Dr. Susan Maret, Lecturer at the School of Information, San Jose State University, and Project Censored contributor to Censored 2017, is coeditor of several books on government secrecy, intelligence and information policy. In the wake of the recent outbreak of concern regarding so-called “fake news,” Dr. Maret shares this checklist here, one she uses in her college courses, for establishing information integrity. While social media companies like Facebook and Google responded to the fake news affair with suggestions of censorship, by outsourcing to gatekeepers like Snopes or FactCheck, and the corporate media like the Washington Post unquestioningly promoted shadowy blacklisting sites like PropOrNot, Dr. Maret’s checklist provides a far more self-empowering and didactic path to finding trustworthy articles and and sources of information. Critical media literacy education is the antidote to fake news and propaganda, not censorship.

Read Susan’s The Process of Establishing Integrity Checklist here.