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Arizona Civics Podcast
Welcome to the Arizona Civics Podcast. This podcast aims to share our journey of sustaining Arizona’s interests in reforms to civic education by working with civic educators in our state. This work is being done by the Center for American Civics at Arizona State University. I am your host, Liz Evans, Civic Education and Outreach Program Director at ASU, and I will interview Arizona teachers, content experts, and leaders in civic education. We hope you enjoy our journey to make Arizona a national civics model!
Arizona Civics Podcast
Beyond Left and Right: Rediscovering Common Ground Through Media Literacy
Alice Sheehan from AllSides joins us to discuss media literacy and the importance of understanding diverse perspectives in our fragmented media landscape. AllSides provides balanced news by showing how left, center, and right-leaning sources cover the same stories, helping readers recognize patterns in media bias while developing critical thinking skills.
• AllSides uses a patented technology and multi-partisan team to provide balanced news coverage
• Their media bias ratings examine 16 different types of bias using expert panels and blind surveys
• Seeking multiple perspectives helps clarify your own thinking by understanding why others disagree
• Teachers can use AllSides for current events lessons without appearing partisan
• AllSides recently released classroom dialogue guides with Harvard Graduate School of Education
• Seeing how different media outlets cover the same story reveals how bias shapes narrative
• The X Influencer Bias Chart helps users diversify their social media feeds with different perspectives
• Media literacy involves recognizing that bias exists in all sources, not eliminating it
• Creating healthy information habits means balancing news consumption with offline activities
AllSides is hosting a journalism contest for students to create AllSides-style headline roundups, with three winners receiving $500 and potential publication on their site.
Media bias ratings:
https://www.allsides.com/media-bias
X Influencer chart:
https://www.allsides.com/media-bias/x-bias-chart
Classroom dialogue guides:
https://mismatch.org/dialogue-in-the-classroom/
The Arizona Constitution Project
Check Out Our Free Lessons on Arizona History and Government!
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Interested in a Master's Degree? Check out the School of Civic and Economic Leadership's Master's in Classical Liberal Education and Leadership
Thank you everybody again for joining us on the Arizona Civics Podcast.
Speaker 1:We have already had three amazing episodes and I'm really excited for this fourth episode because talking about media literacy, talking about how to do things in a way that is nonpartisan, it gets your students to think is really important. And when I taught AP government and politics for all my AP teachers out there we do have a, you know, lessons we have to do on the media and I always utilized all sides because it was a nice thing for me to put up. We could see how different things were reported in the left media, the right media, the center, and I know a lot of you have probably utilized the big spreadsheet that has all of the media and where they kind of fit on the spectrum. So I was very excited when today's guests reached out, wanted to talk because media literacy is so important, especially in this age of constant online activity. So I'd love to introduce our guest today, alice Sheehan from Allsides. Alice, can you tell a little bit about yourself but then also talk about what is Allsides and why is media literacy so important?
Speaker 2:Absolutely, and thank you for having me, Liz, I'm really excited to be here. I, you know, I found All Sides of Myself in 2020. And I was trying I kind of I usually read sort of New York Times and Denver Post. I'm in Denver, Colorado, and I got the sense that I wasn't really getting the whole story from the New York Times. So then I started especially my family's in Missouri, and they were saying very different things from me and so I started looking at other sources. Anytime there was a big story I'd kind of see like what is Wall Street Journal or what's Fox News saying about this, To start to kind of piece together the fact that people are saying wildly different narratives about something that happens.
Speaker 2:And then I found All Sides in 2020. And I thought this is great, this is saving me a lot of time. I don't really want to be a news junkie though I think I was kind of headed down that road but I want to be informed, you know. And so I started using All Sides for my news and at the time I was a public school administrator, so I was overseeing kind of implementation of COVID protocols in our schools in Denver sort of emerged from the pandemic I took a break from working in schools and was sort of looking for something new to do. All Sides posted for a business manager something I knew I could do. And here I am, three years later, still working for All Sides.
Speaker 2:And I think the great thing about Allsides is that we are offering you information in a very fragmented media information ecosystem and just serving it up in a different way that's very accessible and very balanced, but without an agenda. So the phrase we use is we're giving you the information and letting you decide for yourself. We use is we're giving you the information and letting you decide for yourself, and it's all based on patented technology that we've developed over about 12 years. And one thing that I saw when I came to Allsides is that there is truly a multi-partisan background within the actual people running it. So you know myself, I lean left. I also come from kind of a conservative economic background, but I'm always kind of grappling with.
