Post for June 21st - Teaching News vs Fake News

Rationale for teaching the below assignments:

Below you will find two activities/lessons that a geared towards teaching students about parody. To do so, these activities use a familiar source of information, and a commonly parodied medium, the news. The below assignments are very useful in that they will help students develop skills they need to be critical about where their news sources are coming from. Students will look at the practices of news broadcasts, how they select stories, and how they position a viewer. Doing these things are skills necessary for students to think critically. Using a familiar medium, such as the news, provides a good base to use these skills.

As said in "When Fake Is More Real: Of Fools, Parody, and The Daily Show with Jon Stewart" by Kothe (2007), "fake news" encourages its viewers to be critical of their news sources as they make fun of the news practices, relay of information, and selection of information to share. Not only does "fake news" criticize news sources, and encourage its viewers to be critical, but it also informs the viewer of actual news stories. In a world where we are continually bombarded by media messages, it is increasingly important to teach students the skills necessary to sift through the information they receive, find what's valuable, and most importantly, discover what is reliable. To be smart consumers, we need the skills to be critical of the information we receive - the below activities will help students to be critical.

Kothe, A. "When fake is more real: of fools parody, and The Daily Show with Jon Stewart". The Journal of American Popular Culture. 6.2 (2007). www.americanpopularculture.com.

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When I was thinking about possible assignments for this post, I came up with a couple of activities that would complement each other. The possible assignments posted below would ideally be done in succession.

Assignment #1

The purpose of this activity is for students to gain an understanding of how "fake news" such as "The Onion", relates to and parodies real news sources.

This activity may take more than one class period depending on class length and the resources available at the school.

The day before, students would each be given a news article from "The Onion" to read as homework. As they read, students are to take notes on things they notice about the stories and the reporting of the news.

During the next class, students would go online to try and find a news article that talks about the same or similar issue as their first article. Students would then read the found article and make comparisons between the two news articles. While doing so students will think about the following:

• What is different between the two articles?
• Which source seems to be the most reliable? Why?
  
• What aspect of the story does each article focus on?
  
• What does each article make you think as a reader?

After making this comparison, students would share their findings in small groups and then choose someone from the group to share with the whole class. After all groups have shared, the class would talk about the idea of parody, and how the articles from "The Onion" are parodies. The teacher would touch on the specific things the students found in their research to make key elements of parody more clear. After defining parody, the class would then look at how "The Onion" as a whole mimics and parodies newspapers and news articles.

Assignment #2

The purpose of this activity is for students to further explore parody by creating their own parodies.

This activity again may take more than one class period depending on class length and the resources available at the school.

The teacher would prepare a current episode of "The Daily Show" and several news segments/stories that appear in "The Daily Show" from other "real news" sources.

To start, the class would review the idea of parody and their findings from the previous day's activity.

Next, the class would view several "real" news segments (in the sequential order that they appear on the "The Daily Show"). While viewing each segment, students would make note of the following:

• What was the segment about?
• What information did you get from the segment?
• What information was left out?
• How do you feel about the story/situation/issue presented?
  

Students are to do so by making two columns on their paper, numbering each segment, and writing their comments for each segment on the left side.

After this, the class would view the prepared episode of the daily show (or selected segments), and students would make note about each "fake news" segment in the right column across from their notes from "real news" broadcasts. While making notes, students would look for the following:

• What is this segment about?
• What information do you hear? What information is left out?
• What aspects of the original story are being made fun of?
• How does this segment make you feel about the story/situation/issue presented?

While viewing all the clips, the teacher should give students a few minutes between each clip to finish their notes.

After viewing, students would briefly share their responses to the real and fake news segments in small groups. Next, each group would share a little bit of what they found to the whole class. The teacher would make a chart on the board similar to what the students wrote in their notebooks to visually compile the class responses.

The teacher would lead a discussion on how and why John Steward chose to parody and make fun of certain news stories/broadcasts based on the information the students found.

As an assignment related to this activity, students would create their own news parody in small groups (3-4 students). To do this, students are to choose a news source/segment to view from a newspaper, podcast, TV broadcast, or radio. They would read/watch/listen to the news segment, study it and parody it in the same style. So if students chose a local TV new broadcast, students would either prepare a skit or video to parody it. If students chose a newspaper article, they would write the parody. When finished, the projects would be shared with the class. The project would conclude with a written reflection from the group on their choice of news story and source to parody, what specific aspects of the news source and story they parodied, and their experience in creating a parody.