Critical Thinking

Three simple things to tell journalism students about how to do their job in the wake of the 2024 election

People in the journalism educational community have been asking a variety of questions related to their students and the outcome of the 2024 election. Although they vary in tone, concern and topic, they basically boil down to these types of questions:

  • What should I be telling my students about the outcome of the election?
  • What should journalism for them look like now that Trump is president again?
  • What should they do, as journalists, in this current environment?

I’m often accused of being reductive in cases like this, but I believe that we overthink the heck out of stuff like this.

For example, my answer to the first one would be pretty basic:

  • Trump won the election, both the electoral college and the popular vote. If you like that, fine. If you don’t like it, that’s fine, too. However, facts are facts and people need to learn how to accept them.
  • You live in a country where people get to choose a leader, and sometimes people make choices you don’t like or can’t understand. That’s the risk of living in a society like ours, but it is how things work.
  • If you don’t like what happened this time, you can easily use the skills you garnered in any journalism class to be part of a political campaign and try to move the needle in the direction you prefer. If you like what happened this time, you can use those same skills to maintain this new status quo. However, you can’t do these things and be a news journalist at the same time.

I can already think of at least six people who are furiously writing a five-page email to me, condemning that simplicity. So, if you hated that, you’re really going to hate the rest of this.

Journalism is a lot of things, but at its most basic, it’s about finding out what’s going on, making sense of that and then telling it to people who need to know this stuff in a way that makes sense to them. It requires you to keep the door of objectivity open, at least a crack, when you talk to people and to do your best to understand what’s happening, why it’s happening and what it means to your audience.

So, with that as the backdrop, here are three basic things I would tell students about doing the job in this current state of being:

Stick to the facts in your reporting: When I said this to a few Harris supporters, I got the expected response: “This is stupid! Trump and his followers never accepted facts!”

First of all, Trump secured nearly 76 million votes, so to assume that every one of his followers won’t accept a fact is problematic and stereotypical. I can’t get four faculty members with the same level of education, same Midwestern roots, same area of study and same views on child rearing to all think the same way about where we should go to lunch half the time, so to assume 76 million people are exactly alike in a pretty problematic way is relatively stupid.

Second, the goal of journalism isn’t a race to the bottom or fighting stupid with stupid. You do things the way you’re brought up to do them, like finding facts, interviewing key sources, telling stories and so forth in this field. Even if you do all that, there will be people who don’t believe you, whether it’s about the Jan. 6 riot or that you know someone who has six toes.

As I used to tell Zoe when some kid was trying to set fire to the McDonald’s Playland or throwing a tantrum in the middle of Walmart, “I’m not that kid’s parent. I’m your parent. This is not how you behave.”

If you signed up to do a job, you do the job the way it needs to be done. As far as journalism is concerned, that’s relying on facts and presenting perspectives. You aren’t a superhero, set out to right wrongs or showcase what you “feel people should think.” Doing that has led to some of the biggest disasters in our field.

 

Understand your audience and work for those people: If you are working for a traditional media outlet, you will likely have a mix of people who voted in the past election. Those people might consider politics the only thing that matters, or they might be low-involvement voters who have a little more than a passing interest on elections. Some of each may have voted for Trump and Harris for one of a dozen reasons.

To assume that the audience thinks exactly as you do is to doom yourself to failure, so instead of doing that, go actually interact with people in your readership area and figure out what matters most to them.

This can be things that have very little to do with the major elections, or they might be tied directly to them. Where people live, what types of jobs they hold and what challenges they face can be crucial to keeping your eye on the ball when picking stories to write.

For example, the issue of tariffs came up multiple times in the election. The talking heads on various national news programs have come up with a variety of reasons why these are good or bad or whatever. Instead of looking at a large national story, look at things that your local community needs and how specific changes to financial policies have impacted them.

If you are covering a rural community, see how things like the costs of fertilizer, feed, veterinary medication and so forth have changed before, during and after tariffs are imposed. If countries are reciprocating by taxing incoming products, see how the things the farms produce that traditionally get exported are impacted. If all politics is truly local, so is the impact of political decisions.

Beyond that, look at the things that people are actually saying impact their lives and see what can be done about that. Not everything is Watergate, but everything we do can reach people in an important and effective fashion.

I often go back to the story a student wrote for me decades ago at the Columbia Missourian. She found out from a wheelchair user that this person had to ride in the road and risk getting hit by cars because the sidewalks were so lousy. The student wrote the story and caught hell from the city manager, who demanded she retract the story. She kind of freaked out and asked what we should do.

“You hit a nerve,” I told her. “Keep going.”

Later that day, a large group of wheelchair users were gathering for a “Wheelie Rally” in the park to discuss this issue. The student reported on that, further ticking off the city manager. Still, she kept going on this story, covering the events and making people aware of the issue.

About six months later, the city manager stood up at a city council meeting and said he wanted to reopen the budget to deal with the condition of the city’s sidewalks. It was just something he’d been thinking about, he explained, so now seemed like a good time. He never once mentioned the student or her reporting, but every time I saw a chunk of sidewalk being repaired anywhere I went in life, I thought of this kid.

 

Get reacquainted with the attribution verb “said”: This one is going to be crucial going forward, because we have long seen what happens when the wind changes politically and people have made statements. I think half of the late-night comedy shows after the election were of Republicans denouncing Trump in 2021, juxtaposed with their unwavering support for him now.

I don’t know what Donald Trump (or any other politician for that matter) believes, knows, thinks, assumes, understands or feels. What I do know is that he opens his mouth from time to time and words fall out of it. The word for that is “said” (or says if you’re in broadcast).

He said he was going to conduct a mass deportation of undocumented people living in the United States.

He said tariffs are the greatest thing ever and that he would impose tariffs of up to 60% on imports.

He said he would let RFK Jr. “go wild” on the health system in the United States.

Do I know that any of those things will happen? No. Do I know exactly what it means for the future? No. What I do know is that he said them, so I’m going to tell people that and then follow the breadcrumbs along the trail to see where “said” becomes “does” and go from there.

Even if you aren’t directly covering Trump, it bears repeating that people often say one thing and do something different. Report what they say and also what they do and go from there.

Also, record the hell out of everything.

An 8-minute video primer on Artificial Intelligence, its impact on media writers and the ethical concerns it raises for media folks

One of the biggest things I’ve tried to get across on this blog is that it’s here to help media students and professors. (If it helps other people, hey, I’m glad that works out as well…) The other big thing I’ve tried to get across is that if you need something, all you have to do is ask and I’ll probably get it done.

Case in point, a professor down in Texas and I were chatting about the “Exploring Mass Communication” textbook we’d sent her and some other issues, when she emailed me this:

I do have a question for you: Do you have any recorded lectures or videos where you talk about AI in journalism? I would love to take a look and see if I can incorporate it into my class. My current class size is 220, and the classroom is not very adaptable to an interactive Zoom call, which is why I wanted to see if I could use a pre-recorded video. I also teach an online version of this class which is just as large, and the video would be very helpful.

I reached out to Sage and asked if we could do a more “production-savvy” video than just me recording this in the pinball man cave at my house, and they were totally enthusiastic. We got it done for her with two weeks to spare and it worked well.

The nicest thing is that Sage sent me a copy, so I uploaded it to YouTube and here it is if you want to use it:

 

(I hate the fact I keep looking down, but this is what happens when your script glitches on the screen and you have to use the printed backup…)

If it’s helpful, let me know. Also, if YOU want something for any of your classes that fit into whatever area of expertise I supposedly have, feel free to hit me up here. I don’t care if you’re using my books or not. I just like helping people.

Have a great rest of your day!

Become media literate as you learn how to separate fact from crap (A Throwback Post)

(Back when I was a kid, fake news was easier to spot, thanks to World News Weekly, the National Enquirer and, of course, Weird Al’s favorite publication: Midnight Star.)

As we are essentially revamping our entire university, one of the things several of us are pining for in the new gen-ed curriculum is a media-literacy course. We’re not going to get it, but that’s another story…

The importance of media literacy really came home to me when my kid started getting all of her news from a) TikTok, b) other kids who watched TikTok and c) the parents of those kids who read nothing but partisan-hack websites. At one point, she was telling me a story about a police officer whose daughter was killed by a burglar or something, and the cop waited until the guy was done with his prison term before killing the burglar’s entire family in front of him, but leaving the burglar to live.

“Where the hell did you hear that?” I asked, incredulously.

“I saw it on TikTok,” she said.

“You mean you saw a news reporter talking about this on TikTok?” I asked.

“Oh. No. There was this guy doing a short video where he talked about how that happened,” she said.

I punched a few relatively obvious terms into a search engine and found this was total crap. So was the next weird story she told me, and the next weird one and the one after that. At that point, I had a request for her:

“The next time you hear something or see something that doesn’t seem normal while watching your Toks or whatever they’re called, before you freak out about it, come see me and I’ll check it out for you.”

That evolved from me checking things for her to her learning to ask some pointed questions about what she was seeing before coming to see me. She’s now working on figuring out how best to separate fact from crap.

This situation helped inspire today’s Throwback Thursday post, where I return to a three-part series I did on “Fake News” a few years back and how it works. Most of the moving pieces in there are still legit.

In addition, I’ll be doing a video podcast with the folks at Sage later today, so if you’d like access to that once it’s done, feel free to hit me up here and I’ll add you to “Vicky’s Magical List of Cool People” and we’ll hook you up.

In the mean time, enjoy the post below.

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Fake News 101: What can we do to fight fake news?

EDITOR’S NOTE: This is the last part of a three-part series. If you missed Part I and Part II, you can find them through the links. -VFF

The term “fake news” gets thrown around the way the word “internet” used to be thrown around: Everyone is using it, dealing with it and thinking it’s something it’s actually not. For the sake of this post, we’re going to define “fake news” as content posted that the authors know to be false with the intent of fooling readers into believing it to be real.

If you think about it that way, the questions that come into focus are simple even as their answers are complex:

  • Who posts this kind of content and why do they do it?
  • Why do we believe the stuff, especially the really outlandish stuff?
  • What can we do to stop its spread or at least its impact?

This is the last part of a three-part series discussing each of these questions in hopes of helping you get a stronger handle on this topic. Today’s post looks at how we can out-think a situation in which fake news is likely to mess with us:

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Fake news has become a prevalent part of people’s daily media consumption and it shows no sign of slowing down any time soon. The ability for people to make money from splashy, fraudulent headlines and slanted, fake stories ensure that journalists will continue to face an uphill battle as we try to inform people and keep them from being snowed.

The New York Times walked through one such situation in which an Austin, Texas, businessman with a handful of Twitter followers sparked a viral fervor in about 48 hours.

The day after the 2016 presidential election, Eric Tucker posted several photos of buses gathered near a hotel and stated that, “Anti-Trump protestors in Austin today are not as organic as they seem. Here are the busses (sic) they came in.”

Tucker turned out to be wrong, as the buses were connected to a software company that held a conference in town that week. However, the tweet was shared more than 16,000 times, leading to coverage on multiple blogs and websites. Even the president-elect tweeted about how “unfair” the busing in of protesters was

Local news outlets began poking at the story to find out what was going on. Coach USA, the company that owned the buses, had to put out a statement that its fleet had no connection to any anti-Trump protests. Tableau, the software company that hired the buses, also made a statement to local media outlets to claim credit for the buses. Snopes, an internet fact-checking site, stated the busing of protesters was untrue. However, the tweet continued to generate a massive amount of attention. Tucker eventually found out he was wrong and labeled his work as such, but the spread of the falsehood far exceeded anything a correction could hope to refute.

In the middle of this mess, Tucker received multiple inquiries about how he knew the buses carried anti-Trump protesters and how he verified his information. In the Times article, he was quoted as saying, “I’m also a very busy businessman and I don’t have time to fact-check everything that I put out there, especially when I don’t think it’s going out there for wide consumption.” (emphasis added for the sake of pointing out the line that made me slam my head into my desk repeatedly)

As journalists, our job is to both avoid getting duped but also to help other people see the importance of being right before they share information.

The first issue to address is our ability to spot the fake news. We’ve talked about this before on the blog, even offering folks a free copy of this poster if they wanted a big one for a classroom or newsroom:

Beyond those basics, we need to look at how we think about news overall. As part of her work with the Power Shift Project for the Freedom Forum Institute, critical-thinking expert Jill Geissler has developed a list of things that critical thinkers do. Here are a few of those items that will help you avoid the snares of fake news and help teach others how to keep themselves out of trouble:

  • Check for biases, including your own: We talked about this in the previous post when we discussed the idea of self-confirming biases and how they can lead people to believe things that aren’t accurate. It is this predisposition to being biased in favor of something (or against something else) that leads us to want to find things that support our own way of thinking. To avoid adding to the chorus of inaccuracy, stop and think about how bias may play a role in your likelihood to believe in something.
  • Dig beyond the surface: This is where journalists tend to separate themselves from private citizens in terms of critical thought. The motto of “If your mother says she loves you, go check it out,” perfectly captures our desire to find the root of all information and the accuracy of it. Digging into something can be as simple as finding the key source of a statement like Tucker’s, or it can be as complex as building data sets to refute a politician’s statement about who donated to his campaign. The goal in digging is to make sure that when you do decide to share information or publish articles (or even retweet something), you feel as confident as you can that the information is accurate.
  • Identify stakeholders: Journalists have a long tradition of figuring out what Side A thinks and why and what Side B thinks and why. To identify stakeholders in today’s era of fake news, it goes beyond that and requires deeper digging. As mentioned we discussed in the first post of the series, the stakeholders of fake-news farms have a simple reason for creating false news: money. The people who share and reshare the content on certain websites can also be driven by financial desires, but in some cases, it’s about gaining popularity, promoting an ideological agenda or just being a dink.
    When you dig into a topic, you want to identify a wide variety of potential stakeholders, including people who are directly involved with making something happen. That said, always keep an eye on those folks who have a way of benefiting or losing from the actions of others.
  • Consider alternatives: One of the questions someone asked Tucker after his anti-Trump-protest tweet went viral was whether there could be another explanation for the buses being in Austin. His response was that he considered that briefly but discarded it quickly.
    As journalists, we want to do more than skip past plausible explanations for things that don’t support our presuppositions. The goal each time we ply our trade is to tell the audience an accurate story, so in many cases, we need to pick through plausible alternatives to what we are telling them and figure out to what degree they could be accurate. Seeing the buses, a critical thinker would wonder why they were there. It was plausible they hauled protesters from out of state, but it could be equally plausible that they brought people in for a multi-level-marketing company rally or a Coach USA convention where everyone brought their own bus. A quick call to the bus company or the hotels nearby would have helped cut this guesswork off at the pass.

In terms of “fixing” others who find themselves enamored by fake news, this can be both problematic and infuriating, especially for journalists who make this their living. It would be like us walking into their place of work and telling them, “See how you’re running this machine? It’s totally wrong. I read this thing on the internet and you’re just lying and faking stuff. Now, let me turn some knobs and buttons because I know better than you do…”

Here are some things experts have found that can be helpful to keep in mind when trying to deal with people who don’t want to hear what we have to say in regard to fake news. Not all of these will work perfectly or even well, but they are more successful than our tradition of trying to bludgeon people to death with information from Snopes:

Nobody reacts well to being told “You’re Wrong.” The instinct we have as people is to address peace with peace and war with war. It’s a lizard-brain thing, but when someone says with absolute certainty that Hillary Clinton is running a child sex-slave ring out of a pizza joint, we want to respond with absolute certainty that the speaker has a two-digit IQ. Immediately both sides dig in and nothing gets done.

One techniques psychologists have found helpful in breaking people of their beliefs in inaccurate or dangerous things is to engage the person with questions about the material, the source and the information in a way that is non-threatening. So instead of saying, “What a bunch of crap that is” try, “I hadn’t seen that on any of my regular news sites. Where did you see that?” It starts a dialogue that allows the person to operate without heightened defenses and starts to allow the person to unwrap the situation on his or her own terms. Continued questions will move that person away from the certainty, allowing for potential self-correction later.

Fights like this are emotional, not rational. When we say, “You’re wrong,” to someone invested enough in a topic to discuss it in a public or semi-public setting, what we are trying to say is, “As a journalist, I work in this area and there are a number of things that trouble me enough about this to doubt it’s accurate. I just want to help you see what I see.” What the person hears is, “You, not just this information, but you personally and your position on whatever topic you’re trying to support with this nonsense are wrong.”

In explaining how to talk to people about fake news, Claire Wardle, executive director of First Draft, explained it this way:

“We’re human and driven by emotion,” says Wardle. When you reject someone’s views on contentious political issues such as gun violence or abortion, you’re challenging their identity.

To prevent this from happening, a good way to reach out is through perspective-taking actions. It shows that you understand their core beliefs, which you acknowledge they are entitled to, but that this information they are using to support those beliefs needs to be better.

It could be something like, “Grandpa, I know you don’t like Hillary Clinton, and you’ve said that a number of times over the past 30 years. I don’t agree with you on her, but I understand that’s how you feel about her.”

Then, provide grandpa with the information that will show why it is that this story about her colonizing Mars with stem-cell embryos to build a colony of liberals on welfare who will plant trees in every coal mine in America isn’t the best way to help other people see why he hates HRC.

