In a world full of biased media and fake news, how do we make real facts easily accessible to help our community be properly informed? 

Senior Aiden Wasserman started the Hackley Current Events Club with the solution to combat this question. 

“In today’s world, a lot of people are uninformed and don’t know how to consume media,” he said. 

He and senior Annika Terezakis lead the club together to inform the Hackley community about current news events while helping people consume media properly.

Before starting the club, Aiden noticed being uninformed as falling into two categories: the first being receiving untrue or biased media, and the second being receiving no news at all. Aiden believes that people need quick and easy news that contains selected facts so that people can form their own opinions with minimal bias. 

According to Aiden, the club does not have “membership in the typical sense.” They do not have members or club meetings, instead, they use their Instagram as a platform to achieve their goals of informing others on current events and they measure the number of “members” by counting their followers, which currently stands at 186.

Every week, Aiden filters through sources, picks out the major headlining news events, and then writes quick blurbs on them. Annika then edits them and posts them to their Instagram. They try to post every Sunday, although Aiden said that sometimes they post on Mondays if they take longer to make than usual. Aiden predicts that out of the 186 followers, around 50 read their posts each week. 

Aiden describes their Instagram posts as “a quick two-minute read where you can get all your news for the week.”

Their club started in September of 2022, so they have been actively creating posts for a little over a year. 

When running a club that covers current events and topics that can be politically controversial, it can be a hard line to manage, and one that is especially challenging in recent years with recent events. Aiden tries to inform himself on varying sides of opinions during the research portion, and then he writes just the facts on his posts, without picking a side. This allows the readers to create their own stances on these topics. If the readers do not like just the facts, then that is more their issue and goes beyond the goal of their club to create a space for the creation of individual opinions. 

Although this is the goal, he said that sometimes he may end up accidentally giving certain facts that could create a bias towards certain viewpoints, or his own bias may come into play. He battles this by running his articles by another person, usually someone with a different opinion than him, to give him feedback before it is posted to their Instagram. 

Regarding the club’s impact, Aiden hopes that people in the Hackley community have a better idea of what is going on in the world through their posts. 

Aiden values having readable posts. They do not use any language that is too fancy and whenever they reference an event that people may not know about, they always give historical background and context. 

 “I don’t want it to feel like a chore to read,” said Aiden. 

Aiden said that “many lack the ability to acknowledge that others may want to improve our country, just in a different way.” According to him, this is precisely what has led our country to where it is now, so when one can access the full facts and unbiased media, then they will be able to be more moderate and tame about a situation, allowing them to have more understanding of opposing views. 

He hopes that people who read their posts will begin to understand that “we’re all in this together.” People with different views need to accept that and work with each other to fix greater problems that involve everyone. 

“If I can just make an impact on five people, then that would make me feel like my goal is fulfilled,” Aiden said.