The Joy of News Reading

Reading Wisely Cures Misinformation

Your local library will tell you that more reading will cure what ails you. But if an overwhelming political news cycle has left you avoiding the news altogether, take heart. There are tools available to filter out misinformation and regain a calm, level-headed reading experience.

Misinformation, the exhausting, off-putting, overwrought part of the media landscape, takes an aspect of a statement or incident and exaggerates it to inflame people with differing views.

“A new study reveals that users with extreme political views are more likely to encounter and believe online misinformation,” states Neuroscience News. “The research shows that misinformation spreads across the political spectrum, but its impact is most pronounced among those with conservative or liberal extremes.”

Testing for Bias

Most of us believe our views to be reasonable, but we might miss differing perspectives depending on the publications we routinely read. “Everyone is biased — and that's okay,” declares AllSides, a public benefit corporation that charts media bias. “There's no such thing as unbiased news. But hidden media bias misleads, manipulates and divides us....everyone should learn how to spot media bias.”

Differing Views, Opposing Viewpoints

A burgeoning new field, universities and public policy centers now offer misinformation studies. Take a look at this syllabus on Critical Disinformation Studies at University of North Carolina- Chapel Hill, for an idea of what topics similar programs cover.

FactCheck.org, an Annenberg Public Policy Center project, offers readers a fact check on the day’s top news stories and many tools to detect misinformation and to teach media literacy like:

News aggregators have become more popular with people seeking to expand their perspectives. Aggregators, like AllSides, opens a new window, display news stories from the left, center and right of the political spectrum side-by-side to give readers a fuller picture.

The Canadian-based aggregator, Ground News, opens a new window offers Blindspot, opens a new window to show news stories not covered by publications on the left and right ends of the political spectrum. The Swedish news evaluator Nyhetsvärderaran,, opens a new window gives users the chance to test and improve their evaluation skills of online news.

"Political news is broken," states Tangle on their homepage. Billing themselves as "unbiased news for busy people", Tangle declares "We're fixing it" without spin or clickbait and with "a non-partisan politics newsletter that gives you a 360-degree view on the news."

If you would like to read news gathered by people interested in "just the facts," 1440, named for the year the printing press was invented, seeks to provide news "by humans, for humans" for the "intellectually curious." Started by an email to 78 people, 1440 now as over four million readers.

Just the name of this 2016 Stanford University study is enough to restore hope for healthy exchange of ideas: Evaluating Information: The Cornerstone of Civic Online Reasoning, opens a new window, includes assignments for various grade levels to assess the reliability of what they read and the credibility of news sources.

Last year, the library hosted Stanford Professor Josiah Ober at Rinconada Library to discuss his book, The Civic Bargain: How Democracy Survives. In this book, Prof. Ober and his co-author Brooks Manville challenge citizens to “govern themselves...embracing compromise, treating each other as civic friends, and investing in civic education for each rising generation.”

The goal of these resources is to promote more critical reading and encourage civic discourse. It’s so tempting to turn away from the news, but we hope these tools can help you read critically and stay engaged with the news of the day.