Hi, my name is Will Potter. I'm the Marsh Visiting Professor

in Journalism here at the University of Michigan.

And today I'm talking with Mike Kessler,

one of the Knight-Wallace Fellows at the university,

who's a longtime freelance magazine reporter.

He has written for LA Magazine and Outside among many others.

And Mike, thanks for talking to us today.

Happy to be here.

So, you know, we're looking at fake news and, in particular,

how we can all do a better job of critically evaluating news sources,

or things that we think are news sources.

So, maybe to get us started,

could you just talk to us a little bit about how you approach news as a journalist?

And where do you get your news from?

What kind of media outlets?

What's your routine? Things like that.

I'm, like everyone, pretty overwhelmed by the amount of news available to me,

and the amount of news that comes across my inbox,

Facebook feed, and everywhere else.

So, I generally turn to a handful of pretty established outlets at least to get started;

the New York Times,

The Washington Post, occasionally

the LA Times or The Wall Street Journal depending on what I'm looking at.

Maybe, if it's a financial or a business related story,

or if I just want to get a slightly alternate take from what's in the Post or The Times,

The New York Times, I'll go to The Journal just to kind of see what their.

The Wall Street Journal?

The Wall Street Journal, yeah, to see what their stance is on an issue.

The LA Times, if it's more regionally specific,

because that's my hometown,

so I'll often go there more for local news,

and to see what they're doing as compared to what the New York Times

is doing in the Los Angeles area or in the California area,

which is a big a big hotbed of readership for them, for the New York Times.

So, I usually start there with the sort of big three or four papers to begin with.

And then, from there, I feel like I have kind of a baseline

of reliable information from which I can make other assessments,

and read other outlets with a little bit more of an informed view.

Right. And have a better idea of actually what you're

looking for or as you're doing that.

Yeah.

So on that note,

what do you think, as a journalist,

you've learned that shapes how you,

as a consumer of news, are reading articles?

So, for instance, when you pull up a story that you came across on Facebook,

and it's either at the Washington Post or some other major media outlet.

How are you critically reading that?

The two most important things,

at least, right off the bat are tone and word choice.

I don't think news has to be delivered in

a totally flat and boring way to come across as totally objective or unbiased.

But I do think that there is a certain responsibility that people have to,

that outlets have to choose their words carefully.

Sometimes they choose them very carefully in a way that

basically gives away their bias or their stance on something.

I don't necessarily have a problem with that.

But I think that it's really important to look at the way headlines are worded,

the way that even captions are worded,

the way that the lead of a story,

the first couple of sentences are worded.

I notice right off the bat.

You know I can go to The Journal,

I could blindly tell you which story is

a Wall Street Journal story and which one is

a New York Times story if it's about the same thing.

Just based on-

Based on that tone just language.

Based on the headline, based on the lead,

sometimes even based on the caption that accompanies the photo that's with a big story.

Sometimes, that kind of tone or bias comes through by way of omission.

So, it might just be a matter of what's left out of a story.

So, I guess the the words or the lack of words,

and the strength of the words really make a big difference.

And yet, I mean, especially as a magazine writer,

some of the best magazine writing we seek has that point of view-

Yeah.

Built into it. It's more subjective than traditional newspaper reporting,

for instance, or aspire to that traditional notion of objectivity.

So, when readers come across something that has

a detectable opinion in it or a point of view,

that's not necessarily a reason to brush it aside.

So, how might we more critically engage with a story like that?

I think, well, like you said,

I don't think it's a reason to brush a story aside.

I mean, you look at someone like Glenn Greenwald with The Intercept,

and even some of the Washington Post coverage right now of the White House and,

you could argue, the New York Times coverage of the White House.

I think we can walk away knowing where they stand on the job that the president is doing.

I don't think that those stories should be dismissed just

because they reveal some sort of subjectivity.

But I also think that it's important to go and see what somebody else is saying.

I don't think that means go to Breitbart.

But I think that if you want to be a responsible reader and make informed choices,

and have informed opinions,

then go to the Wall Street Journal or maybe look at some of the smaller political,

more conservative leaning publications in Washington just to see what they have to say.

You sort of know where you need to stop

looking when the scales start to tip too far in one direction or in the other direction.

Right.

But just look around basically is the key.

And it's kind of similar to what I tell my journalism students.

We are thinking about a healthy diet;

relying all on one food group,

isn't going to give you what you need.

I mean, you can do it for a little bit,

but it's going to have consequences.

It's kind of the same with news;

I mean, unless you have,

as cheesy as it sounds,

some of that more of a diverse or balanced diet,

you're not getting the full scope of what's out there.

Yeah, you can't survive without carbs forever.

Basically.

I'm on the all bread diet.

Yeah.

Well, so, when you do come across though, I mean,

you're on social media,

you're on Facebook, and Twitter, and everything else.

And when you come across a story

that is compelling but it's from an outlet you haven't heard of,

or is raising some kind of red flags that it might not

be 100 percent accurate or could be too partisan or whatever.

What do you do to try to start evaluating that?

You mentioned Breitbart earlier,

these sites that are hyper political,

very partisan, and in a lot of cases,

flat out fake news.

How do you evaluate a source like that?

At this point, I feel pretty confident that I

can recognize what's a legitimate source and what's not,

just because I've done it so much.

