The CIP’s ongoing work was recently spotlighted in a front-page Sunday feature package in The Seattle Times.
“When a mysterious virus began racing around the globe earlier this year, scientists at the University of Washington’s newly created Center for an Informed Public described it as the perfect storm for bogus information, both innocent and malicious,” The Times‘ Sandi Doughton wrote. “So what’s the situation six months later, now that the coronavirus pandemic is playing out in tandem with a passionate push for racial justice and the opening volleys of the presidential race? The perfect superstorm?”
Doughton wrote a second feature that offered advice for “how to inoculate yourself against rumors about coronavirus — or any subject,” which has helpful guidance from the CIP’s Jevin West and Kate Starbird, plus Mike Caulfield, a Washington State University Vancouver digital literacy expert who often collaborates with the CIP. “We’re all wrong sometimes,” West told Doughton. “If you call BS on yourself, then it makes you a little more careful when you go to question someone else’s argument or question their sources.”