Understand that certain people are targets. People who are older and less technologically savvy are the targets for the fake-news farms we talked about throughout the series. The reasons are pretty obvious, once you stop and think about it:

  • Older people tend to have more money, more civic engagement, more free time, and less experience with technology.
  • Older people are often more at risk for certain things, such as the pandemic noted in the article linked above. This means they’re more likely to search out information to protect themselves, but again, are less likely to know where to go.
  • People who are less technologically savvy tend to have lower education or socio-economic status, which puts them into a position of limited nuance. Research on everything from color choices to informational outcomes dictates they prefer thing that are simple, common and familiar. Absolutism in black and white fits that bill.

Above all else, many people who are older tend to trust the media because they spent much of their lives with media they could trust. Newspapers and Walter Cronkite gave them the straight story.

The story that will always resonate for me was the time I came home from college and stopped over to see my grandmother for our family’s traditional Friday night gathering. She was upset and confused because she read in the Cudahy Reminder (the local newspaper) that there was going to be a fish fry at the Kelly Senior Center that night at 5 p.m.

When she went there, there was no fish fry.

The more I tried to explain to her that it might be a mistake or that the paper might have screwed up, the worse it got. In her mind, if the Cudahy Reminder said there was going to be a fish fry at the Kelly Center on Friday at 5 p.m., well, then, dammit, there was GOING TO BE a fish fry at the Kelly Center at 5 p.m.

On the flip side, people with less education or lower socio-economic status, regardless of age, are less likely to trust the media. Therefore, whenever they get a story that tells them everyone out there at NBC and CBS with their fancy suits and their big studios have been lying to them, they’ll buy into whatever “inside scoop” the fake news folks will tell them.

And, again, nobody, lest of all people who feel like they are marginalized or like they’re starting to lose their grip on reality, want to hear from people they know, “You’re wrong.”

To help folks in this position, organizations like the New York Times are working to develop programs meant to inoculate certain groups against fake news. They not only provide information in a way that speaks to them at their level of understanding (whatever it may be), but it comes to them based on their choice to engage. In short, it allows them to decide how and when to challenge their own assumptions.

 

PICK THE HILL YOU’RE WILLING TO DIE ON: As we’ve discussed before, there are certain things that really matter and we’re willing to give it all to that discussion. We’ll fight it out, regardless of the odds or the enemy, because it really matters a great deal. In other words, we have decided this is a hill we’re willing to die on.

When it comes to trying to disabuse people we know about the facts associated with fake news, it can feel like we’re ready to die on every hill, every day and in every conversation. Facts are our stock and trade, so to abuse them in this fashion can feel an awful lot like someone just told us we have the ugliest baby they’ve ever seen.

However, experts agree that, despite our best efforts, we’re not going to change hearts and minds in most cases. Too many people are too far down the rabbit hole to pull them back out. If that’s the case, consider how much energy you want to put into this. If the answer is, “This is annoying, but its not the hill I’m willing to die on,” then the best answer is to diffuse the situation with a statement that shows you’re unwilling to engage:

“Uncle Jim, I understand you think Joe Biden is on a super cocktail of Ritalin, PCP and Bang energy drink to keep him alive during the debates, but I don’t, and nothing either of us is going to say is going to matter much here, so I really don’t want to talk about it.”

 

The phrases “objective journalism” and “sexting relationship with a source” rarely co-exist

Not to put too fine of a point on it, but when you Google a person’s name and EVERYTHING comes back related to one story, it’s rarely going to be a good day for that person.

THE LEAD: It’s stories like this that give me a brain aneurysm:

New York magazine on Thursday said its Washington correspondent, Olivia Nuzzi, is on leave after learning the star journalist had allegedly engaged in an inappropriate relationship with a reporting subject. That person is Robert F. Kennedy Jr., according to people familiar with the matter.

“Recently our Washington Correspondent Olivia Nuzzi acknowledged to the magazine’s editors that she had engaged in a personal relationship with a former subject relevant to the 2024 campaign while she was reporting on the campaign, a violation of the magazine’s standards around conflicts of interest and disclosures,” a spokesperson for New York magazine said in a statement in response to questions from Status.

A BASIC LOOK: Nuzzi met Kennedy in person once, according to published reports, as she worked on a profile that ran in November 2023. Kennedy is married to actress Cheryl Hines while Nuzzi was engaged to Politico chief Washington correspondent Ryan Lizza, but the two recently called off the engagement.

A variety of news outlets chipped in bits and bites of this story, but they all generally agree on the fact this wasn’t a physical affair. It included some tawdry banter, full-on sexting and/or Nuzzi sending nude photos to Kennedy. Word of the nudes and texts got back to the bosses at New York Magazine, and Nuzzi eventually confirmed the gist of the situation.

She is currently on leave from the magazine as a result of this situation.

POST-TRAUMATIC JOURNALISM FLASHBACK: I’m not naming names, as the last thing I want to do is dredge up the past or be accused of internet shaming. However, this isn’t the first case of a reporter and a source ending up in a compromising position of this nature. If you don’t believe me, just Google “Reporter source romantic affair” and you’ll find more than a few of these situations have made the news outside of the RFK Jr./Nuzzi situation.

The one that comes back to my mind happened in Milwaukee when a reporter for a local publication wrote a profile about a high-ranking law-enforcement official while simultaneously slipping into a relationship with the person.

This situation was a full-on affair of a physical nature that was eventually nudged into the public eye by other local journalists. I remember the editor of the reporter’s publication standing up for that person in public, only to back off later after finding out things were much more involved than the editor thought at the time.

As this whole thing went into full Dumpster-fire mode, I just kept thinking, “This is not going to look good on a resume…”

THINGS I DON”T GIVE A DAMN ABOUT: You can feel however you want to feel about certain elements of these kind of situations, or this one in particular. As a journalism professor and journalist, here are the things that I don’t give a damn about that are getting reported with breathless pearl-clutching in the press:

  • The age difference: She’s 31, he’s 70. Yes, he’s technically old enough to be her grandfather and no, I don’t want to think about that, either. However, from a journalistic ethics perspective, I couldn’t give a damn. (I seem to recall the Milwaukee situation being a case in which one of the people involved was about twice the age of the other person. Still don’t care.) Whether they were born within nanoseconds of each other, or if they have an age gap that makes the one between J. Howard Marshall and Anna Nicole Smith look tiny by comparison does not make this ethically better or worse. As long as they were both above the age of consent, it’s not an issue. As long as they were source and reporter, that’s the issue.
  • Relationship status: He is married and she was engaged. Personally, I wouldn’t be all that thrilled to find out that Amy was trotting around on me. Also, I know If were doing something like this, I’d come home to find her with a meat cleaver and a shovel, sitting calmly in her chair as she practiced her alibi. However personally sketchy or morally repugnant you might or might not find the concept of breaking the bonds of commitment, it’s neither here nor there for me when it comes to the ethics of this situation.
  • The “level” of the affair: Maybe I missed it somewhere in the SPJ Code of Ethics, or I just haven’t come across one at a yard sale yet, but I don’t think journalists have some sort of “conversion chart” for what is an “acceptable affair” with a source. (“If they only got to second base, and they’re not the subject of a profile….”) There’s a pretty clear line that anyone with a brain has in regard to the difference between being friendly with a source (“So, how are your kids doing in soccer this year?”) and crossing that line into an affair (“So, are your kids still at soccer? Can I come over?”) I know that everyone has their version of that line, but I’m guessing the phrase “sent nudes” would garner general agreement that a line got crossed.

SO WHAT DOES MATTER IN THIS CASE?: For me, it’s a pretty short list, but here we go…

Reporters shouldn’t engage in sexual (or sexually adjacent) conduct with sources: As we’ve reported here, it’s a well-debunked trope that all women in journalists trade sex with sources for information. That doesn’t mean that a) cases in which reporters of all genders having sexually inappropriate relationships with sources of all genders don’t exist and b) it’s wrong, no matter who started it, when it started, how it started, where it started, why it started or what level of sex stuff is involved.

This breaks the ethical code journalists ascribe to in a clear and basic way, as the SPJ code clearly states:

Avoid conflicts of interest, real or perceived. Disclose unavoidable conflicts.

Refuse gifts, favors, fees, free travel and special treatment, and avoid political and other outside activities that may compromise integrity or impartiality, or may damage credibility.

No, it doesn’t say, “Thou shalt not have a naughty-time tussle with a source,” but it’s still pretty clear.

Look, I get that journalism is a particularly weird field in which we get really close to a lot of people, and that we’re all damaged in a lot of ways that don’t really lend themselves to finding normal human relationships on the regular. I also know that it’s nearly impossible to spend any time in journalism without running a risk of a conflict of interest.

I had two: In the first case, I became engaged to a city council rep after a relatively brief period of dating. I wasn’t covering the city council, but I still disclosed it to the editor and got it out there. (Oddly enough, I told him on a Friday night and on Monday, I was sent to cover the city council for the first time in my career. When I protested, reminding him of the situation, he told me he had no one else available and, “Just don’t quote her.”) That relationship ended a short time after that situation, so it didn’t become an issue again.

