Increased Challenges

Today I spent a couple hours of my snow day looking up articles and resources to use for the upcoming satire unit that I teach in conjunction with the reading of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. As I was sifting through materials that will help my students distinguish between political satire and fake news, I realized how much more difficult it must be for our students to navigate through their world than it was for me to navigate through my high school world.

When I was a teen, I had access to six television channels at my house -- NBC, CBS, ABC, FOX, PBS, and an independent network. There were three tv's, but one was not hooked into an exterior antenna, so we had to adjust the "rabbit ears" to get reception. My family watched the evening news together because that is what my parents were watching on the good tv. A daily newspaper was delivered to our house. Besides my teachers and classes at school, those were my sources of information. While the media always had the power to determine what issues were considered important by deciding how much air time to give to an issue, the coverage was much more balanced than cable news networks of today, and intentionally fake news stories were not being promoted except in The National Enquirer, and very few people believed more than a sentence or two from it.

Now, before we can even talk about the current social issues that connect with literature, we need to determine whether the topic of an article is even real, and that is getting trickier. Even Andy Borowitz has changed the heading on his column to make it less likely that a person will interpret his satire as straight news. Some fake sites, like the Enquirer make it quite obvious that their stories are fake, but others mix facts, half-truths, and outright lies together so skillfully that it can be difficult to filter through. Add to the mix that a fake story is shared on social media by a trusted adult in a teen's life, and the confusion grows.

Last year, for this unit I focused on Charlie Hebdo and asked the students how to distinguish satire from materials that shock or provoke simply for the sake of shocking or provoking. Now we also need to ask whether a fake news site can defend itself by saying they are producing satire. While this will be an interesting intellectual exercise, the fact that these questions are getting more difficult to answer and the lines between entertainment, news, personal opinion, political statement, and deceit are blurring more each day worries me. Adolescence and finding one's place in the world has never been easy; however, when the identity of the world seems just as uncertain as the teen's, it seems to be even more complicated.