Speaker 2:I'm a millennial and so the fact that, like much of my generation, is not doing as well as our parents. There's people that I work with every day on all sides who describe themselves there's an anti-fascism, pro-democracy. That's one person's description of themselves. Another one is an anarchist, libertarian homeschooling mom, libertarian homeschooling mom. Another one is conservative, on the royal Christian path. So really runs the gamut. And I think what I want to spread to the rest of our country is that we can still come together, disagree strongly politically but work towards a shared solution. And what the values we share are that we believe in democracy, we believe that the people should have a voice and we believe that we have to at least listen to the other side and consider their perspective, even if we don't agree.
Speaker 1:And it's such an interesting thing because you talk about you know your family in Missouri reading something different, right? I'm in Arizona, I have family in rural Iowa and sometimes back there like reading what their newspapers say. I'm like it's such an interesting thing because, again, I think the number one thing for media literacy is genuinely just to be curious, right, and I think that that's why, as a teacher in 2016 specifically, I really heavily leaned on all sides because I wanted to just show my students. Look at the difference in how this specific thing is being reported. Why is that important? Like why? Why do we need to know these? So, for example, on your site right now is talking about the Colbert show being canceled and how you know the. The center is talking about it, the right and the left, and one of the things I really appreciate about your website, too, is it has a code on it, so there's two lefts, a center and two rights, so you can kind of see the left and the right extreme.
Speaker 1:But again, it is very much like you said, we don't have to go looking for all of this.
Speaker 1:It literally exists on one site and you don't have to be a teacher, you can just be somebody who's like I'm really interested to see how deportations are being presented in the media. You know how the Columbia University settlement is going. There's so many different things and building this habit of looking at multiple perspectives habit of looking at multiple perspectives and you know, we all know looking at perspectives that are not yours help strengthen your own perspective, because not only do you know what you think, but you know why you disagree with. You know people on the other side, whatever that looks like. So why is it so important, do you think that we have our views challenged and that we don't stay in this kind of ecosystem, that you know, of words that we make us feel good or make us feel like, see, I was right, because everything I'm reading means toward that um, I think, as we especially um, as we sort of mature as human beings, one of the realizations that I hope we all have is that none of us holds the absolute truth on the world.
Speaker 2:I can remember I was raised Catholic, I'm still Catholic, and I went to a summer camp that was very, I think, baptist in nature, but definitely not Catholic, and in fact, the kids I went to summer camp with, and even my counselors, found Catholicism kind of threatening. It was like why do you worship Mary and why do you, you know, do all these things? And you know, it kind of gave me pause because I was like I don't really worship Mary, like what. That's not really my experience of Catholicism, um, and but it gave me an opportunity, like them asking me questions of their perception of Catholicism and not me being like, well, that's not quite right, like that's kind of an extreme. Maybe some people do, but not anyone that I know. And then also being able for them to challenge me about some of my beliefs and have to explain them clarifies my own thinking. The kind of Catholicism that I was brought up in was something that was a very much prioritized questioning what we were learning and and this idea that you know you can kind of follow the rules at the beginning of your life when you don't know much and it's helpful, but then as you mature and get older, you need to challenge those rules in order to really become who you're meant to be. So that kind of upbringing and having those experiences I think laid the groundwork for me on everything else outside of religion you know of. Okay, well, you're telling me this one perspective, but it's not the absolute truth. And what are these other people think that come from wildly different backgrounds. What do they think on this? And that's why I think it's important to seek out multiple perspectives and where All Sides comes in, we don't have a media literacy framework. There's really really good ones out there with really snappy, easy-to-remember acronyms that I'm sure many of the teachers listening to this know. One of my favorite curriculums to pair with All Sides is Project Look Sharp. They have really great lesson plans. We don't offer a lot of that because A it already exists and B it's more about.
Speaker 2:We think it's the experience of All Sides that helps you be more media literate, media helps you be more media literate. So we're very focused on experience, on habit building, on introducing students to. You know the concepts of critical thinking and what and asking you know the questions about what's the agenda of this writer, who's funding them, etc. But then how do you actually do that in your day-to-day as a busy person who has a life? What we don't want them to do is just avoid the news because it's depressing. So finding an actual habit that works for them to read the news in a balanced way is where All Sites comes in.
Speaker 2:And then the other piece I would say that we focus on is being accessible. There's a lot of data that we could add to this. Who are the funding sources? If you know of ground news, they sort of take more of this approach of like you have this one thing and then there's all of these different data points around it, and there's utility in that, certainly, and it's helpful to have that information aggregated. In our experience, people find it overwhelming and less accessible for their day-to-day use. So we've worked hard and it actually is hard to not let it get cluttered with a lot of different data points because it is all out there, and to really edit it to. Here's what we think is most useful to just the average newsreader not news junkies, but like the average person.
