Pop quiz:

Is the following sentence grammatically correct?

The media is covering the election daily.

Answer: No. The sentence is not correct. The word media is plural. Is is singular. Therefore, the sentence lacks subject/verb agreement. So the corrected sentence should read like this:

The media are covering the election daily.

If the correct version sounds strange to you, it’s because you’ve heard it used incorrectly more often than not. When people refer to “the media,” they’re referring to lots of individual, independent organizations that cover elections — and thousands of other subjects.

Here are two takeaways from this:

1. If something wrong is repeated often enough, people sometimes start to think it’s right. (More on this later.)
2. The media are not a monolith.

Rather than being monolithic, the media *are* made up of many parts, including:

• Local newspapers and news websites.
• National newspapers and websites, all independent of each other.
• Sports television and websites.
• TV news networks (cable, like CNN, and broadcast, like ABC).
• Local TV affiliate stations that produce evening news, sports and weather.
• National magazines.
• International news companies.

You get the idea. These organizations don’t work together. They don’t ask each other what to report. There’s not one person in charge of all of them. Instead, each one has many people who make decisions about what to cover.

In the most practical terms, that means when people talk about “the media” doing something, writing something or reporting something, those people are making a mistake. “The media” doesn’t do anything.

Instead, a newspaper covers an election. A TV station covers a crime. A magazine writes about college admissions.

In some cases, more than one media outlet covers the same thing. ESPN, The Athletic and MLB.com all cover the New York Mets, for example. Why do they all cover the same thing? Because they want to attract that audience. They all send separate reporters to Citi Field in Queens, New York, when there are games. Each reporter covers the Mets independently of the other.

On one Saturday during baseball season, MLB.com’s Mets beat reporter filed this story:

Mets should be even more aggressive
at stealing bases

In The Athletic:

Did the Mets just complete their worst month
in franchise history?

On ESPN’s website:

It’s Bobby Bonilla Day! Here’s why the former Met
gets paid $1.19 million today and every July 1

This gives Mets fans several options. Reading all three gives Mets fans a variety of perspectives.

Media outlets cover elections in the same way, as our example sentence stated. Local TV stations cover local elections. State newspapers and TV stations cover state elections. National news media cover presidential elections.

The more we read about those elections, the more knowledgeable we can become. So, don’t fall for the canard that members of the media all get up in the morning and decide together what they will and won’t cover that day.

Individual reporters, writers and editors at publications of all kinds make daily decisions about what they’ll cover. They are all trying in their own ways to inform us so we can make our own decisions about:

• Who to vote for.
• Where to eat.
• How to apply to colleges.
• Whether or not it’s worth it to be a Mets fan.

Misinformation and disinformation

Of course, there is misinformation out there. Misinformation can include honest mistakes, exaggerations, and reporter misunderstandings of facts, according to The Associated Press stylebook. These do happen, but not on purpose.

Purposeful misinformation is called disinformation, which the stylebook says is “spread intentionally as a way to mislead or confuse.” You might have heard this called “fake news.”

It looks like this:

An urgent-sounding headline popped up in many people’s social media feeds in the run-up to the 2016 presidential election:

FBI agent suspected in Hillary email leaks found dead

The story beyond the headline said an FBI agent died alongside his wife in “an apparent murder-suicide.” Their house burned as well, the story alleged. Details included names, dates, ages and locations. The report connected all of it to Hillary Clinton, who was the Democratic nominee in the race for president vs. Donald Trump.

In many cases, reactions piled up on social media as well:

“Wow!”

“And the bodies keep piling up.”

“Hmmmmm.”

Finally, a brave observer on one Facebook feed assessed the information and made an important point.

“This newspaper does not exist.”

The commenter was correct. The Denver Guardian was the name displayed as the source of the post. The fire story was one of the biggest pre-election “fake news” posts — among many that month. A legitimate news source with a similar-sounding name, The Denver Post, also thought something was fishy about the fire story. Post reporters did a little digging, and here’s what they found:

The domain denverguardian.com was first registered in July 2016 (four months before the pending election) and was hosted by GoDaddy.

There was no such place as Walkerville, Md. There is a Walkersville, Md., but that town does not have a police department, making the quote from “Walkerville Police Chief Pat Frederick” null and void.

The image used to illustrate the story was taken by Flickr user Adam Belles in 2010 of his neighbor’s house on fire.