The second was when Amy and I were married and in Missouri. I was the crime editor and she had gotten a job as a police dispatcher at the university police department. We both disclosed and it was fine, in that dispatchers rarely ended up speaking to the media, and I wasn’t about to lean on her for information about anything at MUPD.

That said, there were more than a few nights when she’d come home and want to unburden herself about a ridiculously terrible day, only to stop and say, “Wait, you’re not a journalist now. You’re my husband… Spousal privilege applies.” I didn’t break the faith, but, man… that was tough some days.

The point is: It’s not like this is some uncharted territory or arcane rule we’ve never heard of. That said, “knowing” and “knowing better” are apparently two different things, and “caution” should remain a watch word when we feel the line between source and friend (or more) start to blur.

If A Former President Tells You An Undocumented Immigrant Ate Someone’s Dog, Go Check It Out (A throwback post)

Based on the concerns raised in Tuesday’s presidential debate, we felt it was important to let people know we’ve got an eye on our dog.

If you didn’t watch the presidential debate Tuesday, or you haven’t been withing 5 feet of any device that generates memes lately, the headline on this blog post might seem like a MadLibs game gone wrong, or the start of my slow slide into dementia.

That said, during an actual debate between two people who actually would like to run this country, one of them made the claim that undocumented immigrants in Springfield, Ohio are stealing people’s pets and eating them:

If you aren’t part of what I would most politely call the “tinfoil hat brigade,” you might have been as confused as I was when Trump started going down this rabbit hole. In looking around online now, apparently there have been a collection of randomly stupid social media posts, unsubstantiated allegations at public meetings and out-of-context photos from around Ohio that are trying to link the increase in the Haitian population there with a “pets-as-food” narrative.

I have to say that the most impressive moment of that debate, from a journalism perspective, was when David Muir responded to Trump’s claims by stating the network had reached out to the city manager of Springfield, Ohio to fact check this situation. Muir noted that the city manager found no credible evidence of any of this happening. That meant Muir and his colleagues did a couple things we should all aspire to do as journalists:

  1. Research the hell out of your topic before any big event: The fact that ABC was plugged in enough to all the random weirdness surrounding the “dude ate my dog” theory and other topics demonstrates they were researching well enough to know they needed to be ready for something like this. The economy, abortion rights, the border? Sure, those were slam-dunk topics they needed to know like the back of their hand. Pet eating in Ohio? That was special-level research.
  2. Go to a credible source for fact checking: If you watch the video, Muir notes ABC talked to the city manager, an official source who was acting in an official capacity, who told the network this was total BS. Trump then flails back with an argument I would expect to hear from a grade-schooler about “people on television” saying that someone “took my dog for food.” I’ll believe the guy whose job it is to take the “hey, my neighbor ate my dog” complaints over the “people on television” whoever they are…
  3. No matter how certain you are about something, go check it out:  In an earlier post on fact-checking, I explained that one of the best ways to look at your work is to assume everything about it is wrong. Then, you should go out and try to prove yourself right. What we usually do is assume we’re right unless something shows up that proves us wrong, which can lead to a much higher likelihood of us committing a fact error. No matter how stupid, outlandish or otherwise weird something is, if you’re going to include it or omit it from a story, you need to go check it out.

Today’s throwback post honors this concept with one of the most well-known maxims in journalism: If your mother says she loves you, go check it out.

 

 

 

If your mother says she loves you, go check it out (or why making sure you’re sure matters).

Iphonetext

The adage in journalism regarding verification is: “If your mother says she loves you, go check it out.” The idea is that you need to make sure things are right before you publish them. You also want to verify the source of the information before you get yourself into trouble.

This issue popped up again this week after former White House Communications Director Anthony Scaramucci had exchanged several emails with a person he thought to be former Chief of Staff Reince Prebus. It turns out, the messages came from a prankster, who baited Scaramucci into an “email battle:”

“At no stage have you acted in a way that’s even remotely classy, yet you believe that’s the standard by which everyone should behave towards you?” read the email to Scaramucci from a “mail.com” account.

Scaramucci, apparently unaware the email was a hoax, responded with indignation.

“You know what you did. We all do. Even today. But rest assured we were prepared. A Man would apologize,” Scaramucci wrote.

The prankster, now aware that he had deceived the beleaguered Scaramucci, went in for the kill.

“I can’t believe you are questioning my ethics! The so called ‘Mooch’, who can’t even manage his first week in the White House without leaving upset in his wake,” the fake Priebus wrote. “I have nothing to apologize for.”

Scaramucci shot back with a veiled threat to destroy Priebus Shakespearean-style.

“Read Shakespeare. Particularly Othello. You are right there. My family is fine by the way and will thrive. I know what you did. No more replies from me,” the actual Scaramucci.

“Othello” is a tragedy in which the main character is tricked into killing his wife Desdemona after his confidante convinces him that she has been unfaithful.

As the article points out, Scaramucci isn’t the first person to be suckered by a prank. Other members of the government had been similarly duped via email. In terms of prank calls, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker found himself once speaking with a person pretending to be billionaire David Koch, discussing ways to attack protesters and destroy liberals.   (The prankster told his side of the story on Politico.)

News journalists have also been caught short when it comes to making sure they’re sure about the sources and information they receive. In 2013, KTVU-TV in San Francisco had what it thought was a big scoop on the Asiana Flight 214 crash: The names of the captain and crew. However, the information turned out to be not only a hoax, but an intentionally racist set of names:

Three people were fired and a fourth resigned for health reasons in the wake of this error. In digging into this, it turned out that the NTSB found the source of the names to be a “summer intern” who thought this would be funny. In its own investigation, the station found that nobody asked the source at the NTSB for his name or title. The station issued an apology, as did the NTSB.

It’s easy to laugh at these incidents or to marvel at how dumb somebody was to buy into this stuff. However, we used to say around my house, “There, but by the grace of God, go I.” In other words, you could be next.

So here are three simple tips to help you avoid these problems:

  1. Verify, verify, verify: If something sounds too good to be true, it usually is. Look up information on various sites, ask a source for other people who can augment/confirm the information and make sure you feel confident in your content before you publish.
  2. If you aren’t sure, back away: It is always better to be late on something than it is to be wrong. It’s also better to let a random email or a text go without a response than to get sucked in and pay the price later. Some of these are easy, like when a Nigerian Prince promises you untold riches if you would just transfer your bank account number to him. Some are harder: When’s the last time you made sure it was your friend texting you about a “crazy night” and not his mom or dad doing some snooping? We just assume we know the actual source. That can be dangerous, so back off if you’re not sure.
  3. Kick it around the room: One of the best reasons why newsrooms, PR offices and ad agencies exist is to gather collective knowledge in one place. Sure, with technology now, it’s easy for everyone to work “off site” but keeping people in a single physical spot can make it easier to have someone look over your shoulder and see if something you just got “smells right.” Take advantage of other people around you and don’t go at it alone.

How Jordan Love’s Injury Drove Packer Nation into a Frenzy of Misinformation and How You Can Avoid Perpetuating Viral Stupidity

 

THE LEAD: The Extra-Special, We-Want-You-to-Buy-Peacock-Streaming, I-Bet-Brazil-Is-Amazing Friday night game between the Green Bay Packers and Philadelphia Eagles got off to an ugly start, with terrible field conditions and ended even worse, with franchise quarterback Jordan Love writhing in pain on that lousy turf.

Love’s injury wasn’t as bad as some I’ve seen, but when you dump $220 million extra into a quarterback and he doesn’t make it for first full game, things aren’t great. Also, this situation had half the press booth doing deep dives to figure out what, exactly, Malik Willis had done in his career to this point.

What makes all of this worthy of a post today wasn’t the Friday event, but the subsequent spread of information I witnessed Saturday that became a perfect microcosm of why media literacy matters so much.

THE BACKSTORY: The first Saturday of each month, Dad and I are at the Oak Creek Salvation Army as part of the largest sports card and memorabilia show in Wisconsin. We set up a couple tables and sell our wares, which range from cheap packs of cards from the junk-wax era to old programs from the Packers glory days.

More than 700 people came through the door that day, with about 695 of them wondering about how bad Jordan Love’s injury was. Between selling stuff and looking for stuff to buy, I heard dozens of theories on what was going on with Love and his knee and what it meant to the Packers season. These included:

  • Torn ligaments, he’s out for the season.
  • It’s an ankle, not a knee. Should be able to tape it up.
  • They don’t think it’s that bad. Should be back next week with rest.
  • This could be career ending. I mean, did you SEE him limping off the field?
  • Packers KNOW what’s going on, but they aren’t saying anything until they know they can grab an extra QB.

SOURCE CHECK: Each time someone I was chatting with said one of these or the other dozen things they were saying with absolute certainty about Love’s injury, I asked a basic question:

Where did you get that?