Speaker 1:I appreciate that you say like stuff already exists, right. Like I'd like to give a shout out to the National Association for Media Literacy Education I was part of their cohort Like they have amazing lessons, you know, and I will link everything that is mentioned here. And I appreciate too that you're like we could do all these extra things. But it is like more information isn't always great because, I'll be honest, there have been times where if I were to get on a site and there's so much information I'm not interested, like I can't have the brain space for it. But, you know, having the ability to just look at something and say, here's what it is, it's interesting that you bring up growing up Catholic.
Speaker 1:I also grew up Catholic. So if you and I were having a conversation about, like, growing up Catholic, we might find a lot of similarities, we might find some differences, but we also, if the only person we talk to is each other, we become in this echo chamber where we just you know you can assume well, everybody knows what a Catholic is, everybody knows what you know. We do whatever else, and it's not until you have it challenged right, have kids, everybody. Because then they ask you like why do we do this, why do we do this, and I love that. That's, I mean, that's why I became a teacher. You know we had a conversation before and you shared a time where your views were challenged with me. Would you mind sharing that story, because I think that that is such a great example of having something that you believe to be true. And then it was challenged and it just kind of made you curious and made you think about things and it's it's a great example of growth, because what we don't want is for people to say this is what I know, this is what I think is right, and I'm never going to change my mind.
Speaker 2:Right, yeah, a more recent example would be. You know, there's a lot of examples in my mind of where President Trump has overreached his powers as an executive, and I know I'm not alone in this viewpoint and it's very worrying to me for democracy and so all of those things out there that it's just like democracy is crumbling. I'm like, yeah, no, you know, and somebody who on my team, who is more conservative, said, you know, during the Obama years, they, there was, I felt an existential threat to democracy as well, and I'm like what are you talking about, obama? Hope, come on, hope, come on, um. And they were like, well, there there was so much bureaucratic overreach, um, and so much of the government infiltrating into our lives in a way that felt like we weren't being heard anymore, like even if we voted, it didn't matter, because the bureaucracy would just sort of do what it wanted to do and I didn't feel represented at all by that government. And that's when I realized like we have the same worry, like we are feeling like we are not represented, and to me, what it evolved my thinking to was not like Trump's. Fine, you know, like I didn't change my mind, but I did think. You know one of them, and actually this was someone who's very conservative, and we came to an agreement on this.
Speaker 2:One of the most important problems today is that our politicians have, for the last 20 years, had gotten about a 50-50 split when it came to the national vote.
Speaker 2:None of them have gotten a stupid majority from the electorate and they are acting like they did and they are forgetting that half of the country did not vote for them, and that, to me, is one of the major problems right now is that our politicians are doing like a winner takes all approach rather than all right, I won, now let's broaden the coalition, open up, you know, get a bigger umbrella here and figure out how I can serve all Americans. They kind of give it lip service, but they aren't actually doing it, and so and my colleague was like 100% I agree with that, and that was that was really eye opening for me, and I think if we hadn't had this culture at all sides, where, if someone says something that's not only do I disagree with, but it's a little threatening, instead of being like ugh, you know, and getting emotional about it being like I know this person, I respect the work they do Let me think about this.
Speaker 1:That culture has really helped me get to like more kind of root cause thinking, which anyone that's worked with me in any job I love root cause thinking of asking why, multiple, multiple times, to try to get to the bottom of what's really going on, when I think that's a great thing thing about the American political system, right, is that they're like you said, like you're like, well, during the Trump administration, I feel this and your colleagues like, well, I felt like that during Obama, and it makes me wonder, like, if we went back far enough, like would we find groups of people in every administration that were like I felt this way or I was nervous about that, and I I love and so appreciate that the conversation was not the politician themselves, not necessarily the parties themselves, but more what is the actual issue we're looking at? We are both feeling at some point we were not represented and that's like that's the scary thing and it's it almost takes. You know, I think one of the hard things, especially with the continuous news cycle, right, is everything feels so important all the time and it gets to be so overwhelming that you, like you said, it stirs up emotions Instead of stepping back and saying, well, I wonder what other administrations have done this, I wonder how that has turned out. I wonder you know how my friends on the other side, one of the, you know, one of the big things right now is it tends to be I'm noticing through the news through politicians is the finger pointing Well, this side's doing this and this side's doing this, but it's like but as a whole, we're a country, so so how does this look? What are some things that we can look at and say it's not a person, it's not a party.
