unSpun: Finding Facts in a World of Disinformation

By Peggy Garvin, Garvin Information Consulting

"Unspinning the spinmeisters" was the focus of a session coordinated jointly between the SLA Government Information Division and the News Division. Brooks Jackson, an SLA-designated "Spotlight Speaker," spoke about the work of his team at the political fact-checking site FactCheck.org. Jackson and co-author Kathleen Hall Jamieson have summarized many of their lessons learned in the book unSpun: Finding Facts in a World of Disinformation. Jackson noted that unSpun originally was going to be about disinformation in the 2004 Presidential election. The authors quickly learned that after that election and its endless associated reportage and commentary, nobody wanted to read or hear another word about it. So, instead, the book became a more general handbook on disinformation—how to uncover it and debunk it—based on the FactCheck.org experience. The book, along with FactCheck.org and its companion FactCheckED.org site, may be particularly useful to the information literacy instructors in our ranks.

Photo by Liz Doyle, U.S. EPA Region 10 Library

Jackson started his discussion with examples of outrageous commercial claims, such as the unending variety of promises for weight loss drugs, but rapidly moved on to political communications. He gave the audience numerous examples of disinformation from the American political right and left. He explained that while national regulation of commercial disinformation is present but ineffective, national regulation of political disinformation does not exist at all. Political speech has long been protected under the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

In defining disinformation, Jackson says he it doesn’t really matter what type of lie it is if it can support a wrong decision or action. He also asserted that a falsehood is not made any more right by the claim that the speaker truly believes it. Jackson enumerated guidelines for fact-checking, including:

•  Look for agreement among experts. This goes beyond finding agreement in the "echo chamber" of Washington.

•  Check primary sources; for example, look at the full transcript of a talk when all you get is a partial quote.

•  Know who is talking. On websites, read the About Us section and verify it. If there is no information about the source, do not use it.

•  Cross-check everything. Get a second source!

Jackson is the director of Annenberg Political FactCheck, sponsored by the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania. Their website, FactCheck.org, is a nonpartisan effort to monitor the factual accuracy of statements by political candidates and others. The session was moderated by Anne Caputo, DGI member and 2008 SLA Fellow. The session was generously sponsored by Dow Jones & Company and by Thomson Reuters.