You often can tell just by the name of the site

that's being cited on a Facebook post or something and you can tell,

oftentimes, by the people who are doing the posting.

I think that we come to trust

certain Facebook and social media friends more than

others in terms of how they're vetting their own sources.

So, if it's coming from somebody suspicious,

I will be more suspicious of the link.

I think that's an important thing to consider.

Obviously, that's not the way to vet a news source, but I mean,

the first thing to do is just go and if you read a story that's

really compelling on sourcex.com,

whatever it is and you want to know if it's legitimate.

Take the five minutes it takes to look them up,

do a google search.

Who pays for them?

Who funds them?

If it's funded by a group that you don't recognize.

If you can Google that group,

you'd be surprised how quickly two or three degrees of separation later you can

determine where the money's coming

from and what the publications real interest or agenda are,

if they if they have an agenda.

And also, how accessible a lot of that information is.

I think a lot of people think that there's kind of no way of

doing this sleuthing to figure out whether a source is credible or not.

But like you said it a lot of cases,

it just takes that few minutes of googling to see what else is out there on the issue.

And also what else is out there on the media outlet itself,

If it is a media outlet.

Yeah. To your point,

my wife and I got looped in on a Facebook,

we were tagged in a Facebook post,

it was some chart that was pointing out,

how far left and how far right certain news sites were and how legitimate they were.

And, it was getting

all sorts of circulation on social media and we went and looked it up and

looked at the source of this graph and that was

being passed around and it wound up being funded by an extremely partisan group.

It took about six minutes of googling to figure out who published it,

and then to figure out from there what was their methodology which

was nonexistent and on down the line,

until we basically, sort of go back to the friends of ours who posted and said,

you probably shouldn't be posting this stuff.

Here's where it came from.

So just be careful.

Well and that's exactly what I was going to ask next.

I mean, I know we've all been in those situations where,

you're seeing this stuff especially on your Facebook or social media

feeds that friends or friends of friends are posting.

And when you know, it's outright,

false or fake or a questionable site,

what do you think are the best ways to address that and to speak to that?

How do we- I know this is a difficult question,

but how do we try to help educate our friends and family and

colleagues without turning it into partisan,

hyper political flame war on Facebook?.

Yeah, I think that for me the most important thing I've learned is,

avoid the flame of war at all costs.

Which means saying, oh,

I can understand how this would upset you.

This particular article might get you upset about X,

Y or Z subject that it's talking about.

But, it's important to note that this news source is not legitimate.

Here's a link to a legitimate news source or a legitimate reference point explaining,

what it is about this,

about your original source that makes it unacceptable.

Again, it's just using word choice and speaking in a tone that isn't condescending,

which I think is something we're all really tempted to do on social media.

It's really easy to have that courage when you don't have to look someone in the eye.

Well, we see that with the language of headlines and captions and everything now,

as well being catered to that.

Really trying to provoke that response from people and speak to

very hyper political lines to get those likes and shares and reacts and everything else.

It's a lot easier to play to people's emotion,

than it is to play to reason- to their reasonable side.

And, it's really easy to get emotional and

click forward or share or thumbs up or I second that,

if you're sitting at a computer screen than it is,

if you're sitting in an environment like this.

So I think it's important to stop

and it's okay to have the feeling that you're having but before you respond,

just take a moment to think it through.

Right. This element of patience.

I mean we were talking the other day about the idea of slow journalism,

of not being so pulled in,

to the hot take,

to the immediate breaking news,

unless you've had time to actually evaluate your sources.

Journalists and consumers both have to do that.

We have to exercise restraint as working journalists, but also,

when I'm on Facebook,

we have to exercise the same restraint of everybody else and not,

hit share just because you see the headline.

Yeah. And I think a lot of people do that really quickly and a lot of people

who I respect and whose opinions I trust do it.

And I am guilty of having done it,

from time to time you just see something and you can't believe it and then oops-

Well, that was what I was going to say.

misfire.

Yeah. Have you had situations like that,

where you either share or send around an article that you find out later is questionable?

And if so, what do you do with that?

I can only think of one instance when I've shared something that was not legitimate.

Fortunately, it was a really ridiculously funny headline about,

like a guy crashing a party in a dolphin suit or something like that.

It was totally stupid.

It was too absurd.

I don't know who had the imagination to make it up.

I was off the hook.

Yeah. I guess I haven't really,

I try not to share stuff too quickly unless I've read it through,

unless I feel like I can sort of stand behind it.

Right.

I also try not to share stuff with too much editorializing attached to it.

Occasionally, I will but generally I'll take a quote from

the article itself and put it in the Facebook feed

instead of sounding off with my own opinion.

I'll take the part that I think is most important,

that I hope is going to get other people to read it.

Because ultimately, if I'm sharing a story it's

actually because I think somebody might get some value out of it.

It's not because I need my opinion to be heard.

So I think that's also important to think why am I sharing this.

And if you really want people to understand what it is that's in the story,

then your opinion is sort of secondary to that.

It's a great point. And on that note,

we want to thank Mike Kessler,

one of the Mike Wallace fellows and freelance magazine reporter for joining us to

talk about how reporters consume news. Thanks Mike.

You're welcome. Thanks.

Will Potter and Mike Kessler

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