Speaker 1:This is a common issue and, honestly, it just depends what side people fall on, that they're either going to feel represented or not, and that what a cool culture to work for, to have, like those are hard conversations. Those are not conversations that everybody can have in their workplace, right, or maybe even know how to have, like I'm thinking, people who are going home for Thanksgiving and they're like you know, thanksgiving tends to be a quote, unquote popular time to do politics, which to each their own, but having conversations and wondering, like, why do you think that? Where did that come from? Right, when you're talking about Catholicism, that's interesting. We don't do that. Where did that come from? Or, like you said, that's actually a really extreme side.
Speaker 2:That's not what a normal practicing catholic um does well and and I think the the key is to resist vilifying the other side. Um, I went to, I did this conference, um called frontiers of democracy and they um was talking about what we're doing with all sides, but it was was interesting is I listened to a panel and that was fascinating. There, you know, it was like 600 years ago, a King had made these two groups, the Hutus and the Tutsis, and for a good reason. I'm not going to try to explain it again, but the King had good intentions in mind. And then fast forward and it started to be used as. Have you ever read the book the Sneetches, yeah, by Dr Seuss? Dr Seuss, yes, I think about that book a lot, because it's like who has a star in their belly and who does not, and that defines who is in and who is out. And that's how these two kind of fairly arbitrary titles started to be used in this culture and the hate was slow, slowly and methodically built up that by the time the violence happened, people weren't all that surprised, and what I see in our culture is the beginnings of that.
Speaker 2:There was a TikTok video right after Trump was elected. That really disturbed me and it was a young woman walking around her neighborhood and she meant it as a joke. So generally I'm like all in on jokey things, but this one bothered me. She's like walking around kind of pretending like she was looking at her neighbors and looking for who was smiling that day the day after Trump was elected. Looking for who was smiling that day the day after Trump was elected, and if someone seemed like they were in a good mood, oh must be, must have voted for Trump.
Speaker 2:And now they're on like her blacklist and I just I think that is the kind of thinking we have to resist, because I can tell you that my attitude has been I will not let national politics rule my personal emotions. So I might have had a smile I don't remember how I felt that day but I might have had a smile on my face that day and not voted for Trump. Or I might drink Coca-Cola or Pepsi or like there's all these things that are being politicized and we have to resist that vilification of each other. And I think these things like all sides or you know, namly, or anything, that kind of helps you break out of your filter bubble and understand the media you're ingesting a little better, helps you resist that and whatever habits you can kind of build into your own life to be less hateful towards things that are different from you is helpful to our democracy.
Speaker 1:It's interesting too. I mean living in Arizona for most of my life. My family moved here when I was six, you know we kind of grew up with like the Goldwater Republicans, like you know, and we have people like Sandra Day O'Connor, who was a Republican and she, you know, became the first woman Supreme Court justice and I think that, you know, growing up here really gave me an appreciation for the political diversity of Arizona. I think a lot of times people look at electoral maps and they're like Arizona's red, colorado's blue, and that's what they are, and it's like it is way, way more complicated than that. But I appreciate that you say like the vilification, because one of the things I notice is, as soon as we point to somebody else and say they're doing this, we relieve ourselves of responsibility and really in a democracy our responsibility is to to learn and to understand. And the vilification of our neighbors, I think, is, like you said, like national politics. National politics is important. I do not want to downplay that, but our local and state are really, really important and affect us on the daily right. People in my neighborhood, the speed limits near schools, like these are the things that affect me and my family. And when you talked about that tech talk.
Speaker 1:I'm like that does make me sad, because what we're doing is we're lumping a type of voter, or a voter who voted for candidate A or candidate B, as this person. And the more I talk to people who have voted again in 2024, voted for Trump, voted for Harris the more I have these conversations, the more I understand why people vote the way they do. That doesn't mean I have to agree, but a lot of it has to do with the media they're ingesting. So now I can like look again at all sides and be like, if I'm just looking at this side, I can understand why somebody voted for this candidate, yeah. Or on the local level, I can understand why somebody voted for this candidate. Or on the local level, I can understand why you know the city council is mostly this party, or the state government is mostly this party, and it is. It makes me sad because I think that the more we point fingers and blame each other and the vilification of other Americans, it does. It does nothing but drive a big, you know hole in our democracy and it gets rid of civil discourse and it's just. It's a hard thing.
Speaker 1:So if I'm a teacher, right and I again, I love the all sides is literally for everybody. Anybody can get on it. It is not for just educators, it is not for just students. But if I'm a teacher and I am in a school where I'm noticing this right in my classroom, purpose sometimes to teach things because I didn't want one side or the other to say, oh, she's this or she's this or she's trying to indoctrinate that word, indoctrinate my child into believing X, y or Z, how can I, as a teacher, then utilize what all sides has to kind of help me? Again, I still have to teach media literacy, right, I still have to teach current events. Kids are going to come in and ask questions. It's the best thing about kids is they come in and they're like can they do this, right, kids? You asked me during the Obama administration and during the Trump administration can he do this? Yep, we're talking about current events. If I'm a teacher, how can Allsides help me to kind of navigate this process?