The answers were a mishmash of things like, “I saw it on Twitter” (Sorry, Elon, nobody’s calling it X in casual conversation. I think we just call it X in the media so you won’t crash a rocket on our houses or buy our media outlets.) to “I know a guy who…” to “I saw it on my phone” to “I just heard those guys over there talking about it…” (That’s always reassuring.)

None of these people could point me to one specific source that had any kind of insight whatsoever as to the specific injury, the actual diagnosis and the expected time of recovery. Personally, I dropped a note to a former student of mine who was in Brazil covering the game and he never even got back to me with an answer. At his press conference after the event, coach Matt LaFleur straight up said he didn’t know and they expected to get an MRI when the team got back to Green Bay.

That didn’t stop everyone, and I mean everyone, from chiming in on social media about what they absolutely, positively, definitely knew had happened to Jordan Love.

Contrast those immediate “I know stuff” reactions with what the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel put out Saturday:

GREEN BAY − Green Bay Packers quarterback Jordan Love injured the medial collateral ligament in his left knee and is expected to miss “a couple” of weeks, PackersNews has confirmed.

Earlier, ESPN’s Adam Schefter reported on X, formerly Twitter, that Love “is believed to have injured his MCL, pending further testing. It is not expected to be a season-ending injury, but he is expected to miss some time.”

Look at those two paragraphs, complete with actual sourcing. Now, you can think PackersNews is a lousy publication or that Adam Schefter is a shill for the NFL if you want, but at least you have two sources that are in the know cited in relation to this injury.

The rest of the piece continues that way, with references to sources like NFL Network’s Tom Pelissero, The Athletic’s Dianna Russini and PackersNews reporter Tom Silverstein. In each case THOSE people had sources that told them things. Again, you can like or dislike any of those sources, but at least we know who they are, as opposed to “My phone told me” or “The guy in front of me ordering a Sloppy Joe was saying…”

MEDIA-LITERACY MOMENT: One of the most important things to understand about today’s media is that literally ANYONE can participate through various channels that can spread information far and wide. This is great when it allows for a wide array of normally underrepresented voices to put forth information that matters to people. It’s also great when it can shine a light on reality that otherwise would have gone unseen, as was the case with the George Floyd incident.

That said, it can be a terrible thing when people who don’t know anything get information from other people who don’t know anything and keep perpetuating the stupidity of even less-informed people further up the food chain. In the race to be first or to just get a lot of attention, people without a true understanding of how the media SHOULD work use tools they don’t fully grasp to make a mess of reality.

One of the most important things you should do when you get information, even if it’s from a platform use a lot and even if it supports your viewpoint, is to figure out who initiated that content.

In short, always ask, “Where did you get that?” before believing (or sharing) information and you won’t get sucked into a rumor mill or some viral stupidity.

DISCUSSION STARTER: How much faith do you put in any of the information you receive through the various platforms you use? What makes you more or less likely to consider the information valid? Also, what level of certainty to you apply when it comes to information you receive to share it with other people along your social media networks?

 

The trolling of Gus Walz and the history of people picking on political kids

THE LEAD: Gus Walz, the teenage son of Democratic VP candidate Tim Walz, went viral during the DNC last week for his unabashed love of his father. Gus, who has a nonverbal learning disorder as well as anxiety and ADHD, yelled, “That’s my dad,” before he broke down crying during his father’s speech.

It was a sweet, touching moment of humanity that only took about six seconds for people to start ridiculing online:

Mike Crispi, a Trump supporter and podcaster from New Jersey, mocked Walz’s “stupid crying son” on X and added, “You raised your kid to be a puffy beta male. Congrats.”

Alec Lace, a Trump supporter who hosts a podcast about fatherhood, took his own swipe at the teenager: “Get that kid a tampon already,” he wrote, an apparent reference to a Minnesota state law that Walz signed as governor in that required schools to provide free menstrual supplies to students.

 

The professional media operatives also decided to get into the act:

 

Both Coulter and Weber issued apologies of a sort, with Coulter saying she took her post down once someone told her Tim was “austistc” and Weber noting  he “didn’t realize the kid was disabled.”

(SIDE NOTE: It’s unclear exactly how serious to take an apology from anyone who a) doesn’t take the time to spell the apology appropriately, b) takes a shot at a kid and only feels bad when the kid turned out to be “disabled,” or c) uses the term “disabled” rather than learn about the condition the kid he has is mocking.)

A QUICK HISTORY OF RECENT POLITICAL KIDS AND MEDIA: Kids whose parents decide to make a run for the highest office of the land don’t always get the best treatment in the media. I remember a teenage Chelsea Clinton taking a lot of guff in news reports for her “frizzy hair” and “awkwardness.”

The late-night TV crowd got into it as well, with various skits:

An SNL cold opening that featured “Wayne’s World” once took a shot at her that was so bad, NBC edited it out of all the reruns. (Strangely enough, they didn’t edit out the “schwing” the guys gave to the Gore daughters, who ranged in age from 13 to 19 around that time…)

The Bush twins were in their teens when George W. Bush was elected the first time, with Jenna’s “minor in possession” charge becoming fodder for the news reports and tabloids. (SNL mocked the twins as well, but this time had the dignity to wait until Bush was re-elected, putting them in their early 20s.)

Conservative radio host Glenn Beck took potshots at then 11-year-old Malia Obama, as part of a 2010 diatribe about the BP Oil Spill in the gulf,  a move he later apologized for making.

The Obama girls had the misfortune of being in the White House right around the time social media was becoming a thing, so their lives were not just the target of regularly stupid people using traditional media outlets, but also extra stupid ones Facebook and Twitter. In 2014, GOP staffer Elizabeth Lauten resigned after she raked the girls across the coals in a Facebook rant for needing to have “a little class.”

While Donald Trump was in the White House, teenage Barron Trump actually fared fairly well in regard to the media’s mockery machine. Most mainstream outlets considered him to be off limits, and SNL actually suspended Katie Rich for a tasteless Tweet about Barron in 2017.

 

DOCTOR OF PAPER HOT TAKE: I’m not sure what was worse: Picking on Gus Walz for showing human emotions toward his father or basically saying it would have been fine to mock a 17-year-old kid if he hadn’t had a neurodivergent condition. Both are deplorable, but one seems like it should put you at the gates of hell, while the other seems more like a VIP ticket to hell’s champagne room.

The underage children of political folks really have no agency, as they aren’t the ones who decided to run for office and put themselves in the public eye. When they are adults, they can choose to become more or less part of the public discussion.

Tiffany Trump was more in the background of her father’s political efforts while Don Jr., Eric and Ivanka Trump were part of the Trump political machine. Barron, now that he is 18, chose to be political delegate for Florida at the RNC, which does put him out there for public “discussion.” However, I still go back to the fact that he’s 18 and there should be at least a few guardrails people should consider in “discussing” him.

There aren’t too many hard-and-fast rules about who should or shouldn’t be put in the media spotlight and who shouldn’t but let’s consider a few points:

  • AGE: People we consider to be kids (under 18) should usually be off limits to mockery and punditry. Media professionals often take care to really avoid harming kids or generally putting them through the ringer even if they are tangentially related to a media story. The younger they are, the more protected they tend to be.  (We also tend to protect the very old in society for similar reasons. What makes you “very old” is in the eye of the beholder, but it is something we think about.) I tend to broaden the age range for “being a kid” a bit, with the idea that nobody is their best version of themselves between 18 and 22.

 

  • LEGAL ISSUES: Crimes open the door to more things being discussed in the media than do other forms of public participation. Thus, if Political Candidate A’s 17-year-old son skipped a class to play the latest version of Madden, leave the kid alone. If the kid crashed a car while driving drunk, started a public fight at a Starbucks or shot someone, that’s getting covered. The degree of the incident, coupled with the age of the participants operate on a sliding scale of debate among journalists as to what to say about whatever the kid has done.

 

  • COGNITIVE ABILITY AND CULTURAL SOPHISTICATION: Protecting people who are unable to protect themselves is at the core of everything from the SPJ code of ethics to the IRB research dictates. People with cognitive limitations of all varieties should be treated with extreme care when it comes to media coverage. I often extend this to the concept of cultural sophistication as well, given that there’s a huge difference between an 18-year-old kid (yeah, I said kid) who grew up in the spotlight and has been on TV more times than Lester Holt and the 18-year-old kid who grew up in a town of 400 people and never met anyone who wasn’t from that town. How each of those people is able to handle questions from a reporter clearly varies.

 

DISCUSSION STARTER: What do you think about the media coverage of Gus Walz and the other political “kids” in recent memory? What is or isn’t fair? What should or shouldn’t be out of bounds? What experiences have you had in your life makes you set those kinds of standards?

