3.

Fact, Opinion and Bias

SENSATIONALIST
How many other words can you
make from the letters above?
5 – 15 = okay 16 – 25 = good 26+ = great!!

Excellent: •My response to the overall effect of texts shows clear understanding and
critical evaluation of writers’ purposes and viewpoints.
• I demonstrate sustained and critical analysis and evaluation of the social, cultural
and historical contexts of texts.
Good: • I show an ability to draw on other sources to develop my point.
• I demonstrate insight by teasing out layers of meaning and weighing up evidence
across texts.
Secure: • My comments consider the wider implications and significance of the text.
• I can precisely locate the main purpose and viewpoint of the writing.
• I can identify the effect on the reader, with some explanation as to how the effect
is created.
 Real or Fake News Story?
Oh !! Oh !! How cruel can humans be???
Please finish your meal before open the files....
What u are going to witness here is a fact, don't get scared !" It's Taiwan's hottest food..." In
Taiwan, dead babies or fetuses could be bought at $50 to $70 from hospitals to meet the high
demand for grilled and barbecued babies ...
What a sad state of affairs!!
Please forward this msg to as many people as u can so it can be seen by the world and someone
takes action on the same
 FAKE!!
• The man in the photographs is Chinese
performance artist Zhu Yu, who staged a
conceptual shock piece called "Eating
People" at a Shanghai arts festival in 2000.
Maintaining that "No religion forbids
cannibalism, nor can I find any law which
prevents us from eating people," Zhu Yu
acted out a performance in which he
appeared to eat a stillborn or aborted child
(likely constructed by placing a doll's head
on a duck's carcass) and said that he "took
advantage of the space between morality
and the law and based my work on it."

• The controversial photographs have since

been part of a number of art exhibits and
caused another stir in 2003 when they
were aired on television in the UK as part
of the Beijing Swings documentary:
66 year-old Nicholas Cooper was taken into custody for assaulting Kris Kane, 38, after an unnamed
young girl confided in him. She said that she ‘wanted to tell Santa a secret’ and that ‘all she wanted was
for her stepdad to stop touching her at night’.

Kane was waiting by the side of the Southridge grottos for his stepdaughter to finish talking to Santa.
And when he saw the fake bearded and red suited Cooper come towards him, he thought he was in for
a chat about what gifts she wanted… But he couldn’t have been more wrong.

“Santa didn’t say nothing. He just grabbed the back of the guy’s skull and headbutted him REAL hard,”
an eyewitness said. “Then Kringle got on top of him and just started pummeling him. He was laughing
ans screaming ‘Ho! Ho! Ho! Motherf*cker!’ over and over again. It was damn surreal.”

The witness goes on: “That ain’t even the damnedest thing, though. While Santa’s punching the cr*p
out of this guy, three or four of his little elves ran over and started kicking him. I mean, they’ve only got
little legs – but they were aiming for his head. He was NOT left feeling very festive after that!”

Milwaukee Police spokesperson Holly Delgado spoke to the media shortly after the arrest. She said this:

“Mr. Cooper, the mall Santa, acted in an aggressive and violent way. We cannot condone this. But Mr.
Kane does not wish to proceed with pressing charges, so we have had to let Mr. Kane go.”

“We have interviewed the little girl and Mr. Kane and his wife and we will be looking to prosecute the
man. He appears to be a dangerous child predator and pedophile…”

Nicholas Cooper, for his part, has been nominated for a Pride of Milwaukee award.
 FAKE!!
• Thug Life Videos is a web site that publishes a mixture of viral content
and fake news pieces. While this particular piece of holiday fiction was
not labelled as a hoax or as satire, this was not a genuine news item.

• For one thing, there is no record of this incident taking place that was
published anywhere but viral and hoax news web site. Furthermore,
the included pictures were stolen from previous incidents (a common
tactic for fake news organizations) and do not show a mall Santa
named "Nicholas Cooper" as he is being arrested for beating up "Kris
Kane." The picture of "Santa" getting arrested was taken in 2013 after
a protest against Black Friday in Ontario, California. The mugshot of
"Kris Kane" actually shows a man who was charged with trespassing in
 Unprovable

But the assertion that panhandlers make large sums of money is not new; one version posted to our message board in 2009 repeated the rumour that many
downtrodden beggars were "secret millionaires," made wealthy by posing as people in need:

Maybe it's the economy - people have money on the mind - or maybe it's because I recently moved to Los Angeles, which (believe it or not) has a lot more
panhandlers than my native New York. Whatever the cause is, the old "I heard some panhandlers are actually millionaires" has come up in conversation
much more often recently. Whenever it does, it's always accompanied by statements like "I saw it on TV once" or "My Mom swears it's true." I'm still waiting
on proof.

