From: Alex Holzman <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Mon, 28 Nov 2016 20:30:18 -0500

I'm a non-librarian, but for the sake of future researchers, would it
not be smart to tag pieces that are labeled false by Snopes,
FactCheck.org, etc?  Discarding them would handicap those future folks
who won't have our understanding of 2016, but it would save them a lot
of time and effort if there were a way to see that an article was
labeled false by nonpartisan organizations who made their job to
fact-check.

I've no idea what to do when a president-elect picks up an idea from a
conspiracy site and repeats it as fact through a tweet.  Good
heavens....

Alex Holzman


On Mon, Nov 28, 2016 at 6:49 PM, LIBLICENSE <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
> From: Don Beagle <[log in to unmask]>
> Date: Mon, 28 Nov 2016 11:37:10 +0000
> Greetings,
>
> I agree with Bernie Reilly that we in the LIS community can take the
> constructive step of shoring up our support for the news sources that,
> over the long haul, have proven central to our national discourse and
> generally meet a high level of journalistic integrity, such as the NYT
> and WaPo.
>
> I also agree with Susan Lafferty that we a on a slippery slope if we
> attempt to be independent arbiters of valid and invalid sources. For
> example, the underground newspaper scene that flourished during the
> war in Vietnam in retrospect (sometimes covertly edited & written by
> active-duty military personnel) produced reporting that in certain
> cases proved more accurate than the mainstream media; libraries would
> have done a huge disservice to historians of the period had no attempt
> been made to archive these. The recent campaign season made me more
> fully aware of a range of titles like The Intercept, Jacobin, Baffler,
> & the like; though they may dissent from narratives in the mainstream
> media, they are generating some provocative & sustained discussions on
> social media.
>
> There are at least two other constructive steps I think we can take.
> We can more actively stay abreast of fact-checking sites like Snopes,
> FactCheck.org, & PolitiFact and more strongly urge our users to scan
> them when evaluating news stories. And we can continue to move ahead
> with library-sponsored critical thinking programs & projects, by more
> tightly coupling them with digital literacy and information fluency
> initiatives.
>
> sincerely,
> Donald Beagle