 

Help me help you figure out why students use AI to do their work and what it would take to get them to stop

help me help you | HELP ME, HELP YOU! | image tagged in help me help you | made w/ Imgflip meme maker

If you missed Wednesday’s post, we spent a good amount of time talking about what motivates (or deters) students in their use of generative artificial intelligence when it comes to coursework. You can take a look at the ideas behind the motivational theories and how they apply to this issue, but I know the big question is the simple one:

“What can I, as an instructor, do to make them want to do their own work instead of relying on AI to churn out a word salad of content they send in at the last minute?”

This might be the most Pollyanna answer you get all day, but here we go:

“Let’s ask them.”

And this is where I need your help.

I built a Google doc that has two simple questions on it:

  • What kinds of writing assignments do you (or would you) use programs like ChatGPT to do the work for you? What reasons do you have for using the program instead of doing the work independently? (e.g. “I ran out of time,” “I was bored by the work,” “The work was too hard.”) Please expand on your answer as much as you would like.
  • What would motivate you to NOT use generative AI programs like ChatGPT to do your written work for you? In other words, what makes you more willing or able to do the work independently? (e.g. “It would be cheating.” “I’m afraid of getting punished.” “I like what I’m asked to do.”) Please expand as much on your answer as you would like.

(UPDATE: Based on the request of a colleague, I added one more: In what ways have you used AI to facilitate your independent work? How do you wish teachers would allow AI as the tool it could be?)

It collects no private data, it doesn’t require them to log into Google to do it and I’ll have no idea where any of this came from. It’s simply two short answer questions meant to figure out WHY they do (or don’t do) something so we can look for potential solutions based on the research people have done on things like motivation and task completions.

If you want to help me help you, here’s the link:

https://forms.gle/WH9nzpHNT2XbMX5KA

If you have to (or want to) offer extra credit for this, I put a “code phrase” on the completion page you can ask them to give to you.

I’m going to let this run for a couple weeks and see what we get. If we get responses enough to make some soup out of this, I’ll put together something to share with you all a couple weeks after that.

In the meantime, hang in there and keep the faith. We got your back.

Vince (a.k.a. The Doctor of Paper)

What motivates students to use Generative AI and what would motivate them not to?

(The classic scene from “Back to School” that is both outdated and exactly the problem AI presents to us today.)

As most of us have already begun the semester, are headed toward the start of the semester or are in the process of panicking about the semester, we’re booting up the blog to tackle one of the bigger concerns we all seem to have these days.

THE CORE PROBLEM: As the semester began, I started seeing a lot of posts like this one from a friend and longtime college mass com professor:

I am up at nearly 2 a.m., going back and forth about whether to remove a writing component that I’ve used in almost every course I’ve taught over the last 10 years. It’s usually worth 25 to 30 percent of the course grade.
But it’s a massive waste of time to grade writing assignments that have been completed via generative AI.
The alternative? Reading quizzes, blue book responses, heavier emphasis on creative (group) projects, etc. Writing exercises are an opportunity for students to demonstrate the depth and originality of their thought.
The advent of Generative AI seems to be rendering useless a lot of the writing assignments professors have relied on for eons. As students began relying on AI to write their pieces, professors sought AI-detection tools to sniff out the fake stuff, leading to an escalating arms race between improved AI and improved AI detection.
Two years ago, The Atlantic published an essay titled “The College Essay is Dead,” noting that AI would likely challenge our approach to higher ed in ways we were incapable of understanding and dealing with. Journalism professors who once scoffed at this as being more of a “gen ed” problem are now finding AI-written content popping up in their own classes. It has also made several embarrassing forays into the profession itself, with some media chains using it to replace human writers altogether. With AI expanding rapidly to the point in which recorded lectures can be uploaded and integrated into the AI responses and AI helping you to sound less like AI, it can feel like we’re totally screwed.
MOTIVATION TO USE OR NOT USE: I’ve been studying psychological motivation for almost 25 years now and you can find a ton of reasons why people do or don’t do something. I still consider self-determination theory and its motivational spectrum as my bible for such things, including this situation.
Here are the four general motivational pivot points most of us have for doing (or not doing) something:
  • Extrinsic: We are compelled by an outside force to do or not do something. Think of a stick or a carrot as being the sole reason for completing a task: Your parents gave you $5 to cut the grass. Your parents threatened to ground you if you didn’t clean your room. This is the lowest form of motivation and it leads to the worst outcomes overall. This is where “cheating” or corner-cutting usually occurs. So, you pay your little brother $2 to cut the grass and claim the work as your own to get the $5. You take all the stuff that’s messing up your room and cram it in your closet, instead of taking out the garbage and putting the dirty stuff in the laundry etc.
    • NEWSFLASH: This is where we normally are for dealing with stuff like AI, in that we tell the kids in the class not to do it or else they’ll get a zero, fail the class, get expelled or experience whatever this is.
  • Introjected: We are compelled to do something based on motivation that is not entirely ours, but we do it because we feel we have to. Think of guilt or shame as the reason for doing something and you’ve got a handle on this one. You want to go hang out with your friends, but your parents convince you to visit your aunt instead because “she’s probably going to die soon and it would break her heart not to see you one last time.” You don’t feel strongly toward either presidential candidate, but your favorite teacher tells you about “how many people died for your right to vote,” so you cast a ballot.
    • NEWSFLASH: Guilt is a hell of a motivator and this really does work in a lot of cases, particularly for high-engagement people. However, people who are most likely to cut a corner or cheat are those most immune to this form of motivation. In other words, guilting people into avoiding AI for written assignments will work for students who are on the fence about cutting the corner, particularly if there is a strong affinity for you as a professor. However, the people most likely to cut the corner are going to do it, regardless of how much guilt you lay on them.
  • Internalized: We are compelled to do something because we see a benefit in it. Think about a nursing student taking the NCLEX test: They don’t like the test or all the work it requires, but they see value in becoming a nurse and therefore work really hard to pass it. This is one of the better forms of motivation, as the person is geared toward seeing a reason for doing what they’re doing, even if it’s not what they want to do. In short, they own the motivation and value the outcome.
    • NEWSFLASH: This is really the sweet spot for most educators, as it’s more successful than guilt and less Pollyanna than what we’ll discuss next. The underlying issue here is to tell people WHY they’re doing what they’re doing so they can internalize that motivation.
  • Intrinsic: We are compelled to do something because we really like it. This is why my dad sits at the kitchen table for hours doing word searches and why my wife can knit or needlepoint for days without wanting to stop. They really love it.
    • NEWSFLASH: If you can find a whole classroom full of kids that are intrinsically motivated, take a picture for the rest of us.

SO WHY AI? If what we’ve outlined above is true, and about 60 years of research from people way smarter than me says it is, the key to preventing students from AI-ing their homework and calling it good comes down to a few potential things:

  • The work is too hard, so they rely on outside assistance to get it done.
  • The work is too easy, so they figure they’re not missing something by letting AI do it.
    • (NOTE: The concept of flow by Csikszentmihalyi says people are most likely to enjoy an activity and persist in it when the difficulty is just slightly outside of their normal range of ability. In short, if we can feel just a little bit of stretch, we feel motivated to continue. If not, we are bored or frustrated.)
  • Other activities are preferential to the one we use AI to complete.
  • The work provides no inherent or perceived value. (a.k.a. “busy work.”)
  • Lack of repercussions.
    • (NOTE: Carrots and sticks count here, but so does the “So what?” element. In other words, if the kid doesn’t learn about the intricacies of The Council of Trent, what difference will that make in real life? However, if the nursing student doesn’t learn proper titration of drugs into an IV line, they might kill someone.)
  • Other, unknown things we aren’t thinking about but they are. (I’m always amazed at the things I DON’T know when it comes to my students and their reasoning behind doing or not doing something. This includes everything from having seven roommates and one bathroom to getting a ton of tattooing, despite telling everyone how broke they are. This is a true consequence of being old, I imagine…)

So the question obviously is, what is the best way to go about trying to figure out what to do about AI based on all of this.

In tomorrow’s post, I’ll give this a shot, but I’ll need your help.

Journalism, Journalism Education and Generative AI (Part III: The Human Factor)

Screenshots from "New Girl"

If we could translate this into Latin, I think we’d have a replacement for the journalist’s motto.

Since AI isn’t going away any time soon, journalists and journalism educators are in a bit of a bind when it comes to how best to use it or to help students use it appropriately. This week, we’re doing a three-part series on the blog this week that take that “overhead” view of generative AI from three key angles:

You can click on the links above for either of the first two parts. The final part is below and a lot more complicated: The human factor.

As we’ve noted before, generative AI is a tool. As such, it can be used for good things or bad ones, based on the person using it and why they’re using it. Let’s consider a few aspects of human nature that can help make AI a useful friend or a mortal enemy:

 

WHAT’S MY MOTIVATION?: One of the luckiest breaks I ever caught in life was getting into a psych course on human motivation as part of my doctoral program. It not only hooked me up with Kennon Sheldon, a professor with an incredible history of publishing important psychological studies, but it also helped me to better view how people choose to act or not act based on motivating factors.

