How to read the news
A guide to help you be a better news consumer
Salam and hello :)
Eid Al-Adha Mubarak if you’re celebrating this weekend.
As always, there’s so much news to keep up with, and sometimes it can get overwhelming. So, this newsletter serves as a short guide on how to navigate news and share credible and reliable journalists and/or news outlets to follow.
Just before I published this, I had to add this short section because I came across an example of why verification and fact-checking matters. A local account with a large following shared the following photo to raise money for Gaza, but the problem is that the photo is inaccurate and is not from Gaza.
Reuters fact checked this image a few days ago because it’s been making its rounds recently on social media where others made the same mistake. They concluded that the image is actually an old *staged* art project from 2014 from a photographer in Saudi Arabia, and not a real photo in Gaza.
It might not be that serious to some, but there are plenty of real photos people can use to share what’s happening, and using an inaccurate image destroys the reliability of not just the person who shared it, but in this case, the entire fundraising campaign.
It’s true that for news on Gaza and Sudan, following people on the ground — even if they aren’t a journalist by profession — is reliable when Western outlets aren’t sharing the full story. Sometimes that means following doctors, children, photographers or whoever has access to the internet when there’s frequent outages and is able to post daily updates on their social media pages.
But it’s important to take extra caution when following accounts that repost someone else’s updates or make their own news post without including sources or links for further information/reporting. (A black Instagram post with a few sentences and no sourcing isn’t news. It’s a quick way to use other people’s reporting and claim it as your own in order to get it reshared and gain more engagement/followers.)
Journalists are valuable because of the skillset they have in verifying information and doing their due diligence when reporting, so it’s always wise to check who you’re following.
I know not all of my subscribers are Muslim, but I do want to highlight how our Quran tells us to be cautious of spreading any misinformation, rumors or unverified news.
“O believers, if an evildoer brings you any news, verify ˹it˺ so you do not harm people unknowingly, becoming regretful for what you have done” [49:6]
Our God tells us to fact check any information that comes our way, especially if it can harm people. When it comes to communities of color, we need to be especially careful. There’s already a lack of media literacy in these communities due to several factors, and it’s easy to spread a piece of information without first checking where it came from, who wrote it or if it’s even true.
During the onset of COVID, we saw the harm communities of color faced due to the spread of misinformation that caused vaccine hesitancy and other (more deadly) outcomes.
In order for our communities to thrive and truly grow, we need to be smart news consumers. This guide aims to provide resources and tips to navigate the news industry and how to improve your consumption with factual and reliable sources.
Check where the information is from
A lot of the time you may read or hear something from someone who isn’t a journalist or a news outlet. Take for example: TikTok, Reels, or a forwarded WhatsApp message.
It’s important to see if the user included any sourcing (meaning links or studies or anything that provides details to where they got the information). Sometimes it’s easy to fact-check something yourself by looking it up on Google.
Sometimes when breaking news happens or a post is viral, we don’t take a second to fully figure out the context of what we’re sharing. There’ve been moments where old videos, photos and even headlines have been used.
Take a second to:
Check the headline, caption, and look for a source or link to get the full information before sharing with others. Was there a date posted in the article? Are you familiar with the news outlet or is this the first time you’re seeing it?
Track where the repost came from. Don’t blindly repost another repost.
Who were the sources who were quoted/interviewed? Are they reliable? If the Israeli Army or local police or the President of this country are quoted and the outlet publishes their statements without further investigation or reporting, then that is not a reliable article. It’s just echoing possible lies by entities that are known to lie to media.
Follow a list of reliable outlets
It’s important to stay informed in not only national and international topics, but also local news. If you don’t like to read, there’s TV or radio, and most news outlets are extremely online and on all social media platforms posting bite-size videos and summarized articles.
For local newsrooms, I would recommend reading and supporting nonprofit newsrooms over corporate-owned news outlets because they usually do care more about the communities they serve than what brings in subscribers/sells to their audience. Your local public radio station is probably also producing some great work.
Here are a few outlets I like to check frequently in Detroit/Southeast Michigan:
Michigan Public ( 91.7 FM Ann Arbor NPR station)
WDET ( 101.9 FM Detroit NPR Station)
(I have a long list of local reporters I love to follow, feel free to message me on the side if you’d like to follow their Twitter (X) accounts.)
For national outlets, it’s hard to trust the big names because of problematic decision-making in their editorial and news sections (I avoid The New York Times, Atlantic, Wall Street Journal) but some outlets have journalists producing amazing reporting like CNN’s Nima Elbagir on Sudan or Alaa Elassar and Yahya Abou-Ghazala on Palestine.
Other sources include:
Zeteo by Mehdi Hasan (here on Substack!)
The Washington Post (their social media team is great!
For international outlets, I like to follow Arabic news channels for coverage on North Africa and the Middle East since a country’s news is most reliable when reported in the language of its people.
But there are some outlets that generally have good coverage in English: