Illinois Is the First State to Have High Schools Teach News Literacy
npr.org
npr.org
It was taught in more the general sense of how to apply critical thinking to judge news stories. To the people saying that this just instills propaganda about specific news sources: consider learning a little bit more about the class.
It teaches about how to tell journalism apart from other kinds of information, like entertainment and opinion; the hallmarks of good reporting, like transparency; discerning assertion from verification, and evidence from inference; the idea of seeking out multiple sources and how to reconcile them, etc. It's more a toolbox of how to inform oneself, regardless of any specific source.
It definitely included examples of bad reporting from all sorts of sources, because the message is that its ideas are applicable to any source of information.
Ideas: https://www.centerfornewsliteracy.org/what-is-news-literacy/
Class: https://www.centerfornewsliteracy.org/stony-brooks-center-fo...
Most people I know who went into the course just for credits came out with a greater appreciation for the course in general.
The fact is there's selection bias in people who even take these types of classes, and there's really no way to know how effective it is in reducing ones propensity to be "misinformed" (by whatever measure).
> there's really no way to know how effective it is in reducing ones propensity to be "misinformed" (by whatever measure)
It seems straightforward to research it.
Most regular English classes have a very similar curriculum and almost certainly any English teacher on the high school level will say part of their learning objectives for their students is to improve critical thinking skills.
> It seems straightforward to research it.
How would you? Seems very difficult to me.
If the question is "How effective is a course in reducing ones propensity to be "misinformed"?" then that's a pretty basic (and cheap) experimental psychology study.
Set up a control group (diverse, large enough) that goes through a traditional curriculum. No added class.
Set up a test group (diverse, matched, large enough) that adds the additional class.
Afterwards, present both groups with a battery of defensible and indefensible information, with and without source identification.
See what the statistics say.
Some psychology is hard or impossible to study, but this is relatively straightforward.
What’s something objectively indefensible that would require a course on misinformation to identify?
I also don’t really see how you can setup a control group - either this class is required in which case a control is not possible, or you introduce the massive selection bias.
The best way would be to assign people to taking this class, which I suppose could be straightforward. I sincerely doubt there would be any effect once you control for grades in something like English.
Off the top of my head?
- Susie says the sky is blue. The sky is blue, because Susie says so.
- Frank says climate change is real. Frank is a convicted pedophile. Therefore, climate change is not real.
- Among all animals, only man is rational. Women are not men. Therefore, women are not rational.
- All humans are alive, therefore life begins at conception.
- Hacker News is the best source of informed commentary, because informed commenters comment on Hacker News.
And I've seen real world analogs of all of those on cable news shows.
> massive selection bias
This is something that experimental psychology has been solving for about 100 years. They're not bad at it.
You don't have a yearning to be part of a tribe, unless you feel like you're missing one.
cue histrionics
Provided it can stick to that, I'm all for it. But the landscape has become a lot more partisan/ideological in the last 10 years, particularly at universities, so I understand why people are skeptical/concerned. One also wonders what's going on in journalism programs around the country that is allowing for so much unabashedly propagandist content to be pushed out under the guise of "journalism"?
What if the propagandists are portraying it that way, in order to create that skepticism/concern. They do delegitimize one institution after another: Journalism, education, government, etc. - these are the big ones.
> so much unabashedly propagandist content to be pushed out under the guise of "journalism"?
If you are talking about opinion columns/segments, I agree it's there. But most straight news from major sources is impressively straight, IME.
> But most straight news from major sources is impressively straight, IME.
Your attitude is exactly why so many posters here are skeptical of the idea of "News Literacy". Whatever right-wingers are saying, there are good reasons to distrust institutions, including journalistic ones.
Any genuine "News Literacy" course will end up teaching radical skepticism. It certainly won't teach fealty to the noble and honorable professional journalists, which is what you seem to be suggesting.
> Most straight news from major sources is impressively straight
I personally think both of these have happened. I bristle at the inference that only one of them is taking place.
This post is an excellent example of information to not trust.
https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/solutions-to-political-...
