By Cathy Hird

When sifting through news online, my husband came across a headline about a sudden illness hitting President Obama. Although he wondered how this media outlet got ahead of the networks he usually watches, he followed the link. He became trapped in an internet morass that required a complete shut down to exit. It was false news.

Waiting in the long pre-holiday line at the grocery store, my daughter started to read the front page of a tabloid newspaper. "Look, one of Obama's girls is in rehab, it says." She knew this was false news. The next headline she found interesting: it claimed that President-elect Donald Trump had "rebuked arrogant China." Here was an example of the kind of slant a news source can give to actions many report.

I have known for a long time that all news has bias. Some details are left out. Particular details are put first. The headline colours the whole story. What has taken me by surprise this fall is the rash of false stories.

I got caught by a Facebook post. During the American election, there were many opinion pieces about the two main presidential candidates. Pieces about Hillary Clinton were slanted both ways with suggestions she had committed major crimes with her email account, or arguing that the process was misogynistic making it impossible for a woman candidate.

The piece that caught me claimed that Donald Trump was headed to court in December on two criminal charges. While it crossed my mind that someone with pending criminal charges would not be allowed to run, and I did not "share" it, I did talk about it once. It seemed like a fact.

I am embarrassed how slowly it dawned on me that only certain stories were coming up on my news feed. My friends who have political and social perspectives close to mine chose what they would share. Also, Facebook's algorithms sifted my browsing and liking history to chose which items showed up on my feed. I realized that if I had different search habits different news pieces would have shown up. I had self selected the opinions that I was seeing.

And I realize now that the piece about pending criminal court appearances for Donald Trump was false. With the opinion pieces, it was not hard to see the bias, but I came to understand that some of the news on the internet was untrue, making false claims about things that had not happened, were not happening.

I should have known this. I've always been skeptical about the headlines on a tabloid. But things shared on the internet by people I knew, I did not doubt.

I woke up to the seriousness of the problem when I tuned into the CBC program Quirks and Quarks, and they had a piece on why people accept false news. I found other people talking about the amount of false news that is available. I picked myself up by the shirt collar and gave myself a shake, figuratively speaking.

I had heard before that there were sites that claimed to be sharing news but made up stories that promoted racism and xenophobia. I think I thought that these preached opinion. Somewhere in my brain, I knew that false statistics and skewed historical stories would be included, but I did not think of them as news sources. And I forgot the same thing could happen on the left.

When I watched a conservative American TV news channel, I could hear the pro-military bias. I could tease open the critique of the current Democratic administration and see where they skewed the story.

What I have woken up to again is the need to apply the same critique, the same analysis, to opinions and stories that match more closely the ones I hold.

Waking up again to my own bias is important. It may help me to listen more openly to people with a vastly different perspective. I do practice this kind of listening, searching for ways to engage in helpful conversation with people who I deeply disagree with, even being willing to learn something from them. I need to take the same approach of openness and self criticism into my time on the internet.

Cathy Hird is a farmer, minister, and writer living near Walters Falls.