Lesson: Why the News Isn't Really the News

Conversation

Answer the following questions. You might be asked to write them down or answer them out-loud.

1. Do you read blogs often? Which ones?
2. Do you think blogs are trustworthy? Why? Why not?
3. What gets your attention when you pick something to read on the Internet?
4. How do you know that the information you're reading is fake or unreliable?
5. What is your favorite internet app?
6. Some people love to read gossip about famous people. Do you read this type of article?
7. What's your favorite news source on the Internet?
8. Have you ever clicked on a link to find out it wasn't what you were expecting?
9. What do you think about advertisements on the Internet? Are they cool? Invasive? Funny? Boring?
10. If you had a blog, what would it be about?

Vocabulary

Look at the vocabulary below. Take time to explore the links for their definitions in English and their translations to Portuguese. When you are done, make a sentence with each word. Ask your teacher if you should write them down or say them out loud.

DT   cruise

DT   source

DT   intriguing

DT   gossip

DT   conjecture

DT   sort

DT   hierarchy

DT   chain

DT   readership

DT   threshold

DT   publish

DT   stature

DT   pound

DT   pavement

DT   hijack

DT   fake

DT   accurate

Video

Watch the following video but DON'T read the transcript yet.

After watching the video do this listening exercise.

Reading practice

Read the following transcript then do the associated reading comprehension exercise.

Transcript:

So you're cruising around the Internet and you see a link to an article from some trusted news source, and it's got a really intruiguing title, so you read it. And later you find out that that whole article was mostly false. What you thought was news, was really just gossip or conjecture.
So we've got Ryan Holiday here. He's a media manipulator and he explains how this happens:

Ryan: So what I quickly discovered was that the media was this sort of hierarchy or chain. The bottom you have small blogs who have small readerships but correspondingly low threshold for what they will and will not publish.

Ryan: Say this blog publishes a rumor then Business Insider or The Huffington Post or Perez Hilton writes about it. And now, because of the stature of those sites, it becomes something that people are talking about on Twitter, on Facebook, on e-mail, they're chattering about it. And what happens is, producers for CNN, producers for a right wing talk radio, journalists for The New York Times - where do they find out the news? They're not out pounding the pavement like it's a hundred years ago. No, they're reading what people are chattering about online. And that cycle is hijacked by people like me who say, "Okay, if this blog here has the power to accidentally start a media firestorm by what it publishes, I'm going to get them to publish something that benefits me."

Ryan: I, I've sent them fake anonymous emails and watched as that turned into front page stories. The public isn’t aware that this is how their news is being made, but on both sides of the divide – on the marketing side and on the news side – neither is particularly concerned with quality. They're concerned with what will get attention.

And that's because of how blog sites and news sites make money. First, they get a lot of viewers to their pages. And then they sell that view count to advertisers. So to get more views you do stuff like…

Ryan: Asking rhetorical untrue questions in a headline, doing your fact checking after you've published an article, gossiping, speculating, making up a story from whole cloth.

But what if I want good, accurate news. I mean, shouldn’t news sites want to give that to me ?

Ryan: Yeah, look, uh, I think the rule of thumb is if you're not paying for it they don’t give a shit about you. They're loyal to their advertisers.

If you're not paying for it, you're not the customer, you are the product.

Writing practice

Write a short article pretending you're a journalist and need to impress the expectators from a website. Remember to use catchy words and an extremely grasping title. Make sure to use words you learned from the text and try to make it as long as you can.

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