It seems more like a popular construct than truth; if I can believe a grubby panhandler is really a secret millionaire, I can feel less guilty when I don't give him
any change. We're all hurting for money in one way or another right now, and perhaps the fantasy of panhandling ones way to fortune is a nice thing to
think about.
• Kindly people getting defrauded or harmed by those posing as victims is a perennial theme in modern folklore, inviting us to test and reframe our true
opinions about the poor, needy, and down on their luck. A stranded or distressed person isn't just often a potential con artist in these tales of caution, but
also frequently a violent individual , gang member, or murderer. Because of the inherent risk of extending trust, the rumours say, we're more likely to
become a victim than to help one. As for the age of the trope itself, readers pointed to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's  1891 Sherlock Holmes short story "The
Man with the Twisted Lip"; a primary plot point involves the discovery of an apparently destitute man who is in fact living a secret "reputable" life.  
• Just as its impossible to produce even a ballpark figure of how many folks on the streets are truly, desperately in need, so too is figuring out how much the
average panhandler can make. Location, season, visibility, personality, appearance, the economy, and a giver or mark's own views of the activity are
among the variables that affect how lucrative it can be. Numerous articles including "estimates" of panhandling incomes are  available; one penned by a
self-identified panhandler  described an "average is closer to $15 than $30," adding that panhandling for more than a few hours at a time was "nearly
impossible" due to police, weather, and public aggression.
• A 2002 paper from the Department of Justice's Community Oriented Policing Services, or COPS, typically cited other police materials or dated research in
an excerpt about the "Economics of Panhandling":
• Most evidence confirms that panhandling is not lucrative, although some panhandlers clearly are able to subsist on a combination of panhandling money,
government benefits, private charity, and money from odd jobs such as selling scavenged materials or plasma. How much money a panhandler can make
varies depending on his or her skill and personal appeal, as well as on the area in which he or she solicits. Estimates vary from a couple of dollars (U.S.) a
day on the low end, to $20 to $50 a day in the mid-range, to about $300 a day on the high end.  
 Mostly False
• On 15 December 2016, the Facebook page “Natural Solutions Magazine” posted a story from the web site Healthy Food House, titled
“Women Need More Sleep Than Men Because Their Brains Work Harder, According to Science.” That article, shown above, is no more
than a collection of quotes that have been used (with varying degrees of accuracy) in numerous sporadically appearing viral stories.

• Among the many warning signs present in that story and its numerous iterations is the failure to cite a specific research study, and
the extremely broad and oversimplified rationale, not to mention the ever-popular red flag of a science headline that is “according to
science”.

• As it turns out, this story is only the most recent episode in a long history of viral science news going back, potentially, as far as 2008.
Theresa Fisher, in an exhaustive debunker published in on the sleep-focused website Van Winkle’s made it clear that the story (as
originally presented) was essentially made up.

• In response to an earlier March 2016 episode of this story’s appearance, Fisher found that most of the quotes in the story that were
attributed to Jim Horne came from either a 2010 Daily Mail story, or from a different scientist altogether:

• ...most of Horne's quotes actually date back to a 2010 Daily Mail story. And, at least one quote attributed to Horne appears to belong
to Edward Suarez at Duke University.

• That there may be gendered differences when it comes to sleep, however, is commonly reported in the scientific literature. In a 
2004 book Epidemiology of Sleep: Age, Gender, and Ethnicity, Kenneth Lichstein and colleagues performed an extensive literature
review of studies relating to sleep, finding that there is some evidence of gender-derived differences in sleep epidemiology:
• There is strong evidence that women are more likely than men to report difficulty initiating sleep. There is also evidence that the
prevalence of difficulty maintaining sleep and early morning awakening is slightly higher in women, but the findings for these
variables are less consistent across studies. Gender differences in [total sleep time, TST] were found mostly in studies including young
and middle-age adults, with women reporting longer TST.
• A study performed by Horne himself in 1996 monitored 400 individuals over a 15 night period and found that women tended
to sleep longer. A 2004 study of 2000 British adult study participants concluded men and women slept about the same, but that
women reported more sleep problems. A 2014 study in a similar vein concluded:
• Compared to men, women spent 15 min
True
!
 Fake!
• ORIGIN: On 27 May 2012, Discovery's Animal Planet channel aired a pseudo-documentary entitled 
Mermaids: The Body Found in the U.S., a purely fictional work dealing with a purported federal coverup of a
discovery involving scientists from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) that proved the
existence of a remnant population of mermaids (described as being an evolutionary offshoot of the "aquatic ape"
hypothesis, a generally discounted idea that early Hominid species went through an aquatic phase in their
evolution). The program was not fact but rather speculative science fiction, which included obvious CGI-produced
video sequences like the one displayed above and actors fictional characters such as "Dr. Paul Robertson, former
NOAA scientist." To enhance the pseudo-reality aspect of the program, a web site was established at 
believeinmermaids.com offering no content other than a opening page hoax proclaiming that the site's domain had
been seized by the U.S. Department of Justice and Homeland Security.
• After this program aired in Australia in April 2011, Brad Newsome of the Sydney Morning Herald wrote of it that:
• The thing that's got my goat at the moment is a fake documentary on Animal Planet called Mermaids: The Body
Found. It has actors playing scientists talking about how they did an autopsy on some mermaid remains, and how
the US government swooped and covered the whole thing up. There's grainy fake video of mermen being hauled up
in fishing nets, the whole box and dice.

