Staff photo by Clay Schuldt Librarian LeRoy Harris leads a discussion in a seminar on news media at the New Ulm Public Library.

NEW ULM — Knowing who to trust in the news media was the subject of the New Ulm Public Library’s second in a series of five seminars on evaluating the news.

Last week, New Ulm Library’s Programming & Technology Service Librarian LeRoy Harris started the series on evaluating the news to help people sift out the facts and to make informed decisions in the world of 24/7 news coverage.

Harris began by asking the audience what criteria they need for a source to be credible? Who is an expert? How do we trust things we’ve never seen?

“There are plenty of things that are outside of normal personal experience,” Harris said, “we are getting information all the time and how we interact with that information and how we decide to believe it or not is very important.”

The focus of this week’s seminar was differentiating between logic and fallacies; the connection between partisanship and propaganda; how news media companies produce drama masquerading as news and knowing who to trust. Harris said logic is a formal school of mathematics. It is used to evaluate the validity of statements and mathematical expressions.

He presented examples of statements and reviewed them on whether each made logical sense — if it had consistency.

“The detective is in the garden; so someone is in the garden” is an example of a logically valid statement. It goes from a specific claim to making a general claim. The statement does not have contradictory information.

An example of an invalid logical statement was “every human born before 1879 died; so every human will die.” This is not a logical statement because it creates a causal relationship where one does not exist. People will die, but it has nothing to do with the year 1879 or the people born before that.

Harris explained logic can be used to evaluate whether something makes sense, but he warned just because a statement is logical does not make it true. If an assumption is incorrect, then even if a statement is logical it is untrue.

This led to a discussion on fallacies. Fallacies are statements that appear logical but are incorrect, invalid, or irrelevant.

Harris presented a list of 12 common fallacies; including slippery slope, hasty generalizations, post hoc, genetic fallacy, begging the claim, circular argument, either/or, ad hominem, appeal to populism, red herring, straw man/cherry-picking and moral equivalency.

With this list of fallacies, Harris presented top news stories from CNN and Fox New websites to find examples of fallacies in the news. The group identified post hoc, circular, red herring and straw man fallacies in different articles.

Harris said the ideas and topics in the articles are not the problems, but the way they are presented. He said the reason news media companies use fallacies is because it sells. By sensationalizing an article, a writer can create drama from the news and increase readership or viewers.

Harris explained the sensationalization and dramatization of the news began with Joseph Pulitzer. Pulitzer bought the New York World in 1883 and made it the largest newspaper in the country. He did it by bringing drama to the news.

In the 19th century, most newspaper accounts of government actions were presented in an institutional format, similar to the minutes of a board meeting. Pulitzer turned them into stories to arouse public interests. He added large headlines, pictures and eye-catching graphics. The articles became emotional rather than rational and sensational rather than informative.

“News should not be drama,” Harris said.

The problem with drama is there needs to be conflict and tension, protagonists and villains. This creates a news article that has a bias or serves as propaganda. Drama is also entertainment. Harris warned that entertainment can be educational, but it is not the primary purpose.

“They’ve changed the sharing of information as something to entertain you,” Harris said.

The seminar closed with Harris asking which sources can be trusted. He advised the audience to be news literate. The purpose of the seminar is to give people the ability to understand information, ask questions and research.

“News media still can be helpful, but remember to apply logic, identify fallacies and propaganda, notice what is missing from the ‘story’ and always check for primary sources that you an access to evaluating for yourself,” Harris said.

The next Evaluating the News seminar will cover how news media companies are structured, journalistic ethics and information gatekeepers. The seminar will be held at 6:30 p.m. Thursday, Jan. 20.