25 topics
Media literacy, worked through on real examples
The checklist most students are handed — look at the domain, find an About page, see whether the site looks professional — is close to the opposite of what professional fact-checkers do. Researchers who evaluate sources for a living leave the page within seconds and search for what other people say about it. That move has a name, lateral reading, and it separates a reader who can be fooled by a well-designed site from one who cannot.
Where students get stuck
How am I supposed to tell whether a website is trustworthy?
Not by staying on it. A site controls everything you can see while you are there — its design, its About page, its claims about its own independence — so reading it harder tells you almost nothing. Open new tabs instead and find out what independent sources say about the organisation: who runs it, who funds it, whether it has been written about. Two facts help here. A .org domain is not a credential; anyone can register one for a few dollars. And a slick, expensive-looking site is evidence of a budget, which advocacy campaigns have and small newsrooms often do not.
Isn’t everything biased anyway, so why bother checking?
Bias and unreliability are different things, and collapsing them into one is how people end up trusting nothing, which is exactly as useless as trusting everything. An outlet with a clear political position can still report accurately, because accuracy is about whether the facts hold up and bias is about which facts get chosen and how they are worded. So separate the two questions. Is this claim sourced and does the source say what the article says it says? Then, separately: what has been left out, and which words are doing persuasive work — a group that is described as demanding rather than asking has been characterised, not just reported.
The headline says one thing and the actual study says another
There is a predictable chain: study, university press release, wire story, aggregator, headline — and the claim gets stronger at every hop. Three specific distortions cause most of it. Correlation is reported as cause, when the study only found that two things occur together. Relative risk is used instead of absolute, so a rise from two in ten thousand to four in ten thousand becomes doubles your risk, which is true and useless. And sample size disappears, so a trial of nineteen people reads like settled fact. Click through to the study itself and read the abstract, which is usually far more cautious than the headline written about it.
I can’t tell an advertisement from an article any more
That is by design. Sponsored content, sometimes labelled native advertising, is written to match the newspaper’s house style and sits in the same feed. The disclosure is legally required but is usually set in small grey type above the headline — sponsored, presented by, partner content, promoted — so look there first. Other things to notice: affiliate links in review articles, which pay the publisher when you buy; the grid of lurid recommendations at the bottom of a page, which is bought advertising rather than the newsroom’s picks; and creators who bury an ad disclosure at the end of a caption instead of the start.
How do I check whether a photo or video is real?
Start with reverse image search, because the most common manipulation is not editing at all — it is a genuine old photograph relabelled as a new event. If the same image appears in coverage from three years ago, you are done. Then look for cropping, which removes context without altering a single pixel, and check whether other outlets have the same footage from a different angle. On AI-generated media, the honest position is that hunting for hands and warped text is already unreliable and will only get worse. Provenance beats forensics: ask where the file came from and who first posted it, rather than staring at the image.
What's covered
Media Literacy topics you can work through with a tutor, generate practice on, or turn into flashcards and a study plan.
Evaluating sources
- Lateral reading technique
- Ownership and funding checks
- Original reporting versus aggregation
- Corrections policies and accountability
- Fact-checking organisations
Bias and framing
- Loaded and euphemistic language
- Selection and omission
- Headline versus body content
- News, analysis and opinion
- False balance
Numbers and evidence
- Correlation and causation
- Sample size and margin of error
- Relative versus absolute risk
- Misleading graphs and truncated axes
- Reading polls and surveys
Advertising and algorithms
- Sponsored and native content
- Influencer disclosure rules
- Targeted advertising and data collection
- Recommendation feeds and engagement incentives
- Filter bubbles and echo chambers
Images, video and AI
- Reverse image search
- Decontextualised and recycled photos
- Synthetic media and deepfakes
- Provenance and metadata
- Satire mistaken for news
Media Literacy questions
Is CANtutor AI itself a reliable source?
Not one you should cite, no. It is a language model and it can state something confidently that is wrong, including a date, a number, or a source that does not exist. In a subject about verifying claims that is worth saying plainly. Use it to learn the checking process and to work through examples with you, then verify anything factual against the original source before it goes in an assignment.
Will it tell me which news outlets are biased?
It will not hand you a ranked list, partly because those charts disagree with each other and partly because memorising one would defeat the point of the course. What it will do is work through a specific article with you: where the sourcing is, which words are doing persuasive work, what a different outlet said about the same event. The skill you want is one you can apply to an outlet nobody has rated yet.
How is media literacy actually assessed?
Usually as written analysis of a text you are given — an advertisement, a news article, a social post — against criteria about audience, purpose, technique and effect. That is a rubric task, so bring the rubric and the piece you are analysing. Share your screen or hold the sheet up to the camera, and you can go through where an analysis is describing the text rather than explaining how it works on a reader.
My family shares things I think are false. What do I actually do?
Arguing the facts head-on tends to entrench people, which is well documented and frustrating. Asking where something came from usually goes better than announcing it is fake, because it invites checking rather than a defence. Pick the claims that matter and let the small ones go. This is a real limit of the subject and it is worth being honest that a technique for evaluating sources is not the same as a technique for changing minds.
Stuck on media literacy right now?
Talk it through out loud, share your screen, and watch it worked out step by step on a whiteboard.
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