Participants will:
- Understand how newspapers and articles convey emotions as well as facts
- Learn how facts are presented to evoke emotion
Participants will develop:
- Critical thinking skills
- Media literacy skills
Before you start
- Source some newspapers and cut out articles that are age-appropriate to your group and simple enough for them to understand. You will need at least one article per pair
- You will also need a pen per person, in at least 2 different colours
Materials
Newspaper cuttings, different coloured pens/highlighters.
What to do
Divide the group into pairs, giving each pair two different coloured pens and one or more newspaper cuttings.
Ask each pair to mark all the facts in the article in one colour (using the same colour each time) and all the opinions in another colour.
Put all the sheets on the wall and discuss the young people’s findings using the below prompts:
- Do articles display more fact or opinion?
- Is it always easy to distinguish fact from opinion?
- To what extent do the opinions shape readers’ feelings?
- Do the young people feel that stirring readers’ emotions is justified?
- Does the analysis that they have carried out make them feel any differently about the story?
- What responsibilities do the participants feel the media has to present unbiased reports?
- Why do we expect newspapers to give us “facts”?
Draw up a list of all the emotive words that are used in the articles. Are some words repeatedly linked to particular groups or individuals? What do the Pioneers think the effects of this would be?
Print out some examples of fake news articles. Ask the group to look through these articles and compare them to the real articles.
- How do these articles differ from the real news articles?
- Are there more ‘facts’ or more opinions?
- What markers are there that these aren’t true?
- What are these trying to make you think/feel?
- How easy is it to tell the difference between real or fake articles?
- How would you fact-check these?
Here are some links to places to find fake news:
- BBC fake news – these are more focused on breaking down fake news
- Fighting fake news – this website examines the history of fake news, as well as some notable examples