One of the aspects of self-determination theory (SDT) we looked at was the spectrum of motivating factors that influence people. As it is a continuum, it has a wide array of motivational forces, but scholars have identified four key “stopping points” along the spectrum that capture specific forms of motivation:

  • Extrinsic: You are motivated by an outside force to do something that you otherwise wouldn’t want to do. An example of this might be when your parents told you to clean your room or you would be grounded for the weekend.
  • Introjected: You are motivated to do something through coercive actions of others, such as guilt or shame. An example of this might be skipping a concert you want to attend so you can visit an elderly relative in a nursing home because your parents told you, “Well, she probably doesn’t have much longer to live and I KNOW how hard it would be for you to live with yourself if you didn’t at least see her a few more times.”
  • Internalized: You are motivated by finding value in the outcome of an activity, even if the activity itself isn’t all that enjoyable. An example of this would be a nursing student studying really hard for the NCLEX test. They don’t like the idea of the test, but are motivated by their desire to become a nurse, which requires them to pass this test.
  • Intrinsic: You are motivated by the natural joy of the activity. This is the purest and best form of motivation. An example of this would be Amy and her approach to knitting. She never seems to care if she finishes a project, but rather she enjoys the act of knitting as well as the joy she gets from trying new patterns, new yarn and new needles.

In looking at this, it’s a pretty safe bet that most of what students do for classes in a lot of cases comes down to extrinsic motivation, as they are required to write essays, do assignments and take tests because someone else is forcing them to do it. (Insert your favorite joke about Gen Ed classes here.)

When forced to do something, people will take the easiest way out possible, which is where generative AI comes in. If the only goal is to “get through” whatever someone is forcing you to do, you’re going to let AI take the wheel and just get it done. This is particularly true for those 800-person pit classes, where students figure they have a pretty good shot of getting away with it.

Helping students find motivation to do things that will benefit them in both the short term (pass this class) and the long term (get a better career) will be enough to move them toward a more self-motivated state.

This leads into the second human issue…

 

THIS MATTERS BECAUSE: We have found that people are more likely to value things if they have an understanding as to why these things are supposedly important. In short, “Why do I have to do this?” A key part of motivational research is what is called autonomy support: If you can give people choices or at least explain why they have to do something and that a choice isn’t possible, they tend to adopt the motivation as their own and do better at it.

When you give them a “Because I’m a PARENT, that’s why!” answer, well, they tend to really hate it and extrinsic motivation rears is ugly head.

I had this discussion/argument with people from our history department. The university was cutting several requirements that were making it difficult for kids to graduate on time and/or with multiple majors/minors/certificates.

One of the “forced classes” was a history one, and I overheard the history folks talking about the situation. One person thought it was a good thing, because maybe the kids would then find history on their own and choose it for a minor. A senior faculty member argued this would be a disaster because, “The kids will NEVER choose us.”

I nosed my way into the conversation and asked to what degree they explained the value of their specific classes to students who were taking them. The senior faculty member was offended: “How could you ask such a thing? Do you think history DOESN’T have value?”

Um… No… but if that’s how you approach your classes, I understand why the kids might feel that way.

The more I kept trying to explain that if you want the students to value something, you have to tell them why they should value it, the more I seemingly upset this man. Apparently, in his way of thinking, history is so damned important and he was such an expert-level vessel for this knowledge that there was no need to provide a rationale for the coursework he put forth. At the end, I left him with this:

“I know that kids can take my class because they want to or because they are forced to. Either way, I make sure to tell everyone what we’re doing, why we’re doing it and what value it has to them in moving forward in their lives. They may still dislike the thing I’m making them do, or they may disagree with my assessment of the situation, but they at least understand the ‘why’ and that tends to make them more willing to do the work than to try to weasel their way out of it.”

Understanding what motivates people to do (or not do) things can help us figure out how to help them use AI without abusing AI. Help them understand why they need to do an assignment, or understand a form of writing or complete a task and they’ll likely find a way to buy into your argument.

If we CAN’T show them a “why” answer, maybe that says more about what we’re doing wrong as educators than what is wrong with “kids today.” Is that 10-page paper really helpful to the kid, or are you just so used to grading them that it would be an inconvenience to you to change? Is the textbook you are using a good one, or do you not want to revamp your whole class and redo all of your lectures, so you stick with what you have? Is the kid really losing out on some major life skill or element of citizenry if they let AI take the wheel on an assignment, or is there a better way to make AI part of the process?

Logic has a lot to say about helping people find value in what they need to do and becoming motivated to do the right thing. Unfortunately, logic isn’t always in driving the bus, which leads to the last element…

 

PEOPLE ARE BASIC:  We can talk about this from a variety of angles, but the long and short of it is that humans are base-level creatures in a lot of ways.

Our minds are geared to be “cognitive misers,” which is why we find ourselves in mental ruts and often relying on stereotypes to make sense of the world around us.

We are social animals, which leads us to social dominance behaviors that tend to have some folks trying to assert their high value over other, “less valuable” individuals within the collective. If you don’t believe me, hang out for three hours in a middle school classroom and get back to me.

We’re also driven by some baser instincts in regard to our physiological needs. Or, to quote Jeff Foxworthy, a lot of people would like to get a beer and see something naked. (Pretty much every technological development related to media in the past 50 years has in some way gotten either a significant start or a major boost due to that base-level drive for naked stuff.)

Generative AI takes these base-level human drives and supercharges them in a way that other forms of technology haven’t. Whether it’s trying to prove dominance, trying to be lazy or trying to a pervert, AI puts it all and more at the fingertips of the worst among us.

AI chatbots have been linked to false claims of harassment by political figures in New York. Why would anyone think to do a prompt for the chatbot that included the term “sexual harassment?” There’s not a good argument in here, other than some idiot saying, “Hey, y’know what would be HILARIOUS? Ruining someone’s life!” (Here’s a link to a trailer for “The Anti-Social Network” that pretty much encapsulates the whole process by which general dumbassery becomes a toxic weapon when added to a digital platform.)

This is why you have stories like this one about a MIDDLE SCHOOL in California, where students were using AI to turn images of their friends into nude pictures. Or like this one about the students at a CATHOLIC HIGH SCHOOL using AI to create naked photos of their peers. Y’know, just like Jesus would have done to Mary Magdalene, if he had the technology…

Even pedophiles are getting in on the act, which is the start of a sentence that never ends well…

As with most things in the world, the worst among us will use AI to do some godawful stuff. I’m not sure we can avoid that, but we do have a need to instill in the other 90% of the world the reasons NOT to be like those folks.

 

DOCTOR OF PAPER HOT TAKE: Every time I think of what AI could be used to do and what it’s ACTUALLY being used for, I go back to this scene from “Idiocracy.”

The issue remaining for journalists and journalism educators is how do we go about making AI the tool in the toolbox it can be while avoiding the perils of a society that is slowly riding a Dumpster fire to hell.

The question we need to answer is this: What kind of coherent argument can we, as journalism instructors, make to the students who are in our class that it is in their overall best interest to do the work we assign them instead of letting a machine do it for them? And, how can we present that argument in a way that they will understand it, agree with it and motivate themselves to abide by it, in the face of the human frailties we’ve discussed earlier?

I don’t have an answer for this, but if you figure it out, please post the answer below.

 

 

Journalism, Journalism Education and Generative AI (Part II: The Perils of Generative AI)

Thinking is hard But you get used to it De motivation, us,demotivation posters,auto

Since AI isn’t going away any time soon, journalists and journalism educators are in a bit of a bind when it comes to how best to use it or to help students use it appropriately. This week, we’re doing a three-part series on the blog this week that take that “overhead” view of generative AI from three key angles:

    • The tools
    • The potential perils
    • The human angle

We covered the tools in Monday’s post, so if you missed it, you can catch it here.

As for today, let’s consider the perils of generative AI:

WE LOSE SELF-SUFFICIENCY: I will never disparage the concept of technological advances. Microwaves have allowed me to feed myself from college up to this morning without burning down my humble abode. Seat warmers have kept my rear end from flash-freezing to those leather-ish seats of the Subaru on most winter mornings in Wisconsin. The implementation of whatever stretchy stuff they’re making blue jeans out of these days has allowed me to keep fooling myself that my size hasn’t changed over the past five years.

Even as a journalist, I’m grateful that recorders have allowed me to significantly reduce the scrawl and shorthand I used to use while interviewing folks. Google has made it exponentially easier to ease my paranoia when I write something and then think, “Wait… are you SURE that’s right?” Even better still, I am entirely grateful that I no longer have to hold a piece of correction paper in between my teeth while banging out a story on an IBM Selectric typewriter, as I did back in high school.

The problem is that when we become overly reliant on technology, we are at the mercy of its functionality and lack the ability to cope when it fails. I’m not even talking about that “everything will cease to exist” failure. I’m talking about basic stuff that used to be common sense until computers just did the work for us.

