Students aim to fight ‘fake news,’ from both the left and the right

Students at State College of Florida’s Collegiate School are hoping to save democracy. That’s at least the tag line of a new web page developed by freshmen and sophomore students at the school who want to explain both conservative and liberal perspectives on current events.

RAD News, a student-created web page with the motto “Saving Democracy one story at a time,” went live on Monday with much fanfare in the Collegiate School’s building 19 at SCF.

Standing for Republican and Democrat News, the site has opinion pieces on a handful of hot topics with several more in the works. Students are hoping to crank out opinion pieces at a rate of roughly 30 per week, and they hope other teenagers turn to their site as a source of editorials so they can see both a pro or con, liberal or conservative position to a variety of issues. Each topic includes a paragraph of facts that both sides agree upon and then two different perspectives on the issue.

The project is the brainchild of Collegiate School government teacher Deane Western.

“Because of how things went with the last election, with the fake news and the biased news, we wanted to combat that to help students,” Western said. “So students wrote articles, looking at both sides of the perspective.”

Students in Western’s class said the project was an exercise in active learning, and that they enjoyed getting to debate key issues with their classmates rather than simply studying out of a textbook.

“We get to... experience how the government works rather than just being robots of us just getting inputted information and having to relay it over and over and over again through a series of tests,” said My Huynh, 16, who built the web page.

And while some students said the project led to more deeply entrenched opinions, most said it helped them understand the other side’s position more clearly. Isaac Ortiz, 15, and Aurely Garcia-Tulloch, 15, said working on the project has made them more moderate.

“His views on the political spectrum are completely opposite to mine,” said Garcia-Tulloch, referring to Ortiz. “We definitely had disagreements on some things, but hearing his side and my side, we end up coming to an agreement in the middle.”

Ortiz, who is hoping to find businesses who will advertise on the site, said the ultimate goal is to be a service to their fellow teens.

“Through this project we’ve all become more engaged and informed, and that’s our goal with RAD news. Now that we’re informed, we want other people to be informed as well,” Ortiz said. “You’ve got people walking around who don’t even know who their senator is.”

This story was originally published April 10, 2017 at 4:31 PM with the headline "Students aim to fight ‘fake news,’ from both the left and the right."