GSAN: Fixing AI bias | False health claims | Quality sources

Hi friend of news literacy,

We hope you’ve enjoyed Get Smart About News in its summer format. We are taking a break and will be back in our standard format on Tuesday, Sept. 12. In the meantime, we’d love to hear what you think. Has the newsletter helped you sharpen your news literacy skills? Is there something we could improve? Please feel free to respond directly to this email with your thoughts. We welcome all feedback!

Sincerely,
The Get Smart About News team

Top reads

A roundup of the latest topics in news literacy and misinformation.

“Following Elon Musk’s lead, Big Tech is surrendering to disinformation” (Naomi Nix and Sarah Ellison, The Washington Post).
“Content Farms Are Using AI Chatbots to Plagiarize News Outlets” (Mack DeGeurin, Gizmodo).
“The U.S. Regulates Cars, Radio and TV. When Will It Regulate A.I.?” (Ian Prasad Philbrick, The New York Times).
“AI is biased. The White House is working with hackers to try to fix that” (Deepa Shivaram, NPR).
“A ‘lethal threat’: why the far right sees more scrutiny than the left” (Nikki Wentling, Military Times).
“How to spot misinformation during political turmoil” (Robby Brod, WITF).
“In his first tweet in more than two years, Trump shares his mug shot on X” (Caitlin O’Kane, CBS News).
Video: “Study shows most Americans encounter health misinformation” (Jen Ashton, ABC News).
“Sheriff’s office agrees to destroy evidence obtained from raid on Kansas newspaper” (Sherman Smith, Kansas Reflector).

Featured video

Why is a newspaper called a newspaper? Hint: News is not an acronym. Learn more in this NLP TikTok video:

A still of a TikTok video features the News Literacy Project’s Alexa Volland with a label that reads “Newspaper acronym.”

Quality news reports should have multiple sources.
Journalists include experts, eyewitnesses, documents, officials and more as sources for news reports. When you’re looking at news, take a moment to note which sources are included in the reporting.

Share this NewsLit tip:

Viral social media posts falsely claim California Gov. Gavin Newsom is trying to remove former President Donald Trump from election ballots. President Joe Biden did not doze off during a recent visit to wildfire-stricken Maui. After last week’s rare tropical storm in Southern California, false claims of flooding at an LA metro station went viral with an out-of-context video. Check out more of the latest debunked rumors on NLP’s RumorGuard!

Love this newsletter? Please take a moment to forward it to your friends. They can also subscribe here.

Thanks for reading!

Your weekly issue of Get Smart About News is created by Susan Minichiello (@susanmini), Dan Evon (@danieljevon), Peter Adams (@PeterD_Adams), Hannah Covington (@HannahCov) and Pamela Brunskill (@PamelaBrunskill). It is edited by Mary Kane (@marykkane) and Lourdes Venard (@lourdesvenard).

Sign up to receive NLP Connections (news about our work) or switch your subscription to the educator version of Get Smart About News called The Sift^® here.

Check out NLP's Checkology virtual classroom, where you can learn to better navigate today’s information landscape by developing news literacy skills.