Field Guide to Research
When looking on Buzzsumo for a story, I came across an article whose title made me do a double take right away in thinking if it is real or not. On the site, there is an article listed titled "$100 million naval ships under command of lesbian captain runs aground, catches fire, and sinks" by Blaze News.
Firstly, the title grabs your attention immediately when reading it. It almost sounds like a clickbait title. Putting "lesbian" with "command" and "catches fire, and sinks" seems like a headline that is made to get the clickbait attention of people who are anti-LGBTQ for easy clicks. This headline just stands out so much, however, that I do want to figure out if this is true or not. The engagement on the post is decently high, with a trending score of 97, and an engagement on Facebook of 34.4 thousand and a much lower X engagement of 444.
Right away, the main thing about this article that makes it fishy is that it is not even credited to any authors. The credit the article gives is to the website itself, Blaze News.
Next, I threw Blaze News into the Media Bias Fact Check website. As expected, the site shows that the source is extremely right-leaning with mixed factual reporting, and is known for conspiracy theories, propaganda, and failed fact checks.
Then, I looked closer at the actual article in question, and things really started to show itself. First off, it hyperlinks an article about this incident (which I assume is where they got it from). Clicking this article hyperlink makes Blaze News' article even more suspicious. The article it links, titled "'Bad day': New Zealand navy ship runs aground and sinks off Samoa" by News.com.au (again, this source also does not give a specific author). In this article, it is never even mentioned that this woman is a lesbian, and is actually doing the opposite of the Blaze News article by praising her and the decision she made by saving all the people on the ship from it sinking.
The Blaze News article, however, only briefly mentions the lives that were saved because of her and instead pulls from past sources about her being a lesbian and only being hired as a 'diversity hire'. This is a great example in showing how this original Blaze News article is biased into delivering news that triggers certain people, whether if that news is true or not.
Next, to see if this story would come up from other sources from the web, I typed "lesbian captain" into the web. Although articles did pop up, they were all from lesser known, less reliable sources. After not finding anything of use from these search results, I decided to do one final thing that could close up this stories accuracy for me.
When looking up "New Zealand Captain Saves Ship", I came across an article from BBC titled "New Zealand loses first naval ship to sea since WW2". When looking at the article, although it does mention that a ship sunk, it does not give details on the captain, let alone the captain being a lesbian.
After this, I came to a dead end. This story did not seem to be posted on any other reliable websites outside of the BBC. Seeing this article, however, did make one main thing stand out about the original Blaze News article: the Blaze News article is spun in a way to make the issue seem more about the captain being a lesbian instead of other, more pressing matters about this situation.
This situation and writing of this topic shows the hypocrisy inside of modern day journalism. Although the story of the boat sinking is true, connecting it to the Captain being a lesbian comes off as desperate and wanting to play a blaming game on someone/something that you have biased feelings against in life is not fair. It also shows how people will randomly engage and click on rage-driven articles, as the Facebook engagement was decently high.
Overall, this example just proves that the news should never be 100% trusted, as they will play with your emotions and/or feelings instead of actually focusing on the important and useful topics of the story.