COM Journalism Professor Says Fighting Fake News Begins at Home

Journalism professor Gina Baleria

Disclosure: The author this article interviewed Gina Baleria and wrote this article while enrolled in Baleria’s Desktop Journalism class. This article was edited by Baleria.

In a world where fake news, wrongful accusations of fake news, and political sparring among friends and neighbors runs rampant, a person’s Facebook posting of an article isn’t simply a “just sharing my opinion” move.

Every time a user posts a news item on social media, “(They are) becoming part of the information stream,” says news veteran, media consultant and COM journalism professor Gina Baleria.

People should consider: “Is what I’m posting factual? Did I fact check it? Just because my friend or trusted family member posted it, doesn’t mean it’s real. What’s the actual source?,” says Baleria whose work for her doctoral candidacy at San Francisco State focuses on digital media engagement across political and ideological differences.

In a digital setting, consumers of media are also curators of media, a task that a decade ago belonged to professional news editors.

“(Journalists) are putting information out there in an environment where people don’t understand how to assess information,” says Baleria citing a 2016 Stanford Study which concluded a majority of middle school to college aged students couldn’t identify a piece of fake news from a real one, or distinguish a news source from advertising.

Baleria says she tries to teach her journalism students to be “as credible and transparent as possible to build the trust,” but journalists can’t fight the battle on their own, and a broader educational effort is necessary to combat the problem.

It’s important for people to get information from “as wide a swath of perspectives as you possibly can without dipping into the nefarious nether regions of extremity and weirdness and propaganda,” says Baleria.

When asked if the news is liberal or conservative Baleria says, “It’s neither. I hate that.” She says “it’s all true” that most people drawn to journalism tend to be progressive, and corporate entities, which own media outlets, tend to be conservative, but trained journalists operate within a strong code of journalistic ethics.

Baleria says questions a reader should ask of a news source are: Did they check their biases? Are articles fair? Are sources good and transparent?

She emphasizes distinctions, however, in evaluating quality and bias in news reporting:

“There are sources who are doing good work. Some of it is straight journalism. Some of it journalism with a perspective, and then a lot of it is crap,” she says.

Baleria notes she has seen firsthand accounts of intelligent people, she mentions a childhood friend as an example, who consume media she would characterize as propaganda.

Baleria’s preferred news sources include The Washington Post, The Guardian, Politico, The PBS News Hour, Reuters, AP, NPR and BBC, to name a few.

The New York Times, Baleria says, has “a slight liberal bent, but they’re still in the circle of credible news.” The Washington Examiner and The Washington Times are conservative leaning news sources she describes as “problematic,” but says they “actually cover news.” She adds, “It’s just important to read multiple sources on a story, if you include a source that’s known to be biased.”

Baleria’s preferred sources of conservative editorial work are The National Review, The Weekly Standard and Reason; and to gain a progressive perspective, Baleria looks at Mother Jones, The Atlantic and The New Yorker.

When asked about the validity of sites like CNN, President Trump’s most famous target of fake news accusations, and Fox News, considered by many to be conservative, Baleria says, “CNN is biased toward sensationalism, or has been, not left or right...”

And of Fox News (not be confused with the channel’s many editorial shows), Baleria says, “their regular news does a decent job,” but she pointed out concern over their ordering or omission of big or important stories, which causes some big stories of the day to have lower visibility. Baleria wonders if this ordering is based on an agenda, and she says she would “happily have that discussion with someone at Fox.”

Conversation is an emphasis for Baleria whose doctoral work includes the study of communication across political and ideological differences.

“If you’ve got thoughtful, intelligent people thinking about issues and coming to a different conclusion than I might reach,” she says, “I think it’s important for me to understand how they came to their conclusions...because we have to work together.”

For communities or society to “function well,” Baleria says, there’s a “need to understand (an opposing) perspective...and then probably somewhere in the middle we can work out something.”