In today’s lecture, we enjoyed a short and sweet presentation on Giving a Voice to Your Writing from a classmate, Eva Delgado, then delved into the realities of fake news, including misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation. We then participated in an activity in which we were given headlines to research and determine whether or not they were trustworthy and true stories.
In this post, I would like to focus on the fake news activity. A friend and I were given the headline “Tongue-eating creature found in Texas state park”. The goal was to research and establish whether this news topic was a true occurrence. Obviously, we were hesitant to see the graphic images of a “tongue-eating creatures”. Though, we powered through and got to searching and found that the parasites, in fact, feed on fish tongue, then become the tongue of the fish. They are not harmful to the fish, nor humans.
The most popular news source for the topic was from a news station based in New York – perhaps a bad sign. However, after more in-depth looks, we learned the importance of finding other sources, checking their sources, then checking their sources – its a train of wanting to find the wrongs. Luckily, we found links to Texan news sources that covered the discovery, who’s sources were linked to an educational science site, who’s sources were scholarly articles reviewing these parasites.