If your mother says she loves you, check it out.
It’s what college students are taught in their introductory journalism courses: Don’t accept ideas at face value, even if they sound correct. Take the time to verify.
But in a time in which newsroom employment continues to fall, the barriers to spreading ideas no longer exist, individuals are more politically polarized, and online communities allow us to cherry-pick which points of view we hear from, misinformation spreads like wildfire.
Not only are our information streams proliferated with biased, skewed, or incomplete abstracts of news, but as information-consumers we must now contend with a previously unfamiliar beast: fake news, or the anger- and amazement-provoking headlines that reinforce polarized opinions.