C&CS Presents: “A Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing: Genre Blurring and Fake News”, Tuesday, January 19 at 11 am

C&CS Presents

A Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing: Genre Blurring and Fake News with Kat Phillips and Joel Burkholder

Tuesday, January 19 at 11 am EST

Register Here: https://forms.gle/fGYsBF4GyiMUjV538

Fake news stories are persuasive acts, convincing audiences—if only briefly—their false claims are true. Appropriating the conventions and epistemic authority of real news, fake news blurs the boundaries between genres to achieve that goal. Checklist approaches to fake news identification, like CRAAP, often fail to explore the intentionality of these actions. To that end, this presentation will analyze the phenomenon from a rhetorical perspective. Fake news uses bias as a rhetorical device, a persuasive technique, to take advantage of an audience’s preexisting beliefs. This confuses the process of selecting reliable evidence. In this workshop, participants will analyze how fake news uses bias in constructing false claims to persuade audiences. The IF I APPLY source evaluation tool, which identifies implicit and explicit biases, will explore how fake sources are constructed by authors and processed by audiences, and how this impacts the selection of reliable evidence.

Kat Phillips

Kat Phillips is the Nursing & Allied Health Librarian at Penn State’s University Park campus. She works with the College of Nursing, Department of Health Policy & Administration, and Consortium to Combat Substance Abuse. Her research interests focus on bias, information literacy related to health policy creation and allied health education, working with distance graduate students, and grey literature use and education. She enjoys baking, cooking, and dancing with her 5 year old daughter, playing Spiderman with her 2 year old son, and falling asleep to TV shows and movies on the couch with her husband.

Joel Burkholder

Joel Burkholder is the Reference & Instruction Librarian at Penn State’s York campus. His research interests include the intersection between rhetoric and information literacy, the identification and evaluation of bias, and the visibility of library maintenance practices. He enjoys spending time with his three children, searching the dollar bin at any record store, hiking in the woods, stacking unread books on the bedside table, and losing at dominos.

All C&CS Sessions are recorded and made available via the CRD website following the presentation.

This project is made possible by a grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services as administered by the Pennsylvania Department of Education through the Office of Commonwealth Libraries, and the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, Tom Wolf, Governor.

Support is also provided by the College and Research Division of the Pennsylvania Library Association: https://crdpala.org/.