It would seem unsurprising that the end result of this, upon pulling the "center" of each party towards its own extreme, is essentially what we've seen -- ~50% of conservatives now believe in vaccine/pandemic conspiracy theories, vs liberals support some extremists at the local level, but also continue to support centrists like Biden at the national level.
They wouldn't be pulled to extremes, they'd already be there. However, most research shows it's the right that's moved far. Look at Trumpism and compare that to prior conservative leaders, such as GW Bush, GHW Bush, Reagan, Ford .... Biden fits right in with Clinton and Obama.
> liberals support some extremists at the local level
What extremists? There are people farther left than Biden, but nobody trying to seize power from the people, letting a deadly pandemic spread for political reasons, backing arrest and brutality toward their political enemies, etc.
It's not balanced; if Amy punches Bob, it's not even-handed to blame both of them. If Amy burns down the house, it's not even-handed to say 'we're all crazy'.
I see Trumpism as a cause, not a symptom.
The right was casting about for a leader after McCain and Romney (both centrists) lost to Obama. Trump (and allies) spoke loudest, and so pulled the "party truth" to the right for the Republican party.
Those Republicans who disagreed (of whom there were many) left politics or stopped speaking publicly about their disagreement. Or, over time, began to agree with the party line. Little tent politics.
> What extremists?
There's a well known group, who you can probably find by seeing who's on the Fox News homepage right now, who says things would would be considered far left.
And yet, Biden still calls these people crazy and says no to the more extreme policy proposals. Big tent politics.
My comment wasn't sharing blame. It was remarking on the fundamentally different organizations that the right and the left run, and who they allow to speak.
Fair enough, and I think that's a valuable point. However, I think the following is too:
>> What extremists?
> There's a well known group, who you can probably find by seeing who's on the Fox News homepage right now, who says things would would be considered far left.
> And yet, Biden still calls these people crazy and says no to the more extreme policy proposals. Big tent politics.
I don't think they are extremists, but if you can name some and their extreme policies, I'd go with it. Fox isn't a great source for deciding what is 'far left'.
But to talk about policies, I would call defunding all police, complete student loan forgiveness, banning nuclear power and crude exports, and opposing market based carbon taxes extremist.
The article is a few years old, but by most measures, the Democratic party has been moving from the center-right toward the center-left, making it a relatively centrist party on the global stage, while the Republican party has remained firmly right-wing.
Your comment appears to be true, but what we're seeing may simply be America rebalancing herself for the first time since the lead-up to the Cold War.
Many, including possibly you based on comments so far, are enchanted with the idea that one side is correct always and another side is wrong always.
I think this is the root of the problem - a meta problem where communication has broken down - because the go-to discussion technique is to quote a gish-like succession of cherry-picked examples so the conclusion of the conversation can be one side is always wrong and another side is always right.
Said another way, any conclusion that ascribes traits to "the left" or "the right" is exactly the sort of stuff I would hope a News Literacy course teaches you to discredit.
I think the problem is twofold, political parties are followed as if they are sports teams, and due to shrinking advertising revenues the news media dishes everything with a massive helping of hyperbole. For example, which US political party has a majority of its registered votes in support of gay marriage? The answer is both, but that doesn't get acknowledged in the media.
That depends on all of the time frame (are you talking from the height of the mid-to-late-1990s “neoliberal consensus” where the DNC had shifted sharply right on economic issues compared to its previous positions, and when—due in part to the economic boom, broader in reach down the distributional ladder than subsequent expansions—racial issues were at a historically low salience, or some other time), and your political frame of reference (a fix set of policy stands defining degree of left/right-ness, or comparison to evolving global or developed-world standards), and what you are calling “the left” and “the right” that have moved (are you talking about the nth-percentile position in the electorate, are you talking the median position in each of the major parties [and, if so, are you looking at the party-in-the-electorate or the party-in-government], etc.)
And, as with most identity-charged issues, standard selection tends to be biased by the desired outcome (either directly and consciously, or because of worldview, e.g., a conservative will be biased toward the constant-policy rather than evolving-international-norms standard in measuring how far to the right or left things in the US are.)
What do they mean by 'left-leaning'?: My professors might have been left-leaning, but I rarely knew their politics. The question is what the students are learning.
