New AI Solutions to Verify Facts

Shelby Coffey is vice chair of the Newseum. He was executive vice president at ABC News in New York before joining CNN in 1999, where he was news chief at CNNfn. Previously, he was editor of the Los Angeles Times. Coffey has held editorial positions with the Dallas Times Herald, U.S. News & World Report and The Washington Post. In 2001, he was named a fellow of the Freedom Forum, where he studied and wrote about the media and First Amendment issues. Mr. Coffey is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the International Press Institute, and he served on the board of the Pacific Council on International Policy. Mr. Coffey serves as Member of International Advisory Board for Oxford Analytica, Ltd and has been its Director since July 2015. In this talk Shelby examines…

1. The methods of deceiving the public are ever more sophisticated.
2. In a contrarian and sardonic fashion, we will look at 10 ways deception, especially self-deception, is growing in society.
3. The best cure is media education, which the next speaker, Esther Wojcicki, will detail.


Esther Wojcicki is the founder of the scholastic journalism at Palo Alto High School, now the largest in the nation. Over the past 30 years she built the journalism program from a small group of 20 students in 1985 to over 600 students in 2014 and five other journalism teachers. The program has won major national and international recognition and is a model of how to integrate the curriculum and teach 21st century skills. She is Vice Chair of the Board of Creative Commons, Chair of PBS Learning Matters, and on the board of the Alliance For Excellent Education. She is also an adviser to EdSurge, Hapara and Shmoop and CEO of ClassBadges. In this presentation, Esther looks at…

1. All students need to learn journalistic skills.
2. They develop purpose, autonomy, and mastery.
3. They learn how to recognize fake news.