Speaker 2:Well. So I would encourage anybody who's out there that's a teacher, to just first start using Allsides for yourself. There's an app that you can download, that's free, where you can scroll the news, if that's how you like to get your news. There's a newsletter you can sign up for if you want to just get a little briefing every morning or once a week on kind of here's what's going on, or you can just go to our website and browse the headline roundups there, and by headline roundup what I mean by that is we have a team that's working 24-7 to identify the key stories of the day of the hour, look across the spectrum for what different organizations and outlets are saying about it. They write a little blurb about here's the facts, here's how the media covered it and here's maybe some context. Here's the facts, here's how the media covered it and here's maybe some context. And then they pick three high quality articles from the left, center and the right that you can further explore. That's a headline roundup, and so that's kind of the marquee thing that's available on our site and a good way to sort of get initial or kind of your daily news, essentially especially at the national political level. And so I would start there understand what the resources are, and then when your students so that could be one way that you introduce your students to news is you just have them do the same, right, right, and then you're not pushing any one outlet, any one topic. There's so many different awesome excuse me entry points that I've seen teachers use where they've had students read the news, read all three perspectives and then pick a perspective that they agree with, but then they make them actually speak from the other perspective, as I was saying, so you can teach to the news and just use it for current events. It can also be really useful for that one-off event of what you're describing.
Speaker 2:If a student walks in and says can they really do this? This is happening, it's threatening to my community. My parents are scared. I want to talk about it because that's all I'm thinking about right now in my life. You know, and you know as a teacher, I'm not getting any lesson done today. The kids are hot about this. We have to address it. But then how do I navigate that? Because of a politically diverse classroom and you can bring up the headline on all sides and have you know, a really simple thing to do is just have them read the articles and then write a reflection paper, and that helps them kind of like, process their own thoughts.
Speaker 2:We also, kind of hot off the press. We just posted some guides for dialogue in the classroom that I can share with you, liz, to share out in the links, and this was a collaboration with the Harvard Graduate School of Education and it's, you know, how to handle awkward or offensive comments, five steps to guide a surprise conversation, how to set the stage for hard conversation. So then, when they do happen, probably around November, you're ready. You're ready, um, so, uh, I can send all those to you, but they're meant to be just like super quick. There's even one that's formatted so that you can kind of secretly scroll on your laptop the talking points, and they're like nice and big so that, as you're, you know, sort of pretending like this is all coming from you, you're just, you know, sort of following this guide, um, so, anyway, um, I think those are the sorts of tools that we're trying to put out there for teachers, um, because what we don't want to happen is what you know.
Speaker 2:There's a lot of good stats out there, especially on ed week, of the majority of teachers that are just avoiding it. Yeah, and I get it like totally understand, especially if you don't have the backup of your administrators. And I do want to say, as a former administrator if there's any administrators listening to this podcast right now you need to think through what you would do if a parent came in complaining about a teacher talking about something in their social studies classroom or their service classroom or whatever it is, and be ready for how you're going to handle that, because I have seen that gone bad, gone really bad, really wrong, and we've lost really great teachers because of it, because the administrator wasn't prepared with how to respond in a balanced, even fair way. So definitely we don't have that guide yet. That just gave me an idea that we should put something like that up for the administrator, but I do think that that's important for administrators to be ready to handle those conversations as well like you know, what did you hear when you got home?
Speaker 1:Here's what happened in class. Okay, now can we talk about? You know, if there is an issue, like you know, having the again having the hard conversations, and I think you're right, I don't think administrators are taught. Somebody comes in hot and says your teacher said X, y and Z, and it's like I really don't know what to say. I do want to go back to when you're talking about the different sides.
Speaker 1:So one of the things I learned from Dr Luke Perez, who is one of our faculty members at ASU, in the School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership, and I do have a blog post that I will link in is it would be a really amazing thing to split your class in three. Uh, because for me, I never really knew the politics of my kids. I mean, you can kind of figure it out, right, you're a teacher. Um, my students didn't really know my politics because it wasn't relevant to the situation. But dividing kids up, having them each read so again, I'll bring up Colbert again, because that's what's happening and having them, you know, as a group, each read one of the headlines that are picked out, and I appreciate, too, that on the site. It says like, straight up on there, like who, like where it's coming from, right? So I just clicked it again and it is about um, the Gaza crisis. One of them's from the associated One is from the Associated Press, one's from the Times of Israel, one's from Fox News Digital. But having the kids read it and do a three sentence summary who is the author, what are they arguing and why does that matter? Right, and that is you know you could do like who is the author? Well, the author is the Associated Press and according to all sides, that is pretty far over on the left. Fox News says X, y, z, and according to all sides, they're pretty far on the right. So why did? Why does that matter? And it'll help facilitate a conversation with your students of why are these different. Because, at the end of the day, media is a business, right? They get money based on the clicks. Students can know this, right.