Also, conservatives have moved far rightward, which might make others relatively more leftish.
Also, reactionaries politicize lots of things, such as climate change. Education and research isn't affirmative action for conservatives - they need to prove their ideas. Climate change denial lacks the science behind it; it shouldn't be taught. That doesn't make climate change education biased toward liberals.
How does the book address those issues? Also, why do you trust that book (an honest question - I haven't heard of it)?
I don't think this is true, I think the left-wing media has fixated increasingly on the far-right or exaggerating the extent to which individuals on the right are "far-right" which gives the impression that the right is drifting, but it's just the media changing how it represents the right. To be clear, the right is changing, but it's not perceptibly drifting to the right.
> Also, reactionaries politicize lots of things, such as climate change. Education and research isn't affirmative action for conservatives - they need to prove their ideas. Climate change denial lacks the science behind it; it shouldn't be taught. That doesn't make climate change education biased toward liberals.
2 things:
1. We don't even need to invoke conservative beliefs (certainly we don't need to cherry-pick the most overtly anti-science of conservative beliefs), we can look at moderate liberal beliefs, like colorblind approaches to combatting racism which are equally vilified and actively suppressed.
2. If we're talking about "ideas competing in some marketplace" then why are the left so frequently resorting to cancellation of intellectuals rather than debate? E.g., consider all of the petitions to have professors fired or to have papers deleted from journals. And I'm not talking about dumb kids circulating petitions to have their professors fired, but university faculty circulating petitions to have their colleagues fired for ideological (not factual) transgressions.
But every time we talk about this, left-wing folks pretend that the debate is whether or not to allow creationism or climate denial in the classroom. This seems transparently disingenuous to me.
On the left, far-left voices are also getting louder, but I don't think the centrist-left voices have gotten quieter as much as their centrist-right counterparts.
The end result is that "the right" seems more right (in terms of speech) while "the left" seems... conflicted (in terms of speech).
Even if that's masking the underlying counts and beliefs.
I don't know if it's more or less charitable to suggest that they're primarily driven by revenue. The incentives are basically the same in that model, except the lean is audience-generated rather than centrally controlled. You'd expect more extreme positions on both sides, which is consistent with what you're saying.
A combination of both best fits the evidence, I think. You write controversial articles about both sides to get clicks, and write about the center of your side to get political support. So you get people on both sides with very skewed views (the far) of the other, and who think of their own side as idealogically diverse (the far) but grounded in reality (the center). If the media landscape is primarily liberal, you'd expect it to look the way you're describing it.
I really like that conclusion, because it's perfectly consistent with my experience. I don't really have evidence to support this, though, and I'm not sure how to go about getting any.
The "your centrist, but no other" political motivation (even if not economic) is a piece I missed.
It would be convenient to denigrate those facts in some way, but they are there: Conservatives (generally) back climate change denial, which will cause generations of catastrophe.
> colorblind approaches to combatting racism which are equally vilified and actively suppressed
I don't agree they are "equally vilified" as the overt and covert racism of many on the right. I think "actively suppressed" lacks much basis or meaning except conservative repetition.
There is debate on left, that's true, and that's a good thing.
> why are the left so frequently resorting to cancellation of intellectuals rather than debate?
I don't agree that it's a phenomenon of the left; conservatives repeating that claim doesn't make it true (any more than climate change denial). Look at the conservative efforts to silence protestors (laws limiting protests, legalizing striking them with cars), professors (such as the right-wing donor at UNC, threats to and reductions of tenure at major universities), students (e.g., the football players at U of Texas), etc. Look at Colin Kaepernick, who the President of the United States attacked and who lost his career. Look at many executive branch employees, in Washington and the states, who were fired for telling the truth and following the law, and judges who were attacked for the same. Right-wing politicians and journalists who are destroyed for challenging Trump or reactionary dogma. Etc.
The right likes to push this idea of universities as brainwashing factories, but there's very little of that going on given that its usually a struggle to get everyone to do the assigned reading, let alone try to brainwash people.
I understand some students are lazy. But that's what an F is for. Even in undergrad, I valued my time and tuition dollars more than that.
