HCRHS Media Lit

"A great exercise to train your bias-detecting skills is to check on a high volume of outlets -say, eight to ten-across the political spectrum in the 6-12 hours right after a big political story breaks. I did this right after the release of the Nunes memo on Friday, Feb 2. This particular story provided an especially good occasion for comparison across sites for several reasons, including: -It was a big political story, so nearly everyone covered it. It's easier to compare bias when each source is covering the same story. -The underlying story is fact-dense, meaning that a lot of stories about it are long: -As a result, it is easier to tell when an article is omitting facts. -It is also easier to compare how even highly factual stories (i.e., scores of "1" and "2" on the Veracity and Expression scales) characterize particular facts to create a slight partisan lean. -There are both long and short stories on the subject. Comparison between longer and shorter stories lets you more easily find facts that are omitted in order to frame the issues one way or another. -News outlets have had quite a while to prepare for this coming story, so those inclined to spin it one way or the other have had time to develop the spin. Several outlets had multiple fact, analysis, and opinion stories within the 12 hours following the story breaking. You could count the number of stories on each site and rate their bias and get a more complex view of the source's bias."

"We like opinionated and biased news-like information because being right feels good. Our brains are wired for confirmation bias, which is being more open to receiving information that comports with what you already believe. This is, again, a feature, not a bug, of how our brains work; it makes it easier for us to make sense of the world around us. We also consciously know that we should regularly learn seek out new information, including information that challenges our existing beliefs. However, it's easy to over-consume unhealthy food and unhealthy news in part because each provides instant gratification, and the drawbacks are not immediately evident. The drawbacks, if any, come from long-term, sustained unhealthy consumption, not from one-time, or infrequent unhealthy consumption. It's even easier because those who produce food and information are well aware of our desires and are monetarily incentivized to exploit them."

Is this a form of Culture Jamming? "Swastikas appeared last week in Comcast searches on Google. Google fixed the problem on Thursday, but swastikas inserted into Comcast brand images have been a recurring problem for the nation's largest cable-TV company because of a two-year-old anti-Comcast Reddit page that crowdsourced legions of the company's critics to click on an image of the symbol of Nazi Germany with an embedded Comcast logo. Because tens of thousands of people clicked on the image - more than 60,000, according to the Reddit page - the Google algorithm thinks it's popular and returns it in search results."

"A year ago, a group of academics gathered in the Welsh city of Cardiff for the 2017 Future of Journalism Conference. Panels were held, papers were discussed, ideas were tabled. And now a selection of the scholarly work presented there has been published in a new issue of the journal Journalism Studies. I sifted through the papers, and here are a few I liked:"

"What stereotypes about teenagers do the adults you know seem to hold? How does the media portray people your age - whether you're called Gen Z, iGen or anything else? What can you show us from your own life, or the lives of those around you, that might help make that portrait more interesting, nuanced, complete or real? In this contest we invite teenagers - anyone 13 to 19 years old, from anywhere in the world - to take photographs that depict some aspect of teenage life that you think may be misunderstood, ignored or largely unknown, and, in a short artist's statement, tell us why. We hope to be able to use some of the winning work in the print Learning section that will come out in early November."

"FOR ALL THE FEAR they inspire, school shootings of any kind are technically still quite rare. Less than 1 percent of all fatal shootings that involve children age 5 to 18 occur in school, and a significant majority of those do not involve indiscriminate rampages or mass casualties. It has been two decades since Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold ushered in the era of modern, high-profile, high-casualty shootings with their massacre at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colo. According to James Alan Fox, a criminologist at Northeastern University, just 10 of the nation's 135,000 or so schools have experienced a similar calamity - a school shooting with four or more victims and at least two deaths - since then. But those 10 shootings have had an outsize effect on our collective psyche, and it's not difficult to understand why: We are left with the specter of children being gunned down en masse, in their own schools. One such event would be enough to terrify and enrage us. This year, we had three. Teachers are at the quiet center of this recurring national horror. They are victims and ad hoc emergency workers, often with close ties to both shooter and slain and with decades-long connections to the school itself. But they are also, almost by definition, anonymous public servants accustomed to placing their students' needs above their own. And as a result, our picture of their suffering is incomplete. [Watch educators as they tell us in their own words about what it's like to to teach in an era of school shootings.]"

"THE CONCEPTS OF "safe spaces" and "trigger warnings," hotly debated on college campuses for years, are now reaching high schools too. It's easy enough to say that college students are supposed to have their assumptions challenged daily, even if that sometimes means experiencing discomfort. But the question of what high school students should be exposed to, and protected from, feels murkier in 2018. Today's high school students are more precocious, more politically engaged, more tuned in to their gender identities and nascent sexuality. They are already flooded with uncensored, unedited information, 24 hours a day: What would a safe space even look like for a 16-year-old with an iPhone? At exclusive private schools like Friends, the question is further complicated by the involvement of wealthy parents. As these schools have grown more expensive - Friends costs nearly $50,000 a year - administrators have found themselves trying to balance their own institutional values with the demands of parents who are in a sense high-paying customers. Teachers are increasingly caught between the two."

"Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones has temporarily lost some Twitter privileges over breaking the site's rules against abusive behavior. Last week, the company was a notable exception after a wave of other major tech companies banned Jones and his main channels. The penalties to Alex Jones' personal account, @RealAlexJones, are for one week. The Twitter page for his website Infowars posted screenshots of the notice that Twitter apparently sent Jones."

"Falsehoods almost always beat out the truth on Twitter, penetrating further, faster, and deeper into the social network than accurate information."