The address listed for the Denver Guardian newsroom was a tree in a parking lot (now a commercial building) next to a vacant bank building.When National Public Radio looked into the Denver Guardian, it found the following:

• The site was owned by Jestin Coler, founder and CEO of a company called Disinfomedia, which owned many sites that peddled disinformation.
• Coler wouldn’t tell NPR how many sites he owned. But he said his disinformation business was one of the biggest.

Not surprisingly, then, there were other stories that purposefully existed to disinform readers. This headline, for example, drew clicks on yet another hoax news website:

Pope endorses Trump

He didn’t. But disinformation like this was seen by — and maybe influenced the votes of — millions of people, according to data compiled by Buzzfeed (a legitimate news website). The few who called attention to fake posts were often drowned out by the thousands who didn’t notice or care. The whistleblowers were spitting into a fierce wind that had seemingly come out of nowhere.

The Urgent Need for Media Literacy

After the Clinton vs. Trump election, both Facebook and Google told reporters they would work to minimize disinformation on their platforms. Yet, disinformation is still with us, every click influencing votes, confusing readers and generating revenue thanks to gullible or distracted viewers. How can internet users avoid being the next ones taken in by false and misleading information?

It boils down to a concept called news, or media, literacy. Media literacy is THE literacy of the 21st century, according to an urgent report by the grassroots nonprofit Media Literacy Now. This kind of literacy requires people to develop a deeper understanding of what is and isn’t news, and more broadly, what is and isn’t true. Discernment is key to media literacy because disinformation is everywhere, and there’s no making it go away.

That means, journalists and citizens must educate themselves. For readers, it means taking a few extra steps before deciding what’s true and what’s not. For journalists, it involves practicing the craft in a way that helps audiences do this. It’s critical to the success of democracy. Bald acceptance of everything means citizens will continue to be fooled by hoaxes. The fear that everything is fake leaves audiences with nothing to hold as true.

Media literacy is something in between. And while that’s not as easy as it once was, it can be achieved.

What Is and Isn’t News? Consider the Source

Here’s how. First, take a close look at the source of information before clicking on, listening to or reading it. If it’s on social media, that might take an extra step. For example, the news item might be posted by your friend from high school, but he or she didn’t create it.

Who did, then? It could be a news source. If so, you should be able to trust it. But it could be another organization. Such as

• A political party.
• A lobbyist.
• A corporation.

If so, there’s another set of questions you’ll need to consider, including, what’s in it for the source?

• To win an election?
• To sell a product?
• To sway public opinion?
• To obtain data?

That’s what nonnews organizations do. So, you can factor that into your response to what those kinds of organizations publish. In other words, be skeptical. Check those things off your list of sources that are not presenting facts. These posts might be informative. They may give you data that helps you feel a certain way or act in a certain way. But they aren’t news.

If that’s what news is NOT, then everything else is more likely to be a news source. And information from other sources should be safe to read, believe and maybe forward to others, right?

Well, maybe. There are a lot of sites, stations and publications out there with news content. Some are internationally famous, like The Washington Post or the BBC. Others are locally famous, like the Rio Grande Sun or WRAL. Some cover sports only. Some aggregate stories from other publications. Some cover the world. Some cover one county. Some, like the Denver Guardian, you would have never heard of. Are all of these news organizations?

No. The fact that you’ve never heard of the Denver Guardian should prompt you to at least ask questions. That’s what The Denver Post’s reporters did. Of course, that kind of probe took time and effort that most of us can’t or won’t undertake before reading, commenting or, worst of all, forwarding. But there are things we as news consumers can do that don’t involve tasks as complex as looking up domain registrations. The Denver Post did these things, too. Post reporters found:

• Half of the modules on the Denver Guardian site itself were unfinished.
• The site looked suspiciously like “The Baltimore Gazette,” another “fake news” site that The Baltimore City Paper (legit) called out in September 2016, for sharing a false news story about police violence and breastfeeding.
• The Guardian referenced a local TV news station, WHAG-TV, whose website had no coverage of a murder-suicide house fire of any kind.
• The fire story was the only story that showed up under the Guardian’s “News” section; all other sections turned up “page not found” error messages.

Did any of these show up on your list?

• Fox News
• The New York Times
• Your local CBS affiliate
• Your local newspaper/news website
• The Wall Street Journal
• NPR
• MSNBC
• CNN

Which ones on this list talk to sources to get facts and opinions then produce stories based on those facts and opinions? Answer: All of them.

So, it’s that simple, right?

Still no. There are a number of other factors that help us evaluate the newsworthiness of something we’ve read

• Is the story news or an opinion piece?
• Does the source provide a range of opinions? Or does it only promote one side or another?
• What else is on the source’s website?
• Does the information exist anywhere other than social media?