As a Victoria-based journalist and a father of three teens, Gregor Craigie paid close attention to where his kids were getting their information and news. With social media taking a prominent spot, more and more he found himself asking them: “How do you know that that’s true?”
Long sensing a growing sea of misinformation globally, it now felt like the right time for the well-known host of CBC Radio One’s On the Island to write a book. The purpose was to give young readers and their guardians practical actions they could take to fight fake news.
“It felt like a perfect mix between my professional life as a journalist and my personal life as a dad,” he said.
Craigie’s book, Sticking to the Facts: 10 Ways to Fight Misinformation, publishes Feb. 17. It incorporates knowledge that the award-winning author and journalist has gained in his more than 20 years of experience at the BBC, CBS and CBC.
What worries Craigie the most about how young people are learning to judge what’s true online is that, “for the most part, they’re not.
“There’s so much that’s out there that’s either outright lies or even mistakes. Or unsubstantiated things or opinion masking themselves as facts,” he said. “Traditional media outlets have a set of standards, whereas anybody pretty much can put anything on YouTube [for example],” he said.
“There is so much information that kids are getting, but they’re not getting taught a lot [about misinformation].”
Craigie hopes the book will teach parents something, too.
“I’ve especially heard this from teachers: often kids are educating their parents about media literacy,” he said. “I think it’s a great thing for parents and kids to read together.”
The book, edited and published by Orca Book Publishers, makes the complex topic accessible for readers by breaking it into a list of actions.
Colourful illustrations by Bithi Sutradhar bring the points to life, and compelling real-world examples, including ones dating back as far as the Roman Empire, demonstrate that misinformation is an old problem.
In 1835, for example, the New York Sun printed completely false articles about life on the moon just to sell papers, the book notes. Recently, a fake article claiming that American politician Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez wanted to create a “nationwide motorcycle ban” was shared more than 6,000 times.
While the book has 10 lessons, Craigie said if he had to choose just one lesson for readers to take away, it’s to read past the headline.
“Too many of us in life are so busy that we tend to only look at a headline, or we just hear a sentence or two,” he said. What gets lost is taking the time to weigh the evidence, consider the source, understand the bigger picture and fact check.
The result might look like people commenting on social media posts based on a headline, and arguments based on misunderstandings or incomplete pictures.
“Reading past the headline is a really good starting point,” Craigie noted.
That recommendation is just the tip of the iceberg. To get a fuller picture, Craigie’s book Sticking to the Facts can be found at https://www.orcabook.com/Sticking-to-the-Facts.
Sticking to the Facts was published on Feb. 17, 2026. It follows Craigie’s first foray into middle-grade fiction, Saving Wolfgang, and his other nonfiction hits for young readers, Why Humans Build Up: The Rise of Towers, Temples and Skyscrapers and Walls: The Long History of Human Barriers and Why We Build Them.