Speaker 1:Tiktoks If you're looking at TikTok, a lot of them rage bait you because you'll click on it. It's a behavioral thing. And if you have students, too, that are like, oh, I don't care about the new, because you always have kids that are like, why does this matter. If something you know controversial, quote unquote happens in a sports, have them. Look at the different sides, right, have if it's the NBA or like the WNBA, because they just had their all-star. Like the way things are reported are so different. But having these conversations with them are so important.
Speaker 1:And one of the things, too I I have literally I've used for nine years is on your website under media bias. There is a chart that kind of shows us where these you know news, um news people land. Right when CNN is, where Fox news is, where Forbes is, things like that. There's a bias checker Like it. It really goes into explaining why, right, it's not just all sides. One day woke up and was like we're going to put all these together.
Speaker 1:There is actually a system and talking to students about why that is important and and looking at our bias and I do want to say I always really try it in the classroom to say bias is not a bad thing, right, I am biased to the place where we get our pizza. Right, I'm not really open to where we get our pizza. We get our pizza from a certain place. I like it Great. We get our pizza from a certain place. I like it Great.
Speaker 1:That is a bias. I have a bias because my family again is from rural Iowa. I understand the farming group of people and we want to order a pizza. It has to be a conversation. It's not everybody is going to have the same bias. I do. I again, as a educator, I loved the media bias section of the site and would use that chart all the time, and I again I see it floating around on Facebook. I see teacher groups talking about it because it is. It's a great resource, not just for teachers but for everybody and not I definitely have looked at it and gone oh wow. You know I do read this exact same thing every day and maybe I should try to read something on the other side or something that's more center, just to get different information. So I'm not in my own little echo chamber.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I want to double down on what you've said that bias is just inherent to who we are as humans. It's not bad. What's bad is when we pretend like there isn't bias or we conceal it and so we talk at all sides about like we are revealing the bias of these outlets. Um, people are probably wondering like how we get come up with those ratings and especially the ones on the bias chart. There's multiple methods used, so we look at 16 different types of bias. We do actually have a whole lesson plan and guide on this on our website if someone wants to deep dive into it. Another entry point for students is that they go analyze and come up with what they think the bias is of an outlet and then they compare their own analysis to all sides. That's always kind of an interesting exercise to do if you're really getting deep into the media literacy. But we, so we scan for these 16 different types of bias then and then we use two different methods, so one is actually using experts.
Speaker 2:So we we have a diverse, politically diverse set of people usually six people that review the content from these outlets and then provide a rating. We're just looking at the output from these places we're not analyzing. Where is their funding? Who owns them? Where are they located? It's just pure content is what we are focused on.
Speaker 2:And then we also do what's called a blind bias survey. So we have non-experts, just people who are out there doing this for us, um, who they tell us their own bias, and then we give them a piece of content and they don't know where it came from and they rate it, and then we have it's very, it's got uh, some control articles in there as well from other outlets, so it's not all from the same outlet. And so we compile the results of the blind bias survey and the expert editorial panel and then we combine that into one rating. The idea is that sometimes experts are wrong when it comes to bias because they're kind of in there, they're maybe too deep into it, um, and sometimes just general population is wrong. So if you combine those two things, then you're a little bit closer to the truth, because it is always subjective, um. And so that's where that's how we come up with those blind bias ratings I do like on all of your things.
Speaker 1:It says ratings do not reflect accuracy or credibility only a source's perspective, like I.
Speaker 1:I appreciate that because I think that human nature categorizes things and for us, the easiest categorization or categorization is good or bad. So if I'm looking at a chart and I'm looking at what side I am on, I can say, well, these are all good and the other ones are bad. Where you're just like. This is not accuracy or credibility. We're literally looking at their content and like, doing it like that, and everybody is biased, right.
Speaker 1:But the things that can be harmful are the hidden biases or the pretending that bias doesn't exist, right, because that's when things start to get divisive, that's when we start to get misled with things. I mean, there are a lot of Internet celebrities, I think, that have become very divisive and and going down um has, you know, led people astray, if you will, um, and I think that can be harmful, whereas if you can just say, no, I know this person leans heavily left, or I know this person leans heavily right, or this person has a religious or a political agenda, which, again, are not bad things if you can recognize that, that's what it is, yeah.