"Kaepernick's ability to remain in the public spotlight - and at the heart of the N.F.L.'s protests - stems largely from his use of social media, where an audience in the millions follows him on multiple platforms and tracks his public appearances. His use of social media is especially intriguing because it is often lost just how rarely the words are actually coming from Kaepernick himself. Kaepernick has posted to Twitter more than 11,000 times, but since his declaration of silence to GQ, the overwhelming majority of the posts are retweets or posts under his name where he is simply sharing the words of others. "

"Colin Kaepernick, the former N.F.L. quarterback who inspired a player protest movement but who has been out of a job for more than a year, has signed a new, multiyear deal with Nike that makes him a face of the 30th anniversary of the sports apparel company's "Just Do It" campaign, Nike confirmed on Monday. The first advertisement from Nike, one of the league's top partners, debuted Monday afternoon, when Kaepernick tweeted it, assuring that his activism and the protest movement against racism and social injustice he started would continue to loom over one of the country's most powerful sports leagues."

"As part of the campaign commemorating the 30th anniversary of "Just Do It," Nike will produce new Kaepernick apparel, including a shoe and a T-shirt, according to The New York Times. Nike, which supplies game-day uniforms and sideline apparel for the league's 32 teams, will also donate to Kaepernick's "Know Your Rights" campaign, according to the Times. News of Kaepernick's role in the campaign comes at a delicate moment for the NFL. With the 2018 regular season set to begin on Thursday, the league and its players union remain locked in a stalemate over a controversial national anthem policy ratified by team owners in May. The policy gave players the option to stay in the locker room during the anthem, but required them to stand if on the field or face possible discipline by their teams. The policy was put on hold in July, leaving the NFL without a resolution to what's become one of the most polarizing issues in sports."

"A new study has alarming findings, but is probably not surprising to anyone who knows a teenager: High-schoolers today are texting, scrolling and using social media instead of reading books and magazines. In their free time, American adolescents are cradling their devices hours each day rather than losing themselves in print or long-form media, according to research published Monday by the American Psychological Association. In fact, 1 in 3 U.S. high school seniors did not read a book for pleasure in 2016. In the same time period, 82 percent of 12th-graders visited sites such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram every day."

"As Instagram and YouTube supplanted blogs, Twitter and Vine as the most popular platform for social engagement among millennials, Cotton followed his audience. All interviews were filmed and uploaded; breaking news and truncated clips of music videos could neatly fit onto a medium that swiftly delivered content in pellet-sized bursts. Most notably, Cotton's platform helped launch the career of Tay-K, the controversial 17-year-old incarcerated rapper from Arlington, Texas. Today, with hip-hop having surpassed rock as the most popular music genre, its independent media tastemakers have experienced a commensurate rise in popularity. This is partially due to the social media savvy and innate self-promotional streak of its stars, but it's also a byproduct of the whims of fans. For every Lil Yachty or Post Malone that comes up squarely within the confines of the major label system, there is a Tay-K or 6ix9ine, Soundcloud superstars, whose court cases and controversies fuel their meteoric rise but who are often treated as persona non grata by mainstream publications."

"A broad coalition of English speakers-teachers, retail workers, ice-cream scoopers, and plenty of others-is grasping for a more inclusive greeting."

"Phones have saturated teenage life: Ninety-five percent of Americans ages 13 to 17 have a smartphone or access to one, and nearly half report using the internet "almost constantly." But as recent survey data and interviews have suggested, many teens find much of that time to be unsatisfyingly spent. Constant usage shouldn't be mistaken for constant enjoyment, as any citizen of the internet can attest. A new nationally representative survey about "screen time and device distractions" from the Pew Research Center indicates that it's not just parents who think teenagers are worryingly inseparable from their phones-many teens themselves do, too. Fifty-four percent of the roughly 750 13-to-17-year-olds surveyed said they spend too much time absorbed in their phones, and 65 percent of parents said the same of their kids' device usage more generally."

"It's harder and harder to have an honest debate on the internet. Social-media platforms like Twitter, Reddit, and Facebook Groups are rife with trolls; forums are plagued by archaic layouts and spambots. Teenagers who are looking to talk about big issues face additional frustrations, like the fact that most adults on these platforms don't take them seriously. Naturally, they've turned to Instagram. Specifically, they've turned to "flop" accounts-pages that are collectively managed by several teens, many of them devoted to discussions of hot-button topics: gun control, abortion, immigration, President Donald Trump, LGBTQ issues, YouTubers, breaking news, viral memes."

" the International Fact-Checking Network has been producing videos that focus on tips, tricks and tools that can help improve people's fact-checking skills. Each video is about two minutes long and features interviews and demonstrations with journalists and developers who debunk fake news for a living. From how to fact-check on WhatsApp to preparing for breaking news misinformation, here are all eight instructional videos from our "Check It" series."

"Smith is part of a new wave in plastic surgery: people seeking to permanently alter their faces, inspired by touched-up or filtered photos of themselves. "I have a lot of millennials as part of my practice," she told me. "Most of the time, they want to talk about how they appear in their edited photos. And they are looking to explore options of how to translate that into reality." Sherber, who runs a DC dermatology and plastic surgery practice with her husband, says these patients have become accustomed to seeing their faces in a digitally altered state. They blur imperfections, plump their lips, thin out their noses, and brighten their skin - or sometimes go even further, enlarging their eyes and changing the proportions of their face."

"Doctors have spotted a trend of people bringing in their own selfies, usually edited with a smartphone application, and asking to look more like their photos, according to an article recently published in JAMA Facial Plastic Surgery by researchers from Boston University School of Medicine's Department of Dermatology. The phenomenon is known as "Snapchat dysmorphia," and it's causing widespread concern among experts who are worried about its negative effect on people's self-esteem and its potential to trigger body dysmorphic disorder, a mental illness classified on the obsessive-compulsive spectrum."