I am thrilled that in the very academic year in which I am teaching Global and Historical Studies courses again after a very long break, and asking students to explore the news from the parts of the world we are studying about our own national context, as well as perspectives from anywhere about the parts of the world we are studying, my university’s library is trying out PressReader.com. As I talked today about this blog and what I hope students will do on it, I was asked where students should look for reliable information. I haven’t checked through the many sources that PressReader offers to see which ones are “reliable” and in what sense. I am certain that the publications included reflect all the various journalistic biases my students may have encountered, as well as one they may not have before now but which they need to learn about for this course, namely state-controlled news outlets from totalitarian countries. Their fact-checking skills will be taught, fostered, and regularly put to the test.
What students will find in this database are journalistic resources, newspapers and their more modern equivalents, of precisely the sort that I hope they will read – not uncritically, to be sure, but read nonetheless. There are abundant English-language publications from and about China that they can find here. China Today, News China,China Daily, Beijing Review, and many others for this unit, and many others for the one on Islam and the Middle East. Almost all of the ones from Egypt are in Arabic, and most that aren’t still aren’t in English.
We talked in class about a number of topics related to reliable news and fact checking, but we also talked about Google Translate and the fact that, for all its shortcomings and limitations, it is better to interact with news from another part of the world through an automated translation, than to not interact with it at all, which is what most people in the English-speaking world do.
I’m excited to have students eager to explore things in languages that aren’t at all intelligible to them. And I’m delighted that there are news sources in their own language they can turn to.
Please share your favorite, most reliable, most unusual, most quirky, or most anything else resources from China and the Islamic world in the comments section!