Speaker 2:And I'm glad you brought up credibility, because there's other ratings agencies out there that rate the degree of credibility has been that it is very difficult to rate that it could, because if you think about it almost like a line chart, it kind of like bounces all over the place. So if it's, you know and I'm not talking about the outlets out there that are spewing nonsense and intentionally, maliciously spewing disinformation, I'm not talking about that I'm talking about people who think that they are doing good journalism and they're wrong whether that's their negligence, not checking their facts, maybe they're too much in a bubble, whatever it is but they get the story wrong, um, and that leads to credibility kind of bouncing. It just sort of depends on the topic. Um, and bias is a little bit easier. It's more static. Um, it doesn't change quite as dramatically over time. And we made a decision pretty early on to say you know what we do really big, deep dives into misinformation and disinformation, and we will kind of do the work for you to go out and like read a lot about something that seems like a really controversial narrative and then write up here's what we found. We won't say, and here's the truth, but we'll then write up. Here's what we found. We won't say and here's the truth. But we'll say like here's sort of all the things we found and what you need to weigh when deciding what really happened here, um, but we won't write the credibility because we just have just we're pretty small actually and don't have the capacity for that, and it's almost like whack-a-mole in a way if you're trying to do sort of fact-checking type stuff. And so that's why we've really focused on bias, because we know we can do that really well in a way that's actually useful for people.
Speaker 2:And then I was also going to comment on influencers. So we just posted about two months ago, our first influencer bias chart. Um, we chose to start with x because there is such a large contra large um concentration of journalists there, um, and that took us gosh about four or five months to do um, to figure out. You know, who are we going to rate, what's the criteria that they're sort of relevant enough to rate? And then how do you rate a single person? Because people are all over the place. They do not, they're not necessarily consistent in their bias, like an organization is.
Speaker 2:And that was really an interesting journey, lots of really. It was kind of a whole company effort to figure this out and it was really led by Julie Mastrini, our director of media bias, and I think they did a great job. It was really well received. I was sitting on an airplane next to a guy who just happened to know about all sides but didn't know we had released this influencer chart, and he happened to get all of his news on X and he says that's what he does he wakes up in the morning, he scrolls X to get his news and he, when I showed him the chart, he goes oh great, I'm going to follow some of these on the other side to make sure that my feed is more balanced. And that is exactly what I want people to use it for is just kind of expand what's going through their feed.
Speaker 1:Well, and it's interesting to look at this chart because I mean I can absolutely see the conversation of well, so-and-so is on this side and that's. There's no way, but we're only looking at the content they put out on X. So the way these influencers to maybe show up on TikTok or Instagram, or again, I'm I'm a Gen Xer, so all of these, all of these different social medias, get really overwhelming. But it would be an interesting conversation to talk about how this influencer shows up on X versus your perception of them, because you only see them on TikTok. That's again, a very interesting conversation. And talking about how people show up different places and humans are humans. Right, you talked about the you know credibility. I always think about when, in the 1970s, right, people got their news twice a day. They got a newspaper and then they watched the evening news.
Speaker 2:Now everything.
Speaker 1:Everything is breaking news. I feel like, no matter what I'm watching, there's breaking news and people want to be the first to get a new story out because, again, this is a business and that's not a good or bad thing, that's just what it is. But you want to be the first one out and sometimes being the first one out means you don't have the complete story, and that's where, again, another conversation to have is we get a story and then what happens? When it percolates for a couple of days? Do we find out more? Why is that important? Where do we get our news?
Speaker 1:Right, I think a lot of people do get theirs on social, because that's where they're spending their time. I don't get a newspaper. I watch the morning news, but I'm not watching the afternoon news because I'm watching sports. Or we don't have our TV on, we're doing something else. But all of these things can exist in a different place, right? So, looking at the X influencer bias chart and I will again link this this it's something to instead of immediately saying, nope, this person should be, no, no, no, no. Why are they showing up on X this way?
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 1:What? What is there to? And again it just starts conversations. We're not looking at right or wrong, we're not looking at good or bad, we're starting a conversation wrong.
Speaker 2:We're not looking at good or bad. We're starting a conversation, absolutely, and you know we are going to go there and look cross-platform because, you're right, they show up differently and it's super interesting. And the same way that when we first started with traditional news outlets, seeing the different headlines from the outlets was really interesting, news outlets seeing the different headlines from the outlets was really interesting, and to see how differently they emphasize different parts of a story depending on what their bias was. In the same way, like people do show up differently on different platforms and it's fascinating. So I think you're onto something there.
