7.3 Admit Slip

Media Fact Check
Do you know the news program called Meet the Press has been on TV since 1947? This Sunday morning program is the longest-running show in U. S. broadcast history. The Meet the Press moderator interviews national and global leaders about current events in many areas of U. S. and world political and civic life. Many people have relied on this show for authoritative and accurate information. According to the Wikipedia, Meet the Press is the highest rated of the Sunday morning news programs (Wikipedia 2011).
In December 2009, a New York University professor named Jay Rosen blogged about the lack of fact-checking on Sunday morning talk shows. His concerns prompted Paul Breer, a political science student in Kansas, and Chas Danner, a NYC journalism student, to purchase the MeetTheFacts.com domain and begin their non-partisan grassroots campaign to pressure the talk shows to check their facts. Unfortunately, the moderator of Meet the Press, David Gregory, responded that fact-checking is up to the viewers and not his responsibility.
MeetTheFacts institutedcrowd-sourced fact checking to demonstrate that individuals cannot do this alone. Although MeetTheFacts only lasted five months, it brought attention to the problem of holdingpublic figuresand news agencies accountable for integrity in reporting.Their idea that “arguments based on facts are beneficial to every ideology” ( rings true with many fact checking organizations. Reliable fact-checking websites, such as FactCheck,are non-partisan; they check the facts as stated by any and all public figures, and tease out the truth from far too many misstatements, exaggerations, understatements, and out-and-out lies. In a democratic society, these organizations provide a necessary and invaluable service.

How do you know if information you read, hear, or view on TV, a website, or via another media source is accurate? Why should you care? Why should our society care? Continue on the back.

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Works Cited

"ABOUT MTF | Meet the Facts: Meet the Press Needs Fact-checking." Meet the Facts: Meet the Press Needs Fact-checking. 11 Sept. 2010. Web. 30 Sept. 2011. <

FactCheck.org | A Project of the Annenberg Public Policy Center. 28 Sept. 2011. Web. 30 Sept. 2011. <

"Meet the Press." Msnbc.com - Breaking News, Science and Tech News, World News, US News, Local News- Msnbc.com. n.d. Web. 30 Sept. 2011. <

"Meet the Press." Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. 19 Aug. 2011. Web. 30 Sept. 2011. <

From J. Moreillon, Coteaching Reading ComprehensionStrategies in Secondary School Libraries. (Chicago: ALA Editions). Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 License: