Assessing the Credibility of Bizarre Media Reports
Alligators in Sewers and Other Famous Hoaxes
Stumpy the Four-Legged Ducking
Lesson Handouts in Word Format
Direct students to www.martinlutherking.org:
On first inspection, the site appears to be a reliable and historical account of the life of the famous civil rights leader. As students read the content, however, they ought to start questioning the truthfulness of some of the content, especially if they knew something about Martin Luther King prior to the lesson.
This site is a good example of why we ought to check the authorship of websites such as this. At the bottom of the page there is a link telling us that the page is "Hosted by Stormfront". When clicked, this link takes the viewer to a message board of an American white-supremacist group:
Allow students to search for information on this topic independently by typing "victorian robots" into a search engine, such as Google. They will all end up looking at the same page:
Unlike the Martin Luther King site, this page is a good-natured spoof. Again, students ought to realise that this is a spoof because the existence of robots in Victorian England should be inconsistent with what their previous historical knowledge. Furthermore, they could question why the all ended up looking at the same page (there is no corroboration of the information).
The URL (address) of the site is http://www.bigredhair.com/robots/. If they follow the URL backwards, the students will see that http://www.bigredhair.com/ is not a site that one might expect to be hosting educational resources:
This is the famous April Fool edition of Panorama. There is a copy of the film at http://news.bbc.co.uk/olmedia/70000/video/_70980_aprilfool_vi.ram or students could be given this handout:
Here is an American version of a similar spoof from You Tube:
"Science told: Hands Off Gay Sheep", screamed a Sunday Times headline on 31/12/06. Apparently, a scientist had been cutting open the brains of homosexual rams (about 8% prefer mating with other males) in an attempt to turn them straight. The Sunday Times article is now mysteriously missing from their web archive). A search for "gay sheep" at www.timesonline.co.uk returns a link to the article but, when clicked, the article cannot be found:
However, Pink News (www.pinknews.co.uk) does still have an article in which tennis star, lesbian and animal rights activist Martina Navratilova condemned the experiments:
The story was eventually debunked by the New York Times, whose report can be found here.
Private Eye also had of fun at the expense of the Sunday Times:
Jessica Mydek - a little girl dying of a brain tumour (compare with the case of Craig Shergold)
Snake found inside personal computer
Photograph shows a shark attacking a British Navy diver:
Dog Island
The British Stick Insect Foundation
Sellafield Zoo
Stop Alien Abductions
Save the Pacific Northwestern Tree
Octopus
Stumpy the Four-Legged Duckling (a true story?)
Four-Legged Duckling Shocks Owner (news report from the BBC)
Is this a hoax? Ask students to use the Internet to consider the credibility of this story.
Lesson Handouts in Word Format
A sample lesson using some of these examples can be viewed at: http://www.teachers.tv/video/5425