How to read the news: media literacy basics

In the age of the internet and social media, information spreads fast — but not all of it is reliable. Media literacy is the skill of evaluating information, separating trustworthy sources from untrustworthy ones, and checking claims. Below are documented techniques used by journalists and professional fact-checkers.

The SIFT method: four moves

SIFT is a widely used method for quickly evaluating information, created by the American educator Mike Caulfield. It has four moves: Stop; Investigate the source; Find better coverage; and Trace claims, quotes and media back to the original context.

“Stop” means pausing before you share or believe, to consider the source and any emotional pull. “Investigate the source” means finding out who produced it and their reputation. “Find better coverage” means not trusting a single page but looking for the topic in other reliable sources. “Trace” means checking that a quote, statistic or image has not been stripped of its original context.

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Lateral reading

Lateral reading means leaving the page you are evaluating, opening new tabs, and checking what other sites say about that source. The opposite is “vertical reading” — judging a page by its own look and its “About” section.

In a 2017 study by the Stanford History Education Group (SHEG), 45 people took part: 10 PhD historians, 10 professional fact-checkers and 25 undergraduates. The fact-checkers evaluated online sources faster and more accurately than the historians and students — they read laterally, while the historians and students often read vertically and were more easily fooled by suspect websites.

Telling news, opinion and advertising apart

News is factual reporting that can be verified and is attributed to sources. Opinion/editorial argues a viewpoint and should be labeled (“op-ed”, “column”, “commentary”). Sponsored / native advertising is paid content designed to look like an ordinary article; it must carry a label such as “advertisement”, “sponsored” or “promoted”.

In the 2016 SHEG study, more than 7,800 students in 12 states were assessed. On one task, more than 80% of middle-school students believed a native ad labeled “sponsored content” was a real news story — they could not tell advertising from news.

Verifying images and video

A photo may be from an old event or wrongly captioned. A reverse image search shows where else a picture has appeared online, helping reveal its true date and context. Tools include Google Images, TinEye and Yandex.

Confirmation bias

Confirmation bias is the tendency to readily accept information that confirms our existing beliefs while dismissing information that contradicts them. The strongest remedy is to check several independent, reputable sources: if a claim is confirmed independently by several credible outlets, confidence is warranted.

A practical checklist

• Stop before sharing: is the headline pushing emotion?
• Identify the source: who wrote it, when, and why?
• Check at least 2–3 independent reliable sources
• Trace quotes and statistics to the original document
• Run a reverse image search — is the photo old or from another event?
• Separate news, opinion and advertising

A note on sources

The study figures cited here (for example, the SHEG results) are based on the numbers reported in those studies. The techniques — SIFT and lateral reading — are widely documented in education and journalism. Exact percentages may vary slightly by source.