Hello everyone! Recently, I came across an article that made me want to look deeper into its topic. An article by the “Associated Press” claimed that a Georgia sheep dog saved its owner’s flock of sheep from a pack of coyotes, killing eight coyotes and suffering from many life altering injuries. To find out if this article was true, I took the following steps:
(Please use the links provided for each photo to clearly see the articles and websites if you are unable to clearly see the photos.)
1.First, I re-read the article thoroughly, and noticed that the author based their work off of a TV channel called WAGA-TV who did a segment with the dog’s owner. I wanted to learn more about this TV channel, but I needed to Check the source first.
2. To Check the source, I searched up “AP Newspaper” and came across this Wikipedia article that claimed that “The associated press is recognized for its integrity and accuracy, and has published presidential data since 1848.” Although Wikipedia isn’t always the most reliable source, I chose to believe the article and move on to the next step.
3. After verifying that AP Newspaper Article was a reliable source, I then went back to search up the TV channel called WAGA-TV to Verify the source. It turns out that WAGA-TV is also known as FOX 5 Atlanta. As soon as I saw the “Fox News” symbol I was intrigued.
4. Fox News is known worldwide for usually being an unreliable source for American news. However, making this assumption based off of previous knowledge is not an educated step into discovering the truth. So, I searched up FOX News in the google web browser and found a Wikipedia article commenting on its reputation. The article explained that FOX News has been know for misleading their audience in relation to science, notably climate change and the COVID-19 pandemic, and is biased in favour of the U.S Republican Party. Therefore, in my opinion, I do not find Fox News trustworthy.
5. Now that I had verified the source using a Google search engine, and found out where the story originally came from, I wanted to check the source one more time using scopes.com
However, when I searched up the article headline in many different forms, It did not seem to appear.
6. Although the Snopes website did not have what I was looking for, I didn’t stop there. Instead, I decided to Check Other Sources. I then searched up the article in the Google search engine and pressed on the news tab to see if any other newspapers had written about this event. It turns out, many newspaper were also intrigued and wanted to write about this event as well. Newspapers such as The Buffalo News, CBS News, and Toronto City News had also written about the dog who saved a flock of sheep from a pack of coyotes.
Link to this website
7. One last step that I took to determine if this article was true or not, was that I used tineye.com to do a reverse image search. On every article that I read concerning this event, I noticed one common photo: a dog with an injured face in a medical cone. I copied the link to that image and pasted it into tineye.com, to find that the oldest copy of this photo was posted just 2 days ago, (Dec 4th, 2022) and it traced back to Newspapers such as “The Guardian” and “CBS News.” (Very reliable news sources)
In conclusion, I believe that this article was, in fact, true. Based off my research and further investigation into this particular event, I have determined that most of the newspapers who shared this story were reliable and truthful. Although I was not able to find this article on websites such as Snopes.com (probably because the event took place on December 4th, 2022) I did, however, use the skills and techniques provided by the “Break the fake part 1” lesson to discover that this Georgia dog did save it’s owner’s flock of sheep from a pack of coyotes.