This article is more than 5 years old.

Announcing the ZSR Library guide to “Fake News!” You’ve probably heard the term a lot since the 2016 general election. It might be coming up in your classes. If you’re wondering what it means or what you’re even supposed to do about it, this guide is for you!

We want this guide to be a starting point in the conversation as you think about this issue or study it in your classes. We’ve collected a lot of videos, articles, podcasts, and all kinds of other resources that talk about fake news from many different angles. Not only that, we’ve included some helpful tools and websites that make it easier to gather your news from sources you can trust and critically examine claims you’re unsure about.

For instructors, we’ve also included a number of resources that point to lesson plans and assignments on news literacy. Finally, the guide includes a lot of good ways to start researching the issue, for those of you who want to go more in depth. If you have been considering incorporating the idea of “fake news” into a paper or project, this guide will be your best friend.

It’s important to remember that “fake news” is a term that doesn’t have a very clear definition in the way it’s commonly used. For years, it just referred to news satire like “The Onion” or “The Colbert Report.” So with its recent popularity, we wanted our guide to provide a clearer picture of what we mean by fake news and of the many other ways that news information may be unreliable.

Because of that, we make a point of centering our discussion of fake news on the idea of “news literacy,” the ability to read news information critically and intelligently. News literacy is an issue that affects everyone, not just one side of a political debate. It also applies to everything from outright hoaxes to questionable content in an otherwise reliable source.

So whatever your perspective is, and whatever your news gathering habits are, we think that our guide to fake news is going to be a big help!