The CRAAP Test
Out of the five criteria for the CRAAP test, the one that I believe is the hardest to evaluate accurately is authority. It is common for people to search a headline on Google and click on a top search result or a headline that shares the same opinion as theirs. Because of the availability of the Internet, anybody can post anything, and it could look like a real-life published journalism was the writer. However, this may not be the case, especially on social media. Some news accounts of social media are unprofessional and are clearly not managed by someone within the journalism field. Despite this, people still indulge in this form of journalism, sometimes never even taking the publisher’s credibility into account.
There is still a way to meet all CRAAP test criteria and be biased. Many news organizations have specific political leanings, whether they like to admit it or not. Therefore, news articles about certain topics can have an underlying bias when you read into them a bit deeper. A good way to check for bias in an article is to see if the author takes all sides into account rather than painting a clear “good guy” and “bad guy.”
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