During the 2024 Election, Former President and Republican Candidate Donald Trump made a claim during a debate against Vice President and Democratic Candidate Kamala Harris. He said that Haitian immigrants in Ohio were eating their neighbors' pets.
To investigate whether this information is true, we can use Lateral Reading. This approach means not just relying on traditional markers of credibility such as the website url, the author, or the date of the article, but it asks us to move away from one source and look at other trustworthy sites to find reliable coverage. Instead of just reading vertically -- reading one source from top to bottom -- we read across multiple sources laterally, or side by side to gain a broader, more accurate perspective.
In the screen capture below, we are using this incident to illustrate the practice of Lateral Reading. You can see three browser tabs open to three different news stories about this claim. One from Forbes, another from the New York Times, and the third from AP, or the Associated Press. Each of these news outlets is reputable, and each explained the claim the Former President made was false.
For more, check out the UC Merced Library online research guide about Lateral Reading:
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