|
Students often do not question online information: Study examines students' ability to critically assess information from the Internet and from social media. Most people do not bother researching beyond the first page of their google search. You must realize it is easy to bury information, especially if controversial, by posting bogus web sites and using bots for fake hits to skew google algorithms. Google performs due diligence but its staff analysts and their algorithms can be overwhelmed by others. You need to be more suspicious of media sources in general. Finance and accounting are popular choices at colleges like Baruch are smart career choices. My professional work with the related field of auditing — helping auditors revise their reports efficiently — helped me realize the need for more skepticism in evaluating information. Consider the following article: Why is being an auditor is a good career choice? The contents are interesting even if you choose another field of study. Recall
the Russian gag often cited by Russians during the Soviet-era
regarding their two leading Soviet state-controlled newspapers,
Pravda and Izvestia: “Facts are to be found somewhere between
Truth (Pravda, in Russian) and News (Izvestia, the word in Russian
for news), but news will never appear IN ‘Truth’ (Pravda) and
truth never appears IN ‘The News’ (Izvestia).” The following is not an endorsement for any of the sources cited below -- they are often contradictory, and sometimes none will prove accurate. If you think so, tell me so I can lower your grade for not paying attention.
https://explorable.com/falsifiability
For example, a news report from a web site originating in Alaska on global climate change is likely to be more accurate because the local readers would presumably reject any false claims that could harm the credibility of other news reports on the web site. The local source could be in error but the favorable or unfavorable reaction of locals responding to the issue should suggest accuracy. Most countries have news web sites with English versions. You can also use the Chrome browser to translate or ask another student who may be a native speaker of the language used on a web site. Also, keep in mind one of the most problematic issues in translation as expressed in the Italian: Traduttore, traditore, in a sense, to “translate” is to betray. Most media information consists of indeterminate amounts of truth, half-truths, and outright lies. Determining the efficacy of the various news accounts can be fun as you must assess the internal coherence of a news piece, as well as its correspondence to other sources you will encounter. Check their premises if statistics are involved here: World Statistics in real time : http://www.worldometers.info/ . It certainly beats reading tea-leaves as a guide to market trends, etc. Remember, you are buying a product, information, that is an increasingly debased commodity every time you watch or read the news. Failure to discriminate truth from “Truthiness,” a term introduced by Stephen Colbert on his debut episode of The Colbert Report, makes it easy to get you to act against your best interests as expressed in the figure of speech, “drinking the Kool-Aid.” Elderly supporters of Trump are literally risking their lives to express their misplaced trust in claims by Trump, whose behavior echoes the panic of the Mayor in the film, “Jaws.” [Watch clip.] Truthiness is a quality characterizing a "truth" that a person making an argument or assertion claims to know intuitively “from the gut” or, confirmed by peer group pressure, to act because it “feels right.” Most people tend to assume that they are good judges of character (For example, the Barry Goldwater slogan: “In your heart you know he’s right.”) without regard to evidence, logic, intellectual examination, or facts. In other words, they posit an appeal to ethos, not logos. Similarly, failure to discriminate truth from bullshit ( read the treatise by Princeton Professor Frankfurt ) means you are also “buying into” assumptions that are rarely in your interest, but sentiments (“they (fill in the blank!) get better treatment than I do”) resonate by short-circuiting rational thought, hence the need for critical thinking and situational awareness on your part. Just as with all purchases, intellectual or material, in the marketplace of ideas, remember “caveat emptor” - buyer beware or more precisely for researchers: caveat lector – reader beware ! https://mediabiasfactcheck.com
one place to start fact-checking https://www.independent.co.uk/us : Well, they are independent! https://www.theguardian.com/us Another British publication for contrast. https://patch.com
: Submit your zip code for local NY news. https://www.propublica.org a Not For Profit with minimal compromises on relevance http://fivethirtyeight.com The “Go-To” site for statistics on everything from politics to sports. Top
Censored News Stories of 2022, 2023, etc.... Veteran’s Today: a conservative site that has some credibility and insights for vets. Think
“Global Warming” is a myth? In
Iceland Monitor archives you could have also read about how our
modern day ‘Vikings” dealt with bank fraud and prospered !
SIDtoday
is
the internal newsletter for the NSA’s most important
division, The
agency’s spies explain a surprising amount about what they were
doing, how they were doing it, and why.
https://theintercept.com
Educate-Yourself : Articles from outlier news sources: caveat lector [reader beware!] Example of “alt-right” site possibly funded by climate change deniers: http://www.whatreallyhappened.com Example of purported “alt-left” popular news site: https://www.huffingtonpost.com Zogby Poll Service : Note caveat and one possible reason. http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/worst-pollster-in-world-strikes-again/
List
of Conspiracy sites ? You be the judge, but again, caveat
lector! Top
50 Blogs By Accounting Professors, Students and
Professionals
|
