Sturgill, an associate professor of journalism at Elon University, was part of a panel organized by the McClatchy news organization on election disinformation with the Raleigh News & Observer.
Associate Professor of Journalism Amanda Sturgill joined journalists from the Raleigh News & Observer, Politifact, Factcheck.org and more for a panel discussion on election misinformation on Oct. 20.
Sturgill, who published “Detecting Deception: Tools to Fight Fake News” this fall, talked about a variety of issues including what fake news actually means, strategies news consumers can use to avoid falling victim to disinformation and how to understand polls and news stories about them.
“When it comes to the idea of fake news, what it is depends on who you ask,” Sturgill said during the discussion. “A lot of people will use the prhase ‘fake news’ to refer to basically journalists making things up. That is really not a thing that happens with credible journalists. It gets used as a way to malign the news and to erode the trust that people might have in the information that they get from news.”
Other panelists talked about disinformation web sites, ideas for finding quality news outlets and the effects of disinformation and misinformation on different audiences.
The panel was sponsored by the news organization McClatchy, which publishes the News & Observer, the Charlotte Observer and the Durham Herald-Sun in North Carolina. More information about the panel discussion is available here.