The version that I saw doesn't even do viewers the courtesy of admitting that it's fake until the credits are about to
roll.
• It starts off talking up the rather fringe "aquatic ape" notion of human evolution and ends up with some classic-
looking CGI mermaids that make zero evolutionary sense. From the waist up they're slender modern humans (no
insulating blubber? Brrr!), while from the waist down they're dolphins — and to top it all off they've got a dolphin-
like sonar system inside their skulls. Over what period of time is all this supposed to have happened? A few tens of
thousands of years? A few hundred thousand years?
 False

• This footage was originally taken in December 2015, and shows a group of young people vandalizing the
Wishing Tree at the Galleria Umberto in Naples:

• Reports at that time did not identify the religious views of any of the vandals, writing only that the group
consisted of about a dozen boys in hoodies. Napoli Repubblica reported that the boys were attempting to steal
the tree in what has become a "sad Christmas tradition."
• In past years, the tree was used for bonfires nearby.

• The band, made up of a dozen boys, hooded probably not to be identified by the surveillance cameras, went
into action at one o'clock last night. In less than five minutes they stripped the tree of lights and the star to
make it lighter so they can pull it down more easily. Once the tree came down, the 'commando' was going to
drag it out of the tunnel where the use of two soldiers on duty in the vicinity has put to flight the young.
• In the past it happened many times that the tree was stolen only to be found in the neighbouring Spanish
Quarter where it is cut into pieces and used for the feast of St. Anthony Abbot, when there is the custom of
lighting bonfires (the so-called stones of St. Anthony).

• We found no reports of anybody being identified or arrested for the incident. The contemporary articles we did
find made no mention of religious motivations and merely identified the vandals as young pranksters.

• This is not the only video to circulate in late 2016 alongside the false claim that it showed Muslims tearing
down a Christmas tree. Similar hoaxes appeared in November about Muslims tearing down a Christmas tree in
Egypt.
What is the writer’s purpose and viewpoint?
How can you tell? Use quotations from the
headlines to prove your point
 More media means more stories are necessary! Sometimes headlines try to
create emotion and interest over nothing at all! What do these two headlines
suggest about the celebrity women?
Try writing a new headline which is completely lacking in sexism or “drama”.
Why are headlines like these a problem? What might
the effects of reading things like this over and over
again be?
What is the
writer’s
purpose and
viewpoint?
How can you
tell? Use
quotations from
the headlines to
prove your
point.
Excellent: •My response to the overall effect of texts shows clear understanding and
critical evaluation of writers’ purposes and viewpoints.
• I demonstrate sustained and critical analysis and evaluation of the social, cultural
and historical contexts of texts.
Good: • I show an ability to draw on other sources to develop my point.
• I demonstrate insight by teasing out layers of meaning and weighing up evidence
across texts.
Secure: • My comments consider the wider implications and significance of the text.
• I can precisely locate the main purpose and viewpoint of the writing.
• I can identify the effect on the reader, with some explanation as to how the effect
is created.
‘Ever read a story that really made you mad? Or that seemed to
tap into your innermost insecurity or fear? Maybe it was about
the government secretly spying on you. Don't automatically
believe what you just read and pass it on. Many false news
stories purposely play on our fears and anxieties, knowing that
doing so will make people follow their emotions and not their
brains.’

What are some topics which get you really

emotional?
Scared!!
ANGRY!!

Amused Depressed

Hopeful
Excited
Annoyed
Jealous
 Plan an article which will get people really
emotional.
• Topic:
• Viewpoint:
• Real information:
• What should the reader do?:
P1:
P2:
P3:
P4:
Reflecting…
Answer at least one of
the following:
• What do you
remember from
today’s lesson?
• How did you feel
about one of the
stories?
• How confident were
you about recognising
newspaper bias?