Breaking Your News Bubble: Media Literacy

This guide offers methods and resources to critically evaluate the news you consume.

Library Research Guide

How to Break Your Bubble

Break your news bubble by being aware of the media you are consuming. Knowing who is creating your news and how it is being distributed gives you control of what you read, hear, and see in the media. Be an active media consumer by:

evaluating your current news sources to identify any bias,
changing your social media settings,
auditing your news habits.

.gif credit: re-colored, cropped, and compressed from video by John Lund

Identifying Bias

Not sure how to identify bias in the news? These sites offer analysis of news outlets. Compare the news for yourself by seeing news from the left, right, and center side-by-side.

Ad Fontes Media Bias Chart
Ad Fontes evaluates the bias and reliability of news outlets on websites, TV, and podcasts.
AllSides.com
AllSides.com presents online news with its bias (left, right, center) on full display. Read the news, place it in context. Allsides.com does not rate print, TV, or radio news.
Detecting Bias in the News
This site from the University of Washington Libraries provides guidance on how you can evaluate photos, headlines, use of names/titles and other clues in the news for bias.
Should you trust media bias charts?
This article by Jake Sheridan at the Poynter Institute, a non-profit journalism school, explores how media bias charts are created.

Social Media Settings

One way to break your bubble is to change the order in which you see new posts in your social media. Instead of seeing posts by popularity or other method, you can opt to see posts in chronological order. Or, you can adjust whose posts you see. Below are links to information about changing your settings.

These options change frequently. If the instructions offered below don't work, search the internet using terms like: Facebook and chronological.

How to adjust your settings in Facebook:

How Do I View Stories on my News Feed in Most Recent Order?
Facebook's help section explaining how to view stories chronologically.
How Can I View and Adjust My News Feed Preferences?
Facebook's frequently asked questions about changing settings for your news feed.

How to adjust your settings in Twitter

How to switch your Twitter feed to a chronological timeline
Natt Garun at The Verge explains that clicking the star/sparkle icon at the top of your Twitter feed lets you see Tweets in chronological order.
About Your Twitter Timeline
Twitter FAQ explaining how tweets display in your timeline.

How to adjust your settings in Instagram

How Feed Works on Instagram
Information from Instagram about how the feed works. Unfortunately, there does not appear to be a way to view posts chronologically in Instagram.

How to adjust your settings in Google

Personalize your news settings
You can set up Google News to show the topics you want to see and give you news based on where you are. Click through options at the top for iPhone/iPad, Android, or Computer.

Strategies for Breaking your Bubble

The following are based on Mandy Zibart's comprehensive article, "How To Escape Your News Bubble"

This isn’t easy; be forgiving but be brave in cutting things and adding things to your routine.

What you put into your news routine is what you’ll get out of it.

Action (what to do)	Tools (what to use)	Benefits (what you might get)
Personal news audit/inventory - track your news consumption	Media diary (detailed example) RescueTime or TimeCamp Browser history, “news” pages you like on Facebook, who you follow on Facebook and Twitter	Discover your current news sources to gain a sense of how much diversity you’re bringing into your news routine
Add new voices and formats to the mix	Follow annoying high school friends and pundits/politicians, people in other countries, new topics Consult friends/family who don’t always agree with you but their facts are usually correct (who do they follow?) Podcasts, newspaper/magazine subscriptions	Learn about the people in the city, state, country, and world you live in
Be attentive and engage but don’t get overwhelmed	Read deeper not more Have conversations about what you read with friends/family at times and places when/where you can make space to respectfully disagree Be selective and organize your news with a news aggregators like Feedly	Your vulnerability will bring you new perspectives Develop empathy and understand a point of view Rise above the trolls
Modify the sources you already use	Change Facebook, Google, Twitter, and other social media settings to see news in chronological order. Better yet, stop relying on social media for news.	Prod familiar platforms to give you the latest information, not the most popular.