As my father told a student who complained about a D in his course: "No, I didn't give you a D. You earned a D. I would have given you an F."
(Went to GT and had family who taught undergrad and grad, so might have different perspective on expectations)
Wow. I would say IME people were transformed from unengaged and ignorant to skilled critical thinkers. YMMV, and it it may depend on college and major, but they couldn't make it through liberal arts classes "brainless and all thinking the same things"; they'd fail.
People do realize that you don't have to choose between the regressive, anti-intellectual right and the regressive, anti-intellectual left, correct? Every time someone criticizes the left, some left-wing person argues that the right-wing is worse as though there isn't a moderate option. We have to choose between overt left-wing propaganda and overt right-wing propaganda--we can't have a media apparatus that at least pays lip service to objectivity and neutrality like we have had for the last few decades.
I agree with 'don't'; the idea that everything is politicized propaganda is a tool of the propagandists, like a liar saying 'everyone lies'.
The right-wing opinion on universities and college graduates shifted around the same time that college graduates stopped being a strong GOP constituency.
It doesn't take too long in research-land to appreciate that ideologies are merely abstractions; they're tools to help us understand and discuss the real world.
The people with blind ideological faith are mostly uneducated (and perhaps undergrads), but the academics know how messy the world actually is and love to talk about the jagged, contradictory bits that don't line up with our current models of thought.
Younger journalists are less likely to see their job as being a neutral arbiter of truth and more likely to see themselves as part of the culture war.
I'm a liberal but just as the ACLU is not the same organization it was 20 years ago, neither is The Gray Lady.
It's just the Northeast of the US: NYT, WSJ, Washington Post; and of course NY is the center of journalism (as with many things), and Washington and NY are the leading centers of power and therefore news. There are no equivalent west coast or southeast news sources.
However, don't forget that the largest 'publication', or publisher, is Murdoch: Fox, Wall Street Journal, etc. And that is right-wing and the most biased.
The influence of the coasts has been remarked on for a long time, but I think with the Internet it's actually a much improved situation: People easily get news from all over the country and the world. Everyone can read the BBC and much more (including Russian sources, without even knowing it! :) ), and they also get their news, for good or ill, from random people worldwide! :P
> journalists for the largest publications are overwhelmingly far more left-wing than the rest of the country
That assumes the personal political beliefs have a large effect on their jobs.
Now a days, it’s become a circle jerk on who can get the most twitter likes, they follow and retweet people of their same political side, get multi million salaries, have zero idea of what the common peasant is going through, journalists sit in their ivory tower and look down upon the peasants for not doing the same “sophisticated” things. Smugness and being condescending is a norm in journalist circles.
The best journalist of modern world is rotting in a prison cell in the UK being extradited to the US while the journalists carry water for politicians and how mean tweets is somehow a threat to their press freedoms of lies. They lie and flip flop on all issues and then when the facts come out, they act as if they were never wrong and corrections are printed ignored by everyone, damage is already done.
"The battle is won when the average American regards a corporate journalist exactly as they regard a tobacco executive." - Michael Malice
I won't dispute that someone like Assange is good to have around, but I'm not sure I would ever consider him the best journalist in the world. Part of being a good journalist is looking at the motivations of your sources and looking for and examining the information you're not getting as much as the information you are. To accept and release everything uncritically while also hiding sources reduces some of the useful information that people would use to slot that information into where they think it should go.
For example, if CNN were to start regurgitating information directly provided by Google's or Apple's PR departments without criticism and people found out, they would be justifiably upset with those organizations for failing to do their job. That's why it's important that information from those entities is attributed to them.
That's not to say I think confidential sources should be outed, just that Wikileaks ended up inadvertently scrubbing a lot of this information from the data presented. Presenting everything you have is a noble goal, but only really works as intended when it's what you've uncovered yourself, and not what someone else gives to you.
Employment and salaries in journalism have dropped precipitously.
https://thehill.com/homenews/media/347691-matt-lauer-and-and...
https://www.thestreet.com/lifestyle/highest-paid-news-anchor...
https://www.cheatsheet.com/entertainment/don-lemon-chris-cuo...
