Curiosity killed the cat, a fact-check brought it back

So, what is Bernie’s actual stance on gun control? What really happened with Hillary’s emails? Is anything Trump says accurate?

The national media grows more ambiguous and confusing by the commercial break, and as many of MHCC’s constituents are young voters participating in their first presidential election, it’s easy to get wrapped up in the hype train.

Back in the day, 1949 to be exact, televised news sources were required to hold some semblance of fairness. This policy, called the Fairness Doctrine was eliminated by the FCC in 1987, and the partisan floodgates were opened. Since then, some news source have intentionally portrayed only one side of events, to cater to a target audience who are a more stable source of eyeballs on the screen, which in turn raises ad revenue.

Fast forward to now, and the system is as jumbled as ever. It’s to the point where if you want your own “fair and balanced” news source, you’re going to have to do a little digging for yourself.

Alarmingly, 93 percent of Americans can’t find the tools necessary to check facts given in their media sources, according to the survey we made up for this article.

While the politics-media-spin system is harder to navigate, there actually still are good sources out there. A fine start would be The American Press Institute, which has fact-checks arranged by common political topics on its website: www.americanpressinstitute.org/training-tools/fact-checking-resource/

A resource the Advocate staff uses regularly is allsides.com, a website that compiles news sources and arranges them by bias. While it doesn’t say anything for the ultimate credibility of the articles provided, it’s always useful to know the bias of the news source going into them. And sources from “the center” or a generally unbiased source are provided, too, arranged from left to right, the more conservative to the right, and liberal to the left. It’s also helpful that the site was originally designed for schools.

Our point is that you can be receiving technically correct information, but quite possibly about a thousand tiny things that don’t represent reality and are really part of a feedback loop or “echo chamber” as it’s been referred to – but there are ways around this problem. Stick it to the man: Do your own fact-checking.