Course Beginner-friendly
How the news actually works
The news isn't a window onto the world — it's a product, shaped by choices at every step. Learn to read the choices, and the headlines stop reading you.
You think of the news as a mirror held up to the world. It isn't. It's a made thing — billions of events filtered down to a few dozen, each chosen, framed, headlined, and sold by people making decisions you never see. None of that requires lying. The same true facts can be built into a triumph or a disaster. This course shows you the machine: how a story is selected, shaped, and paid for, and how to read it like the people who make it. By the end, you decode the news instead of absorbing it.
Module 1 — Where the news comes from
The news is a selection, not a mirror
Explain why what you see is a tiny, non-random sample of everything that happened.
The gatekeepers and the agenda
Explain how editors set the public agenda — telling you what to think about, not what to think.
Where the facts come from
Judge how far to trust a claim by looking at its source.
Module 2 — How a story is shaped
Framing: the same facts, two stories
Show how identical true facts produce opposite stories through framing.
The headline does the work
Explain why a headline can be perfectly true and still mislead.
Numbers that bend
Spot the common ways a real number is used to mislead.
What gets left out
Explain how omission — the missing fact — is the most invisible bias of all.
Module 3 — Why it's shaped that way
The attention business
Explain how the way news makes money shapes what gets covered and how.
The algorithm decides now
Explain how a feed that optimises for engagement changes which news reaches you.
The kinds of bias
Tell apart the different kinds of bias and where each one comes from.
Propaganda and disinformation
Tell deliberate manipulation apart from ordinary news and name the techniques.