Speaker 2:And then you know, what we haven't even talked about yet is AI and the fact that we don't even know if some of it's real. Right, and that is something we have been absolutely grappling with. How do we use technology to combat technology in a way, use technology to combat technology in a way, and thinking about how, how can we help people identify if the probability that something is real Because you'll never be sure, but there are ways to sort of say like this is 90% likely to be AI, or 90% likely to be real, or 50, 50. It's anyone? Yeah, I'm not sure. So that's, you know, maybe something that we could do in the future that I think would be really useful for people, but right now, definitely a sort of being very critical of anything that you see out there. I took a quiz that a news outlet did on like is this AI or not, and I only got 60% right, you know, and I went in like, oh, I'll be great it was. It was tough.
Speaker 1:Well, because it's so again, it's so new and they're asking you to look at something in a snapshot, whereas and I think I know the one of the things I really appreciate about all sides is you guys aren't just throwing things out to throw them out there, like we talked about this ex-influencer bias charts months ago. Right, you're, you're really taking time and creating things that have research behind them and it's not just throwing things up for the sake of doing it. It is intentional. And I think, when we talk about misinformation and disinformation and for listeners who don't know the difference, misinformation is wrong facts, sometimes, most of the time like accidental, not on purpose. Disinformation is purposefully representing something incorrectly to sway people.
Speaker 2:Well, and there's always a truth within disinformation and that's what makes it so dangerous no-transcript. And so there's definitely it's pretty dangerous out there. The other thing I would really encourage teachers. So you know, there's all sides. There's media literacy, there's really thinking critically about the information you're ingesting. But there's also and we started to go into this with, like, where are you getting your news of? What are your information habits? What are your habits on your phone or your TV with how much and how often you're taking in this information?
Speaker 2:There's this great teacher that was on our advisory board for all sides and now has started this group called disconnect um in milwaukee, and she it, her approach, has been is incredible, um, it's it's really helping students um rewire the relationship with their screens so that they can have a healthier life, but then also teaching their community how to do the same, and the method that she uses is convening them in groups.
Speaker 2:So she did this with her students as a teacher found that it was very successful, very popular with the students, and so she's trying to spread that to everyone and it really uses the approach of setting goals, reflecting on those goals, sharing experiences, listening to other people's experiences and then giving alternatives. So the last 20 minutes of every meeting they do what's called handiwork. So essentially it's just crafts. It's whatever you want to do, but the kids learn that you get kind of that really nice calming, dopamine release and anti-anxiety by doing things like knitting and jewelry making and you know, whatever it is that you want to do, I have behind me I do botanical illustration to calm myself down.
Speaker 1:So any just anything you can do where you're sort of creating with your hands in a way that feels good to you is an excellent antidote to phones and and the anxiety that our phones give us and we will have Kat on, because I've had a conversation with her too and I actually have noticed that the times where I tend to be on my phone the most actually switch to embroidery, because I love to embroider.
Speaker 1:I again have some behind me and it is like listening to her talk about that and I can't wait to have her on, because the crux of it is is it's not this judgment, it's not this you spend too much time on your phone, so you need to do this. It genuinely is a conversation and and giving alternatives, and not again blaming people for spending all this time on their phone. Like we're not trying to get rid of your phone, we're trying to create a healthy relationship with it so that, in the end, you feel better. Yeah, and I love that. Is there anything else that we miss that you want to make sure our listeners have before we leave, because I honestly feel like we could have a five hour conversation about this.
Speaker 2:The one thing I do want to plug and I'll send you the link for this, liz we have a journalism contest coming up, so we are going to offer the opportunity to any student to write an all-side style headline, roundup or article, and there will be three winners. They'll each get $500 and the opportunity, if they would like, to be published on all sides, and so, please, I invite you to have your students participate in this. It's a great classroom exercise to just have everybody do it. We did something like this last year and ended up publishing a junior's article on our site. That was just awesome and brilliant, so I'm excited to do it again this year and I would encourage any teachers to check it out.
Speaker 1:Absolutely, and, again, we will link this in our show notes. If you follow the Center for American Civics at ASU, we will be tagging all sides. We will be sharing their stuff, because the great thing about the world of civics is we all want to share each other's things because, at the end of the day, we want to have a citizenry that understands our government, understands these things, and if they don't, they know where to go. Alice, again, I literally could sit and talk to you all day because this stuff is so interesting for me and I think that it's it's always timely, right. So thank you for your time, thank you for your expertise. Um, and yes, please, all sidescom. There's so much information that, no matter what you're teaching, or, again, if you want to download the app, and that's how you get your news and then you can decide what you want to read. What a great way to start your day or end your day.
Speaker 2:Absolutely, and thanks for having me on, liz, I really appreciate it Okay.
