6.2: Reading the News - Classroom Activity

Reading the News | Classroom Activity | Counternarratives

How To Use This Material [Instructor Note]

• The following is a group-based activity, wherein students are encouraged to think critically about not only the factual content of their news, but the ways in which that information is being presented.
• This exercise is inspired by work of Alexandra Bell’s ‘Counternarratives’ project; I encourage you to view her work prior to the activity, and to share her work before/during your class to introduce the assignment.
• This activity is meant to follow an engagement with the preceding ‘SIFT’ lesson from Michael Caulfield, but could be easily implemented without it.
• To set up the activity, you will need to source news stories for each small group. I print out enough of each story for each group member to have a copy, and then a large-format copy of each story to distribute at the midway point of the activity. You will also need pens, dark markers, and other annotation tools.
• In my experience, contemporary news stories always work best. I typically select a handful of well-known stories, looking for obvious applicability to the assignment; that said, I’ve also done the activity by picking up a copy of the local paper and clipping pieces. You could also assign the same pieces Bell looks at.
• The opening two pages can be read together as a class, reviewing Caulfield’s work before introducing Bell’s contribution (and the larger activity). I typically bring the class whole class together for 15ish minutes of mini-presentations/discussions on their final annotated pieces at the end of class.
• You are welcome to make a copy of this material to edit and remix as you wish; please be sure to follow the CC license mandates when doing so.

Recap

As you likely don’t need me to point out, the news industry—an industry which had remained relatively stable for hundreds of years—is undergoing some truly seismic shifts, with traditional modes of radio, television, and newspaper usurped by an endless array of digital platforms, providers, and purveyors. Where there were once calls for more voices, more outlets, more perspectives, we now are faced with the opposite problem: an overwhelming number of ways to get the news of the day—podcasts, YouTube, 24/7 television segments, TikTok, Facebook—with some content, well… far more reliable than others.

This daily deluge of information requires new strategies for seeking out reliable, quality information—strategies we’re looking to shine a light on with our materials and activities for this week.

As the title suggests, your assigned chapter from Michael Caulfield’s Check, Please!—“Introduction to SIFT”—provided a new framework to approach online content:

• Stop: both when you first land on a webpage, and after, too
  • First, “ask yourself whether you know and trust the website or source of the information… don't read it or share it until you know what it is.”
  • Second, “if you feel yourself getting overwhelmed in your fact-checking efforts… take a second to remind yourself what your goal is… make sure you approach the problem at the right amount of depth for your purpose.”
• Investigate: get to know a bit about who you’re engaging with
  • “Knowing the expertise and agenda of the source is crucial to your interpretation of what they say. Taking sixty seconds to figure out where it is from before reading will help you decide if it is worth your time, and if it is, help you to better understand its significance and trustworthiness.”
• Find Better Coverage: sometimes, you just gotta know—is this true? In that case, seek out content from other purveyors, doing your best to diversify your sources, to see if they echo the same
  • “Ignore the source that reached you and look for other trusted reporting or analysis on the claim. In other words, if you receive an article that says koalas have just been declared extinct from the Save the Koalas Foundation, the winning strategy may be to open up a new tab and find the best source you can that covers this, or, just as importantly, scan multiple sources to see what the consensus seems to be.”
• Trace Claims to OG Context: online content is often shrunk down to it’s most engaging parts; find the original source to provide full context and understanding
  • “Trace the claim, quote, or media back to the source, so you can see it in its original context and get a sense if the version you saw was accurately presented.”

These are great strategies, and strategies we can—and should!—use each and every day as we traverse through digital environments. But sometimes, even the most ‘trusted’ of sources can get it wrong. Humans aren’t infallible; we all make mistakes, we all have blind spots, we all have biases. And news is, well… made by humans. So that means our news, too, can sometimes be wrong. And not just in misquoting an individual or flubbing a fact; news reporters and journalists, just like the rest of us, can fall victim to stereotypes and ways of understanding the world that may bleed into their reporting and presentation of events. While quality journalistic practices always strive for objectivity, the key word there is strive—it doesn’t always mean they’re successful.

Beyond Fact-Check

For one thing, as the late journalist and professor Curtis D. MacDougall notes, there’s the matter of curation: “At any given moment billions of simultaneous events occur throughout the world… all of these occurrences are potentially news. They do not become so until some purveyor of news gives an account of them. The news, in other words, is the account of the event, not something intrinsic in the event itself” (12). Every moment of every day, many things occur around the world that many of us—if we heard it—would consider ‘newsworthy.’ Not all of those things make it on Good Morning America or Fox & Friends, however: news outlets big and small have to sort through the many happenings of the day and pick out the stories they think are most central, a practice which inevitably means that some events get better coverage than others, often reflecting larger societal biases.