Also not exactly salary but the operating budgets of these corporations is massive.
> “The Atlantic needs to make $50 million in annual subscription revenue in order to break even, according to Thompson. Hitting that target has become more complicated since Trump left the White House and the pandemic let up. New subscribers are coming in at about a quarter of the rate they did last year (10,000 a month, on average), and the magazine faces challenges keeping some of its existing audience, which may have less of a need for The Atlantic’s journalism in a post-Trump, post-Covid world. Without Trump or the pandemic, the path to $50 million is significantly harder. Since February, the magazine has brought in about 10,000 subscribers a month — roughly analogous to its growth rate before the pandemic. Meanwhile, its retention rate for existing subscribers is about 75 to 80 percent, Thompson said. The net result, according to Thompson’s presentation, is not growth. It’s a static or slightly declining subscriber base.”
> the operating budgets of these corporations is massive.
> $50 million
$50 million is not a massive budget.
Journalism as a field maybe can help us arrive at some truths eventually, but it's an iterative process of correction and evolving understanding that never ends. However, individual journalists being arbiters of the truth is just not what part of their job description. How could it be? They cannot collect all the facts, and even if they could, they couldn't report them all to the public because there are too many. So by definition journalists have to decide which stories to pursue and which facts to report, and also how to report them. You can say they should do so in as unbiased a way as possible, and I agree, but the very nature of their job involves making biased decisions.
Also, not all journalists are reporters, just as not all programmers are webdevs. There are all kinds of journalists including editors, curatorial journalists, investigative journalists, opinion columnists, photojournalists etc. Yes straight facts are nice, but I also need some analysis to help me form a nuanced opinion. A fact can tell you something, but it won't lead you to all the implications of that thing.
I think photojournalism is a great example of what I'm talking about. On its face, a photograph is a straight fact. It's a picture of a thing that happened. But the framing, composition, and editing of a photograph essentially encodes a bias, and can equally obscure or reveal the truth. And that's a good thing IMO, I want to see through the photojournalist's perspective when I look at their work. But it's still just one perspective, so I realize it may not be the truth. Recognizing that bias exists, all people have it, and to some degree it always comes through in their work, is part of finding the truth.
So, if there were two sides in a story and, say, an investgative journalist unearthed and presented some fact that resolved the matter, then you might loosely say that journalist was an arbiter of truth on behalf of the public by simply presenting the fact. This was true even as little as a decade ago. And it might have even been considered pedantic to distinguish between journalist as presenter or arbiter.
But this is no longer the case. We are now in an age where people actively refute facts and deny reality itself. They sell the idea that the audience can choose what's true. So when the same journalist presents a fact, he is then accused of bias and becomes a part of the story. Thus, even simple truths have now become debatable to the point that merely presenting them can be cast as arbitration, as if these facts are subjective, thus there is still some matter to be decided.
That's a great way of phrasing it, because it speaks to the economic reality.
You don't get hired as an independent or investigative journalist anymore, at the start of your career.
You do get hired as a content magnet for eyeballs.
This has always been a tension, but it's been exacerbated by the destruction of traditional news funding models and substitution of Facebook and Google ad networks.
So quite literally, the job is fanning the flames of culture war, regardless of how you feel personally. Because that's where the money is. And that's what you're being paid to do.
Bias exists in media to be sure, but one "side" in this country is completely off the rails; assaults truth, trafficks in conspiracy theories, and has generally adopted the fomenting of distrust, fear, hate and anger as its MO in its efforts to accumulate power.
Any effort to counter their disinfo or merely state the truth results in accusations of bias and aggressive attacks.
At the end of the day, any remedy relies on some degree of good faith on the part of the actors and, thus, some adherence to a social contract.
Otherwise, everything (including things meant for the public good, like objective broadcasting) gets ground through the culture war machine. And that's where we are in the U.S.
I’m a liberal American, and our public broadcasting (NPR and PBS) absolutely do have a liberal bias. It’s not as extreme as some outlets, but it’s certainly left-of-center (relative to the US political spectrum).
