Thinking back to the days of my parents sitting and enjoying the
newspaper on a warm summer evening brings happy feelings of a simpler time. A
time when the news that was delivered to our mailbox everyday was reliable and
the stories on the evening news were true.
Did anyone ever worry back then about the
validity of the news? I think the only threat those pages posed was the
possibility of blackening our fingers with ink.
Fast forward to present day. We now live in the digital era, where
everyone is a potential "journalist" with the ability to post news
real or fake. The question is though, how do we spot the difference? How can
something that appears professional and true be fake? How do we know that what
may seem fake is actually real?
It is a confusing time and often hard to navigate the waters
of truth and fiction. The definition of fake news was discussed in the New York Times. It was defined raw
opinion being passed off as news, which causes confusion and doubt among
readers.
The best way to spot the fake is to go through the tried and true
steps of who, what, when, and why. Piktochart offers a useful cheat sheet of sorts to help
spot fake news using these tactics. It gives you a quick run down of tools to
use to help scrutinize the publication and test its authenticity.
The truth is out there. We just have to know how to find it and
how to spot the fakes.
