How to critically consume news media

Your instructor

Presented by former journalist Tanysha Bolger, this course will teach you three strategies you can use to critically consume media in your everyday life. Now more than ever we need to be conscious of the news we read, watch and listen to. She has a Bachelor of Journalism, Masters of Teaching and is currently studying a Masters of Public Policy. She has worked for Fairfax Media (in Australia) and is the founder and editor of Ezra Magazine based in Australia.

The course

Using these strategies you will be able to conduct your own fact-checking mission to investigate whether the information you are accessing is reliable, accurate, and trustworthy. These three simple, easy, and effective strategies will become a part of your news reading habits to help build your critical thinking and reading skills.

Our critical examination of news will incorporate:

1. Examining previous news stories

2. Going upstream

3. Reading laterally

Hands-on activities

Using lectures, this course will examine the strategies in-detail but will provide you with opportunities to put your skills to use. Through two hands-on and practical activities, you will begin to employ the strategies taught and fact-check news websites. At the end of the course, you'll see how I fact-check news stories that I see on my newsfeed every day and show you just how quick and easy it is to verify something you see on the internet.

Course references

This course would not have been possible without the book: Web-Literacy for Student Fact-Checkers published by Mike Caulfield in 2017. This resource is an open-source textbook and is licenced under Creative Commons CC Attribution.