ONE An Introduction to Information Literacy and Libraries in the Age of Fake News Denise E. Agosto When it comes to libraries and issues of information accuracy and authenticity, it’s all about education. Libraries of all types— public, corporate, academic, special, government, and school—are fundamentally educational organizations. We teach our community members about information. That is our special contribution to bettering society. In many ways, the 2016 U.S. presidential election was a watershed event. It marked the first time a woman had served as a presidential candidate on a major party ticket. It brought to light the potentially misleading nature of large-scale polling data. And it put the term “fake news” into the daily lexi- con, not just in the United States but around the world. The rise of fake news stories—false or misleading stories that are “mas- terfully manipulated to look like credible journalistic reports [and that] are easily spread online to large audiences willing to believe the fictions and spread the word” (Holan 2016)—are correlated with a rise in wide- spread public reliance on online sources for news. In fact, the Pulitzer Prize–winning Web site Politifact named fake news its 2016 “lie of the year”:
Document Details My Account Print multiple pages
Print
You have printed 0 times in the last 24 hours.
Your print count will reset on at .
You may print 0 more time(s) before then.
You may print a maximum of 0 pages at a time.
Help
