Reclaiming the Fourth Estate-Week 4
During last week's class, we talked about "speaking truth to power"-speaking your truth...taking a risk...knowing your truth may not be the popular opinion...standing for something.
I think we may have lost this. I'm overgeneralizing for sure; there are most definitely people who speak their truth. But I'm talking about as a whole. We're afraid or hesitant to speak our truth and fear retribution. But who is it we fear? And why?
As we were talking about this, I kept thinking back to Aaron Sorkin's "The Newsroom"--one of my all time favorite shows! It's the story of a cable news station that revolutionizes the way they do the news. But in reality, they're not revolutionizing anything-simply going back to how the news used to be done...the right way.
In the first episode, one scene entails the executive producer talking to the anchor about "speaking truth to stupid" and asking "is there something bigger we want to reach for or is self interest our basic resting pulse?" I wish that we would stop cowering to Washington and Silicon Valley and realize these people are just people. What they have to say is no more important than what I have to say and how can we stop people from climbing to the top for their own self interest and remember everyone they climbed over?
We also talked about Mike Caulfield's "Four Moves" to assessing a source! As I mentioned last week, I plan on bringing these four steps into my classroom as a way to teach students about assessing the information so readily available!
What I loved about this week was actually getting to practice this! I started at the Four Moves blog and after scrolling through a few of the posts I settled on "Dog and Pelican". This was a tweet of a picture of a dog and a pelican named Petey who have become friends! The tweet also mentioned that the owner who adopted the dog took the photo.
According to the "Four Moves", the first is to check for previous work! The tweet came from someone named "For Pitty's Sake" so I went to their twitter to look for the tweet, but became discouraged quickly trying to find it. I typed in "dog and pelican" to google images just as I had the idea to check it out on Snopes. Well lo-and behold, the first image to appear on google images was linked to Snopes to be fact checked!
According to Snopes the image is real, but the backstory is not. What was described as an unlikely friendship is true, but the dog's adoptive owner did not snap the picture. Apparently the picture is over a decade old and was taken in Turkey. The pelican, known as Osman and not Petey, was a sort of local celebrity in this Turkish town and after his death, the dog stopped coming to the beach as well. The next step is to go "upstream" to the original claim, and while I couldn't find one specific source, I did find multiple articles about this pelican from Turkey and his companion dog, along with a multitude of other pictures of this pelican and what the townspeople have said is the same dog. After reading a few quick articles about the dog, I felt confident that I had the true story!
It was so interesting and so simple! I would never have thought to question such an innocent photo, but it makes me wonder, why did the Tweet-er feel the need to fabricate this story? Was it for likes? Retweets? And if he can do , of course other people can!
I think we may have lost this. I'm overgeneralizing for sure; there are most definitely people who speak their truth. But I'm talking about as a whole. We're afraid or hesitant to speak our truth and fear retribution. But who is it we fear? And why?
As we were talking about this, I kept thinking back to Aaron Sorkin's "The Newsroom"--one of my all time favorite shows! It's the story of a cable news station that revolutionizes the way they do the news. But in reality, they're not revolutionizing anything-simply going back to how the news used to be done...the right way.
In the first episode, one scene entails the executive producer talking to the anchor about "speaking truth to stupid" and asking "is there something bigger we want to reach for or is self interest our basic resting pulse?" I wish that we would stop cowering to Washington and Silicon Valley and realize these people are just people. What they have to say is no more important than what I have to say and how can we stop people from climbing to the top for their own self interest and remember everyone they climbed over?
We also talked about Mike Caulfield's "Four Moves" to assessing a source! As I mentioned last week, I plan on bringing these four steps into my classroom as a way to teach students about assessing the information so readily available!
What I loved about this week was actually getting to practice this! I started at the Four Moves blog and after scrolling through a few of the posts I settled on "Dog and Pelican". This was a tweet of a picture of a dog and a pelican named Petey who have become friends! The tweet also mentioned that the owner who adopted the dog took the photo.
According to the "Four Moves", the first is to check for previous work! The tweet came from someone named "For Pitty's Sake" so I went to their twitter to look for the tweet, but became discouraged quickly trying to find it. I typed in "dog and pelican" to google images just as I had the idea to check it out on Snopes. Well lo-and behold, the first image to appear on google images was linked to Snopes to be fact checked!
According to Snopes the image is real, but the backstory is not. What was described as an unlikely friendship is true, but the dog's adoptive owner did not snap the picture. Apparently the picture is over a decade old and was taken in Turkey. The pelican, known as Osman and not Petey, was a sort of local celebrity in this Turkish town and after his death, the dog stopped coming to the beach as well. The next step is to go "upstream" to the original claim, and while I couldn't find one specific source, I did find multiple articles about this pelican from Turkey and his companion dog, along with a multitude of other pictures of this pelican and what the townspeople have said is the same dog. After reading a few quick articles about the dog, I felt confident that I had the true story!
It was so interesting and so simple! I would never have thought to question such an innocent photo, but it makes me wonder, why did the Tweet-er feel the need to fabricate this story? Was it for likes? Retweets? And if he can do , of course other people can!
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