24-Hour Media Diet: Spotting Misinformation
I have made it a personal quest to eliminate the unnecessary calories of Misinformation and disinformation in my media habits.
5:30 am: Up early to attack the dawn, I start my morning watching my local news stations, beginning with Spectrum News 1, NBC 4, ABC 7, KCAL 9, KTLA 5 and Fox 11. I mainly focus on the weather and traffic reporting, as a clogged five freeway or an evening rainstorm will affect my day the most.
Local broadcast news lacks the bias of national News and social media.
After the weather and traffic, I focus on the rundown of top stories. It’s interesting to see the stations parrot each other, covering the same stories with a few different images and words.
Today’s big mutually featured news story is the confusing Shohei Ohtani gambling controversy surrounding the possible theft of $4.5 million by the player’s now-former interpreter. Spectrum News, the Dodger’s local affiliate station, had the best segment, devoting almost three whole minutes to discussing the ins and outs of the story with no bias or manipulating for facts that I could detect.
6:00 am: After watching all the local feeds, I start my workout with ABC 7 news in the background. During breaks in my workout, the social media doom scrolling begins. I start by catching up on Instagram and reviewing my friend’s reels and posts. For News, I go local first with SCV_Incidents, which tells me of a couple of traffic collisions that happened overnight, and a baby was taken to the ER in cardiac arrest. After checking Facebook,
I went to our local newspaper, the Santa Clarita Signal page, which shows an update on local crime and sports, which did not interest me much. I interact with an old post about the name change of the local high school mascot from the Hart ‘Indians’ to the ‘Hawks .’The feature article is non-biased, laying out the facts somewhat.
Last I checked, X (formally known as Twitter) A KTLA post shows a 16-year-old girl died days after a fight in a high school bathroom.
7:00 am: I start to interact with national news feeds. I start with watching the headline rundown from Good Moring America. It looks like a slow news day, or maybe the show is still licking its wounds from earlier in the week when they edited a clip of Trump speaking at a rally to make it look as if he was calling for a blood bath if he didn’t get elected when in proper contact, he was speaking about the auto industry.
The show features a short rundown of Trump’s legal issues in getting $464 million for his civil judgment in New York, which seems fair and non-biased, stating just the facts of the case and what could happen going forward.
7:30 am: I am off to work with an average 1-hour commute to 28 miles. I have plenty of time to listen to the News through my car’s SiriusXM Radio app. I get an update on imported sports news through Shine on Sports Radio. I then listen to the Faulkner Focus, which discusses the same Trump story but with our first spark of outrage framing from the host. She calls the amount of money insane and claims the judgment is political, with no information to back up the claim.
The story appears to be disinformation, distorting facts to create an emotional response. The story aims to reframe the legal judgment as another political attack against Trump. The host and the legal expert repeatedly repeat the phrase ‘political’ to distort the facts surrounding the case. As described in the case study ‘The Effects of Repetition Frequency on the Illusory Truth Effect’ by Aumyo Hassan and Sarah Barber, “Repeated information is often seen as more truthful.” After listing this nonsense, I go back to sports.
9:00 am: That’s right. I have to work at 9 am. LA Traffic. Here, I sit down and look at the worst mistake of my adult life: having my email through Yahoo.com. Yahoo is fine for an email provider, but its news aggregation brings the worst internet bias to my daily feed.
Posts that are over-the-top sensationalized, deceptive, or false headlines lead to shallow articles based on other media personalities decided just to get clicks.
An excellent example of this bottom-feeding type of divisive journalism is this story from the Huffington Post about the earth-shattering importance of Ted Cruz’s popularity in Law school. This article is based on zero interviews or inquiries for factual truth. How do you tell if Cruz was famous in school or not? The post is a copy and paste of a post from Senator Ted Weiner responding to a post not shown in the article of Ted Cruz misidentifying him as a different Senator. I attempted a Google and X search for Cruz’s to fact-check the post and could not locate it.
For the next 4 hours of my day, I am usually absorbed by work with no real media interaction until lunch. Today, though, I got a call from my wife. Her mother, who has recently had a stroke, is being unexpectedly released from a convent hospital. So, I leave work and spend the rest of my day away from the media, trying to sort out what is happening.
The hours I spend with this issue upsets my media diet time schedule as I arrive back home late but I press on.
Summary of my media day:
Today’s media sites were thin on over-the-top calls for outrage and apparent disinformation. I didn’t find much the day I went looking for disinformation posts. I saw Monday callouts of media manipulation of Trump’s’ Blood Bath’ statement, which was a much more active day.
When I interact with media that makes outrageous claims, I usually do a simple Google search to see what other media is saying to check the validity of a spot. I will also go to fact-checking sites like Factcheck.org to verify whether a post is true.
