News Zoom
Zoom in or Zoom out on the news. Pick a story you’ve seen on social media and read two news articles that are either extremely local, or international.
How to do it:
Start with a basic browser search. We suggest DuckDuckGo which provides privacy controls and allows you to turn off AI “help.” This will give you the cleanest search. Search the event and see if you get local news and international news. If you do: read some.
If you don’t, pump up your search: remove the story you’re looking for and search for news from that area. Look for very local sources, down to the neighborhood blog level. When you find some, copy the base URL and add it to your story search. See if they wrote about the thing you’re researching.
Do the same thing with international news sources. Either add the base URL to your search, or go directly to the news source and search there. We’ll add to this list, but to get you started:
Choose a story you’re seeing on social media that is subject to regime spin. A current example would be the horrific ICE raid on a Chicago apartment complex.
Now read two news articles that are either so local they wouldn’t normally get visitors from other states, or are international and reputable. How do they differ? Here are a couple of examples for the ICE raid story:
Local news suggests the building may have been targeted because an immigrant there was killed by a gang member who did not live in the building. This is important both because punishing the victims of a crime makes it harder to keep communities safe, and because it puts us in front of the right’s likely spin effort. CWBChicago
Going local can also mean finding news from a minority community affected by an incident: The Black Wall Street Times gives racial context for the attack.
Oddly, I couldn’t find a single international story about 300 federal agents descending on a Chicago apartment building. This is something I’m going to have to dig into, as it seems implausible. Meanwhile, one of my usual tactics is to visit foreign press and search there directly.
