be able to implement in different places to actually at least tag things as being, you know, potentially inaccurate or to potentially even remove things. And one of the reasons I think it's that the sort of tagging is really important. It seems to be the case that it's not so much that people are not good at discerning what's true and what's false. It's that they're not so good at stopping themselves from sharing things that might be false that we it seems like we have a much lower barrier for sharing. So what we do for actually accepting something as true. So, trying to get at that, that sort of inconsistency I guess and potentially by using scalable things like kind of grouped fact checking might be useful. Amazing thank you. And so we just got a message actually from the chat for a professor tell us. I'm just discuss if I was wondering if you could discuss about the shifting a media consumption becoming more expensive and kind of how people like all the sources you mentioned, like the New York Times while Washington Post are sources that you do have to pay for so like I'm student and I get both those for free of other people and our members of the community that might be on might not have the same access so kind of how can you pick and choose or just kind of budget it. This is something that newspapers kind of messed up on themselves back in the late 90s early 2000s. First of all, good news cost a lot of money to do you, you get what you pay for, and in a large sense and if you're getting used to, you only are going to read stuff that you get for free. Good chance you're going to read stuff that is not accurate. And that maybe is an incredibly opinionated or biased or whatever. But but or late 1990s early 2000s which is exactly when I had started becoming a reporter. The internet started taking off and newspapers didn't know what to do. They started, you know, back in the mid 90s everybody, not everybody but the vast majority of people in communities had subscriptions to their newspaper so they were paying for news then. But that was also paid through advertising that that made newspapers actually profitable as well as being able to pay reporters and have nice big newsrooms. So let me mess that up in the late 90s early 2000s when they just started throwing stuff on for free onto the internet. And that's caught up with them and so now they're trying to backtrack and it's working the New York Times subscriptions are going up through the roof, actually, Washington Post is doing really really well. And I think that will change I think people will realize that if they do want good news coverage of what's going on in the nation and their town, they're going to have to pay for it. And it just comes down to a matter of picking and choosing what are you going to pay for in terms of what do you need to understand what's going on in the world. Thank you so much. And then just one last question for the chat before we wrap up. I know we have this was a fwe inspire event and I know we have a lot of students watching. So is there any quick specific way that students can apply all the knowledge they learned tonight in class. Go to your librarian. Okay, that's the big takeaway right be a question of source so you want to know how to navigate that research space, which is often difficult, especially when it's new right and new platforms I mean I'm still old school like I barely I'm on social so you know, but I think reaching out to those experts is really helpful to at least get your feet wet and figure out how to net how to figure out what is true or accurate or fair or balanced and what what are good sources, they're a great resource for that. Yeah, if I can just kind of jump in there as well and this kind of connects to the one q amp a question about how to find responsible or accurate new sources. Many students here are at a college with a wonderful faculty who would be happy to help them as well in addition to the librarians right. You now know, what are we at five six people here who are dedicated to this issue. And if you email any of us will be happy to assist as well as many other faculty across the university. I can almost guarantee that anyone who sends an email to a professor saying, I'm trying to understand how to get smarter how to learn things how to navigate the news world better how to find credible information. That's what all of us do professionally even in different disciplines. So you don't even have to just go to people who are specializing in the topic of misinformation. So, you know, use the resources you have use the librarians use the faculty talk to people. The news media information environment we're in is incredibly volatile and difficult and hard. It's I do not envy young people coming up now, having to deal with this. So I implore you, please reach out to experts those at the university we're here to help and we would love to do that. Absolutely. And just one last thing to close perhaps is that you know, when it comes to sharing health information, especially trusted messengers really matter. And so when Dr. Andre chicken Dr. Rugg are talking about making it scalable. You know, you may only be one person but if you share credible information with trusted messengers and they can take many roles and shapes in our communities. It could be the people that people trust and look up to and listen to it could be a faith based leader it could be a teacher it could be someone in your family or in your community that people trust. And so making sure that those trusted messengers are, you know, stewards of good credible accurate information can really help provide us with ways to continue to share best scientific based evidence based knowledge. Thank you. No, thank you so much and thank you all for watching and participating in the Q amp a we loved having you here, just a reminder that this will is going to be fully recorded and was fully recorded, and that all the captions are going to be added and put on the Fairfield University YouTube channel if you want to view it and another time. And a special thank you to all of our panelists. And since this is an event as part of a week and other events going on at the library please check the lot libraries website for other upcoming events and define more resources and all the services we kind of discussed to help with you, your look and search for credible information. So it's fairfield.edu slash library. Thank you so much and have a good evening.