Examining the Media

an interview with Amanda Ruggeri

Hi! Tell us about yourself, your background, and your work.

I've been a journalist for more than 20 years. These days, I mostly cover science, psychology, health and critical thinking, most often as related to children and families. No matter the topic, I am always especially interested in getting into all of the nuances and complexities of topics (especially the controversial ones!).

I'm also the columnist behind BBC.com's "How Not To Be Manipulated", which offers smart, thoughtful ways to navigate misinformation, online and off. I write regularly for BBC.com, where I was formerly the editor of the global science section, as well as for New Scientist, Scientific American and more.

I'm American by birth but have lived in the UK, Italy and now Switzerland, and over the course of my career have reported stories from everywhere from Guatemala to Tajikistan to China, so I always like to bring a cross-cultural perspective to my work too.

How can we determine which news sources are trustworthy?

There's a general rubric I like to follow. Basically, it's a five-step system that the folks at the News Literacy Project came up with.

First, you have to figure out what other (credible) sources say about the outlet or news source — you need to get off-platform to do this and check out sources like fact-checking websites.

If the source seems to check out, second, you find out what their editorial standards are. Any credible media organization will have these and they should be easily discoverable somewhere on their website. If they don't have them, that's a red flag.

Third, find out who funds and creates the content — again, at any legit outlet, this should be transparently stated somewhere on the website. There also shouldn't just be transparency around who funds the whole organization, but around which articles are sponsored and which aren't. If this isn't obvious, that's a problem.

Fourth, look at how they handle errors. Seeing a "correction" appended to an article, for example, isn't a bad thing — everyone makes mistakes, and it's way more of a red flag when these aren't transparently corrected.

Fifth, ask yourself about the quality of the coverage in general. For example, is the language inflammatory? Are headlines click-baity? Is the journalism original, or just parroting content from other sources? Is it clear when something is opinion, vs fact-based? And how does the coverage of a particular topic compare to that on other, legitimate sites?

None of this is a guarantee of trustworthiness, but if a source fails to meet these standards, it's for sure a sign you SHOULDN'T trust that source.

How has the rise of influencers and independent content creators changed the traditional role of journalism?

Obviously, it's created even more competition for people's attention — many of us are getting more and more of our news and information from social media and that means less from journalists at mainstream media outlets.

It's also exacerbating a crisis of misinformation, with so many false claims flying around online. That's given those of us who are trained in sorting out fact from fiction a lot more work to do, but at the same time, potentially less eyeballs on us doing it. Which is why I pivoted my IG account to being more journalistic and less personal a couple of years back — now it's a place where I both write about my stories, and the research behind them, but also try to myth-bust and counteract some of this misinformation.

I really wish more journalists (and scientists, and academics) did this, because I think it's such an important part of reaching audiences with actual factual information today, but I also get why they won't, as it's so time-consuming, you don't get paid (at least I don't) and it can often feel pretty thankless.

Why has trust in the mainstream media eroded in recent years?

In a lot of ways this decline is mirroring the decline in trust we're seeing in public institutions in general. More and more folks just aren't trusting the "old guards" of authority and expertise.

I understand why, on the one hand, because there have been some well publicized examples of these institutions not performing the way we'd like, or even in rare cases, according to their own ethical standards and guidelines.

But then I think, so why are people flocking to information sources like influencers on social media, who almost always have zero ethical standards or guidelines or fact-checking that they have to adhere to, and quite often some serious conflicts of interest?

Surely it's better to try to encourage reform of the institutions that actually have some kind of ethical code or commitment to accuracy to begin with.

How has the drive for clicks and views affected news reporting?

It depends on where you are and your financial model. I spent most of my career as a staff journalist and editor at BBC.com. Of course, reaching bigger audiences was always one of our main goals, but it also wasn't one that we had to 100% live and die by, because the main financial model wasn't, say, advertisers paying per view on their ad, or even subscribers. So that gave us a bit more freedom to take a risk on a story that we thought was a great story that deserved to be told, even if it didn't reach as big of an audience as something else might.

Obviously, for other places that's different, and I think that's had the effect of more of these click-baity or even very superficial stories that seem to dominate so much of the internet.

Does the ownership of big media companies affect the kind of news we see?

It can, and I think it's getting worse.

Ideally, in countries like the US, there's been a sharp division between the owner (and even business side) of an outlet and the editorial side. That's a main tenet of basic journalistic ethics — that the advertising/business/financial interests don't affect what's being reported or how

But we're seeing some pretty clear examples at institutions that were once real bastions of that kind of journalistic integrity of that 'wall' being broken down. It's incredibly worrisome.

Private business interests have such an outsized influence on so much else in our lives and society — we should all be deeply concerned if they're also gaining more control over what information we have access to, not just on social media platforms but even from independent media organizations.

Many people say that misinformation travels faster than information. Is this true?

According to the research, yes.

One oft-cited study found that false claims traveled 6x faster on Twitter than true ones. That study was done in 2018, but more recent research has come to similar findings.

One 2023 study, for example, similarly found that false claims went viral more often than real ones. This might be tied to other characteristics of false claims: the researchers also found that statements that were simple and that were novel (i.e., new to the person reading them) were also more likely to be retweeted

Anecdotally, this tracks with a lot of what I see online, which is that the videos that make claims and amass millions of views and likes the fastest are often the ones with either misleading or inaccurate claims.

Any final advice would you give to readers who want to become more discerning and informed consumers of news?

Be aware not just of how to vet an outlet or story and its biases, but your own. It's much easier for us to fall for false or misleading claims that we agree with. We've all done it. Learning about critical thinking strategies is a huge help. Love Critikid for this!

Connect with Amanda Ruggeri

To learn more from Amanda Ruggeri, you can visit her website or Linktree, or follow her on Instagram, TikTok, Threads, or Bluesky.

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Critikid is building a mock social media feed to give kids a chance to practice spotting misinformation, clickbait, and logical fallacies in a safe and controlled environment before they face the real thing. Learn more.

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