Verifying a local source

Difficulty: 1 (of 5)
Skills: Source investigation, URL verification.
Move(s): Read laterally.

So here’s a story for you: the Stanford band (from Stanford University in California) was playing a halftime show in San Antonio, Texas, and as part of the show they insulted fake news, the border wall, and — the deal breaker — Texas’s beloved Whataburger fast food chain. (They called it “Waterburger”, which is cold).  They were booed heartily by the Texas crowd, and the Whataburger Twitter account apparently “fired back”.

stanford

At least you think that happened. Let’s say your friend Andi shared this story with you. Andi is great, but she’s not always reliable.

So — is it true? You could do what we always encourage here and select the headline, then search for it in Google News. But for this challenge we just want you to research the site she shared with you — KSAT.com — which claims to be the website of KSAT-TV, a local San Antonio station.

Local sources are good. But is this really a news site from San Antonio? Let’s double check before we share it.

In the comment box, write down:

  • How long this took you
  • What your conclusion was — is it a local source? Is it real?
  • A link to the page you used to source the site as real or fake
  • The steps/searches/actions you used to solve this

If you are doing this in class, keep a copy of what you write in a local file for discussion in a couple of minutes. Your submitted answer will be seen by the site administrator and used to improve assignments, but not be publicly posted on the website.

Related Resources

If you need help completing this assignment, you may want to review these resources.

Checking Existence of Traditional News Sources (Video, 5 mins)
Evaluating News Sources