It's often hard to know what we're looking at, because we tend to encounter news links in our social media feeds. Let's take a deeper look at the two articles shared in Facebook (from the opening page):
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The design practices for article links in Facebook make it hard to tell the difference:
These design features mean that stories from misleading sources look just like stories from legitimate sources, and you have to work hard to figure out differences. We've all been fooled.
Look carefully at the sources: On the left, wsj.com. That's the Wall Street Journal. On the right, redflagnews.com. That's, um, well, what is it?
Here's how I investigated the Red Flag News article.
I clicked the author's name--Michael Snyder--on the Red Flag News story, hoping to find out more about him. Yes, that's right: before I even read the article, I left the page.
The author's linked name took me to the same article on Snyder's own blog, End of the American Dream. A quick check showed me it was word-for-word the same story as on Red Flag News. (That's how I discovered that Red Flag News is an aggregator.) I scrolled to the bottom of the blog story to see Snyder's author description:
Why would someone who wrote a book on Bible prophecy be interested in (or knowledgeable about) earthquakes? Not a very convincing authority.
Snyder's blog article links to a Fox Science News story (from which he borrowed most of the information), which in turn is a reprint from an original story in the Wall Street Journal by Jim Carlton--the same story linked above. Full circle!
In other words, in less time than it would have taken to read the Red Flag News article, I discovered it was written by someone who specializes in Bible prophecy, and is a 3rd-generation inaccurate representation of the original Wall Street Journal article. This is something you should be doing, too. I just used available links, but if there are no links, use Google. Don't waste your time on unfamiliar, potentially questionable sites. Check their credibility before you read.
And because I'm a librarian and can't help but keep researching: the WSJ article refers to a Federal/State study published in 2014, as well as a report by a company called CoreLogic from November 2016. But I'm getting ahead of myself: evidence & sources are two pages from now.
Wondering how to do this kind of search? Ask a librarian! We live for this kind of thing. Yes, we're total geeks!
There is a variety of types of items you might find on a news site:
Ideally, they should be relatively easy to identify. If they aren't--if, say, a straight news story is full of editorial opinions, or an explainer seems to be pushing a product--be suspicious. The Red State News article is a haphazard mix of explainer, editorial, and analysis.