(The analogy I immediately think of is my dad paying at a fast-food restaurant with cash. The kid punches in the total and it’s like $11.28. Then, Dad will say, “OK, here, let me give you three pennies to make it easier” after the kid assumes Dad’s just giving him a $20. Watching this kid try to do the math in his head because of those three frickin’ pennies is enough to make you weep for the future of humanity.)

Back when I was in doctoral school, the stats professor I had for my analysis of variance class made us do all the statistical calculations for an ANOVA by hand. This took forever and a day and ate up about 10 pages of notebook paper for each one. When we bitterly complained that we’d be using a computer to do this in a fraction of the time, he’d tell us, “Yes, but if you don’t know how to do each step, you’ll never know why it works the way it does. You’ll also never know if the computer is right or not.” As annoying as it was, I can still just look at an ANOVA result and figure out if I punched something in wrong, thanks to Dr. Osterlind.

There has always been an effort-free default option for everything, even back when you were learning to tie your shoes. If mom or dad was in a hurry, they’d say, “Here. Let me do that.” OK, fine, but if they never let you learn how to do it for yourself, you’d be totally screwed at this point. (Or into cowboy boots, shower shoes and a lot of velcro.) Some level of self-sufficiency has to be built into the process.

 

WE DON’T KNOW WHAT’S IN THE AI “BOX:” One of the biggest complaints I get about my intro to writing class, other than I keep having it at 8 a.m., is that I make the students buy the print edition of the AP Stylebook and read the whole thing. Random assignments and quizzes are part of the check-in approach I take to seeing how well this is working.

Students find out that for about the same amount of money, they can buy a digital version that provides them with a search-engine function, so they want that one instead. I tell them, “Once you move into the upper-level classes, that’s an option. Until then, you’re reading the damned book in print.”

My rationale is pretty basic: If you don’t know what you’re looking for and you don’t know if it’s in there, you’re at a disadvantage when it comes to finding it. Thus, if you read the book, you get a handle on the things that AP gets all hot and bothered about and thus you are making mental notes about the kinds of things you should look up. At that point, a search function is your friend, not a game of “Wheel of Fortune.”

Generative AI is pretty much the same thing: If you don’t know what’s in the “box,” you have no idea what to expect will come out of it.

Here’s an example of what I’m talking about. I entered a simple prompt that I figured a student in an entry-level civics class might toss in to avoid writing a short, basic essay:

“Write 200 words on how to deter criminal behavior”
Here is what ChatGPT came up with:

Deterring criminal behavior involves a multi-faceted approach that addresses the root causes of crime, enforces strong laws, and promotes a sense of community responsibility. Here are some key strategies to achieve this:

  1. Education and Awareness: By investing in education and awareness programs, communities can help individuals make informed decisions, reducing the appeal of criminal activities. Teaching ethical values and social responsibility from a young age can create a culture where crime is less likely to occur.
  2. Economic Opportunities: High unemployment and poverty are strongly correlated with crime rates. Providing meaningful employment opportunities and vocational training can reduce the incentive for individuals to engage in criminal activities.
  3. Strong Law Enforcement: A robust and fair law enforcement system is crucial. Visible policing, quick response to criminal activities, and the consistent application of justice can act as a deterrent to would-be offenders.
  4. Community Engagement: Encouraging community involvement in safety and crime prevention fosters a sense of ownership and shared responsibility. Neighborhood watch programs, for example, can help deter crime by creating a community that looks out for each other.
  5. Rehabilitation and Support: Implementing effective rehabilitation programs for offenders reduces recidivism. Offering support services like counseling, education, and job placement helps former offenders reintegrate into society, lowering the chances of repeat offenses.

By combining these strategies, communities can effectively deter criminal behavior and create a safer environment for everyone.

I have no idea where this all came from or why it went this way in terms of answering the question. I don’t know from which sources of information it drew its inspiration or how it decided to approach the topic in this fashion. I also have no idea if there are better or worse answers in there.
If all I know is that I wanted an answer to turn in for an assignment, all I know is that ChatGPT provided me with this answer.
As someone who has looked at various resources and looked into this topic before, I find it interesting that when prompted in this nature, chatbot made a couple key choices:

This leads to another primary concern associated with generative AI…

 

BIAS IN, BIAS OUT: The way AI platforms are trained is by exposing them to tons of content from a vast array of sources in which it kind of picks out a “prototype” of each element it can ascertain from what it has “seen.” The problem with that is the more mainstream content is likely to dominate while the less mainstream content is likely to get shoved aside.

In addition, just because something is shown or written about in a certain way, it doesn’t necessarily follow that it should be a representation of a larger thing. This is how stereotypes are built and reinforced. Consider the following image creations based on several prompts:

A server at a restaurant:

A criminal in court:

 

A basketball player passing a ball:

 

A boss of a company at a podium:

(In the future, you will all be ruled by this one white dude. To be fair, the iStock paid generator did slightly better, but not great.)

 

I tried these prompts with multiple AI generators and these were pretty much the standard fare. Notice we’ve got all fit and relatively attractive looking people in here. The servers are all young and female. The criminals aren’t white, and neither are the basketball players. (To say nothing of the fact only one of them is passing and one of them has two basketballs for some reason.) Bosses are predominantly male and in at least in one set of responses all white and young.

Authors T.J. Thomson and Ryan J. Thomas at The Conversation found similar problems in an assessment of AI, noting that the image generators demonstrated biases from racism and sexism to ageism and classism. As more and more people continue to generate content, this kind of things is only going to continue to build on itself until we’ve got a really stereotypical and myopic view of a lot of how society looks.

 

DIMINISHED CRITICAL THINKING: Most of what journalism requires of us is to be nosy and to dig into topics that are of interest to us and our audience. When we’re doing our work, if something goes wrong, or a source messes us over or we encounter a strange plot twist, we figure out how to improvise, adapt and overcome. In a broader parlance, the whole driving force behind this job is critical thinking and problem solving.

The risk of relying on AI for too much is that we can cognitively atrophy and find ourselves in a journalistic rut. This already happens in some cases, as I’ve seen with stories written about my own institution. When we decided to do a reorganization, the university announced which plan was going to be favored and the local paper did a piece on the topic. The entire thing was basically direct lifts from the press release statement and several other response statements issued about the topic. No deeper examination, no interviews with the stakeholders and no other content than what was provided.

I’ve also seen it where people decide that rather than look for sources to react to important topics, they’ll scan social media and do screenshots of some of the loudest voices out there. It’s like, “Don’t strain yourself reaching beyond your keyboard, buddy. Let’s not try to do some actual work here…”

Students already tell me things like, “I can’t get a quote in here from (NAME) because they didn’t email me back!” To which I follow up with a few basic concepts like emailing again, picking up the phone and calling the person or even going to someone’s office and talking to them. This isn’t Woodward and Bernstein sorting through library punch cards or something. This is “Can-You-Fog-A-Mirror-level” journalism stuff. If I had a dime for every “You mean I should call them… on the phone?” response I got, I wouldn’t need this job.

If the AI tools can help aid in your critical thinking by challenging you to think about things differently, or to consider options outside of your personal experiences, that’s great. If they tell you to stop thinking for yourself, that’s a bad sign.

 

DOCTOR OF PAPER HOT TAKE:  As much as I’m worried about kids getting lazy, that’s nothing new, really. When students figured out that the Encyclopedia Britannica could do a better job of explaining what an iguana is, they copied it straight out of the book. When students realized the kid next to them studied harder for the exam than they did, they “dropped their pencil” a few times and took their time leaning over to pick it up. When students realized they could punch search terms into a computer and get an answer better than the one they came up with, they found the copy and paste keys. Generative AI is just the next stage of this process and we’ll all eventually catch on and catch up.

What really bothers me about AI is when it basically becomes a black box.

I don’t have to fully understand how everything I use on a daily basis works, but I do feel better when I have a general grasp of a situation. For example, I might not be able to fix the pump on our well, but when I see smoke coming out of it and we have no water in the house, I can surmise what’s going on and call a plumber. If the plumber comes out and can tell me what happened, I can pretty much follow along. I’m fine with that.

What I’m not fine with is “heavy mystery time” in which we have no idea what a major piece of our lives is doing and people have an increasingly difficult time explaining it to even other people who work in that field. The reason is that it’s hard to trust things that can’t be explained, and even more, it’s hard to believe they will benefit people other than their creators.

I go back to this clip from “The Smartest Guys in the Room,” which chronicles the rise and death spiral of Enron. Financial expert Jim Chanos didn’t buy the bull that Enron was putting out and when he asked the analysts to explain how Enron was making its money in a clear and coherent fashion, he got the “black box” speech:

In other words, trust us… It’s fine… Until it’s not.

NEXT TIME: Why can’t we have nice AI things? Because people are… well… human.