I have recently talked to a Chinese friend of mine who started talking about how smart Trump is etc. She previously only gained her knowledge through the Chinese media and not the “western propaganda”, so it was her first exposure to the non-CCP-controlled stuff. I told her “you sound like you read FOX news”. She replied with “hahah yes, how did you know?”
This made me realize that she is very prone to getting manipulated and not doing any fact-checking. However, this situation made me reflect on my own news-sourcing skills.
How do you deal with the issue and what can I do step-by-step to verify the news that I read myself and at the same time a way that I can recommend to my Chinese friend so that she doesn’t fall for the most obvious tricks so easily?
One general rule is to get as much information as possible from true experts - people who work on the specific subject that they are discussing, at least in broad fields of knowledge (e.g. history, biology, computers, law). Don’t rely on a single person or team of people to be your one-stop-shop for information. As much as possible, the experts should be independent of each other. While a historian and a biologist may both work at universities, and you may learn about both of them from a reporter, they likely do not have daily contact with each other and likely have not ever met… but stay aware of ‘where they are coming from’. When an interesting topic is raised, be willing to track down the original source and learn more directly from them.
Get information from sources that treat you seriously. For instance both NPR and the Economist both focus on in-depth reporting about a wide variety of topics. In contrast, TV news tends to be full of fluff. Ignore fluff peddlers. Ignore those who talk in circles about today’s minor scandal or “breaking story”, and instead focus on those who give you information that will still be useful a year from now.
Before you can check facts, you need to know what are reliable sources. This is a long term process. If I need to go to one place, Wikipedia is a good starting point to get ‘all sides’ of a topic (usually), with links to primary sources.
A long term strategy is to build general background knowledge rather than relying on case-by-case fact checking. Especially science and history. If you have that knowledge, a lot of the spin becomes immediately obvious, and you quickly identify who is worth listening to (of course, you need to first find reliable sources for history and science, and not get caught in partisan echo chambers. Just don’t turn to politicians and TV pundits for your history lessons).
I like academics because they mainly communicate with other experts and know they can’t get away with BS, while TV hosts and politicians mainly communicate with people who are easy to fool.
Trusting “experts” isn’t exactly always a great idea, especially with the context of OP’s friend in which the CCP being able to censor any dissenting opinions, so you’re just reenforcing their adversion of skepticism.
It’s ironic how the US’s downfall is because the people are so overly skeptical of government, they end up inventing crazy conspiracy theories, meanwhile in mainland China, they are not being skeptical of the central government enough. There is has to be a resonable level of skepticism somewhere.