Analysis

Analysis:

  1. The Huffington post got the highest grades overall, mostly because they covered mostly core topics, and used many diverse sources.
  2. The Onion received the lowest grades because most of the articles were only a paragraph or two and used only one source on most stories we saw.
  3. THe fake news we read didn’t score incredibly high, but it wasn’t that much lower than our highest scoring news site, the Huffington post. As fake news, it is not that hard to make up sources, leading to an easier path to get a good score in the sources category.
  4. We were surprised to see that the fake news site got scored in the same general vicinity as the real news.
  5. It seemed that the Huffington Post consistently had more sources than the other the Herald Journal.
  6. Our fake news site, Neon Nettle, claimed to be real news written “by the people, for the people”, but the majority of the stories were either greatly exaggerated or completely fabricated.
  7. Both of the real news sources, The Herald Journal and Huffington Post, provided mostly substantive news grounded in reality. The satirical source, while not literally grounded in reality, did occasionally provide an interesting reflection of real events in a satirical way.
  8. In the instances where the reporteres were covering sports events, they were able to use statistics from the event. The Huffington Post also had to use statistics in the article titled “Trump Family Business Worth a Fraction of What President has Touted”.
  9. According to the test we applied, to get a top score the stories must use at least five separate sources (Mcmanus scorecard, 2017).
  10. We think that while the government should not have jurisdiction over what kind of speech is spread, the private companies such as facebook or twitter should feel an obligation to prevent blatantly false stories from spreading. For example, facebook recently removed a tool that was contributing to the rampant spread of fake news sources. Users can no longer edit link metadata when posting, meaning that they cannot make obviously fake news stories look like legitmate sources. (Breland 2017).
  11. While helpful, the test we ran on these stories is not foolproof, as is made evident by the fact that the fake news source received similar scores to the legitamate news sources. It is entirely possible to get a perfect score on an article that is completely fabricated. (Mcmanus scorecard, 2017)