Additionally, there is the matter of how those selected stories are presented to readers: as Stuart Hall explains, not only do news purveyors “define for the majority of the population what significant events are taking place,” they likewise “offer powerful interpretations of how to understand these events” (651). The world is complex, confounding, overwhelming, gigantic—something us humans aren’t all that comfortable sitting with. When presented with chaos, we like to make it neat, to make it tidy; we like to make sense, to make legible, to make understandable. And narratives, stories, and the like are some of the most effective framing devices to make sense of the unknown. But, as Michel-Rolph Trouillot writes, “narratives are necessarily emplotted in a way that life is not… they necessarily distort life whether or not the evidence upon which they are based could be proved correct” (6). Narratives, in other words, will always be formed—at least in part—upon stereotype, presumption, and bias: for as much as they allow us to ‘see’ our world, they likewise prevent us from seeing it from ulterior perspectives.

So, in addition to sorting fact from fiction, we must also analyze our news for bias and subjectivity, to think about not just what news is presented, but how it’s being presented. As such, our activity today looks to complement SIFT with another analytic tool: reading between the lines and thinking through 'counternarratives.'

Introducing Today's Activity

Artist, journalist, and activist Alexandra Bell’s public art series, “Counternarratives,” uses the visible power of the edit to call attention to the myriad ways in which the news is presented to us, with a specific focus on how stories are told about people of color. As she shared with The Guardian, her work continually asks—and looks to draw attention to—how “presentation [is] changing the way [we] view event[s].” Why, for instance, are certain words used to describe certain individuals, and not others? Why was a particular image used in the paper, and not another? Why was that headline phrased like that, and another phrased slightly differently? And, perhaps most importantly: what is the result of all these editorial decisions?

Engaging with one of the most respected news institutions in the world—The New York Times—Bell looks to shine light on exactly such features, annotating, marking up, crossing out, and leaving notes in the marginalia to make clear the wide variety of biases, influences, and other editorial factors which serve to color our understanding of the event(s) in question. In so doing, she is able to draw direct attention to the countless ways in which our perspective of any given event is mediated through the ways in which it is being presented—as she notes in another interview, “it’s imperative to show how a turn of phrase or a misplaced photo has real consequences for people at the margins who are still suffering under the weight of unfair and biased representation.”

Our activity today is inspired by her work, calling on each and every one of us to think about how all the little details that make up a news story—such as title, placement, word choice—work to provide a particular perspective through which to view the news event, and engage in a editorial process not unlike her own. Your goal today is to read the news through Bell’s eyes, and use her annotative method to shed light on the stories’ rhetorical and presentational missteps.

Instructions

• Step One: Each small group has been assigned a news story by the instructor. Start by reading the story out loud together, switching off readers every few paragraphs. Try to just absorb the story first, without marking up the page.
• Step Two: After you’ve read through the story aloud, discuss the piece together, working through the following questions:
  • First: what is the story about? What is the Sparknote version of the story, the most essential and important information?
  • Second: how is the story being told? Does anything about its presentation stick out to you, upon first reading?
• Step Three: Read the story again, marking up any areas you think deserve more attention.
  • Feel free to do this individually, or as a group. Remember that any and all details are on the table, such as word choice, visual presentation, title/sub-title, context given/not given by the author, experts consulted/not consulted, evidence provided/not provided, pictures used/not used.
• Step Four: Research the story, finding another outlet or two that has covered the same event.
  • What’s different about their coverage? What’s the same? How do these similarities/differences help you better understand the biases of your assigned piece?
• Step Five: Send a group member to get the master copy of the story from your instructor, along with the various annotation tools they’ve provided.
• Step Six: Discuss together what edits you’d like to make, and settle on a plan. It could be helpful to use one of your copies as a ‘test’ piece before turning to the master copy.
• Step Seven: When you’re ready, mark up the story (as Bell does) to reflect the various biases and errors you’ve discovered.
  • Like Bell, your goal is to be left with a ‘new’ telling of the same event, using your annotations, deletions, insertions, and other edits to not only shed light to the news purveyors’ subjectivity, but also to present another way of telling the same event.

Works Cited

Bell, Alexandra. Counternarratives. 2019-, Locations Vary. https://alexandrabell.com/counternarratives

Caulfield, Michael. Check, Please!. Pressbooks, 2019.

Hall, Stuart, et al. "The Social Production of News." Media Studies: A Reader, edited by Sue Thornham, Caroline Bassett, and Paul Marris, Edinburgh University Press, 2009, pp. 648-655.

MacDougall, Curtis. Interpretative Reporting. Macmillan, 1968, p. 12.

Navas, Francisco. "'It feels important': the counter-narrative artist challenging how news is reported." The Guardian, 30 May 2017.

Stevenson, Sandra. "Analyzing Race and Gender Bias Amid All the News That’s Fit to Print." The New York Times, 9 Dec. 2017.

Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History. Beacon Press, 1995, p. 6.

© J. F. Lindsay, CC BY-NC-SA