> Bias exists in media to be sure, but one "side" in this country is completely off the rails; assaults truth, trafficks in conspiracy theories, and has generally adopted the fomenting of distrust, fear, hate and anger as its MO in its efforts to accumulate power.
I agree with this as a statement of fact (though I frame it as an epistemological crisis brought on by the aggressive politicization of left-dominated institutions) but I really hate how my side uses it as an excuse to backslide. “We only have to be a little bit better than the other side, no need to move forward, blame everything on the Republicans no matter how tenuous.” This sort of race-to-the-bottom thinking is exactly what is wrong with American politics. The Republican side is broken and the Democrats will deflect any constructive criticism by pointing at the Republicans (and similarly progressives/liberals deflect to conservatives). We have to destroy the Republicans before we can consider improving/restoring ourselves.
> You do get hired as a content magnet for eyeballs
I get the idea and can imagine it, but I wonder what the reality is. Do you happen to be in journalism?
I'm sure some are, but in many cases they aren't. First of all, it's obvious to anyone observing from the outside, even absent propaganda. But it doesn't suffice to trust our intuition, so we can look to organizations like Heterodox Academy whose members are ideologically diverse academics that support their positions with empirical research. Beyond that, we can do our own homework--look at the ideological composition of the media, academy, etc. If they're growing more ideologically homogeneous over time (they are) it supports the idea that these institutions really are becoming more partisan rather than "it's just Fox News making you believe they are more partisan" (as though moderate liberals put much stock in Fox News).
> But most straight news from major sources is impressively straight, IME.
Perhaps insofar as "most straight news" isn't political, but IME most political coverage is highly partisan (I don't know how anyone can argue the contrary with a straight face following last year's BLM coverage). To be clear, I'm a moderate liberal and I find the media coverage to be very biased as do many other liberals that I know, and of course the conservatives--really the only people who think the media is on the right course are the left-most ~10% IME. Note also that a supermajority of national journalists live in the left-most of left-wing strongholds, so I really don't think it's a case of "90% are wrong about media bias".
A quick point: You'll recall Trump got incredible amounts of coverage from the major news outlets.
But here is my hypothesis from a former 'moderate liberal', but not a partisan:
* The neo-reactionaries (the extreme reactionary conservatism that now dominates the GOP and right wing) politicize everything, especially anything having to do with racism.
* 'Moderate liberals' are defined most by 'moderate', not belief: They chose their positions by looking for a spot between current left and right, regardless of where those two are, where they can sound reasonable to all. It isn't dependent on values or beliefs, so as the conservatives shift far to the right, they moderates navigate to the right to some degree, to stay between their shoals (moderates of the 1990s, I think, would nearly be progressives now in many ways).
Why? In MLK's 'Letter from a Birmingham jail', he says his biggest obstacle is white moderates who want peace over justice. Absolutely read it - it says it far better than I do - and I believe he has it exactly right. They hate progressives because progressives bring what moderates hate most - tension, conflict. These days, where the conservatives have adopted a hyper-aggressive position, the 'safe' response is to not support it, but to not confront it and provoke them - that brings conflict. It's like telling people not to stand up to the bully because it might provoke them - just keep your head down, about racism, about climate change, etc.
I used to be a moderate. Then I realized: How could I keep head down about racism, about climate change, etc? Why was I doing it? I knew speaking up would alienate many people I know, I would be beyond the pale, which happened - I think that corroborates my hypothesis. More important than their relationship with me, than the truth of these issues, was their moderation; I violated their norms.
But once you shake loose from the moderate mental shackles it's actually quite clear. There's not much question of the issues. I'm not really progressive; I don't read the dogma or follow a cause; but you can't really argue with their positions.
I’m not a partisan. I spent most of my life as a registered Democrat and read the NYT every day as recently as 2012-2013. But wokeness has definitely taken over and the pretense of objectivity has been abandoned entirely.
[1] Other good examples: the “Asian hate crime” stuff. It was wall-to-wall “cultural studies” professors blaming “white supremacy” on CNN for weeks. As a card carrying asian it actually caused me to have a bit of an episode where I was questioning my own grip with reality. I literally reached out to Asians I know in NYC to be like “wait, you think this is mainly about homeless people and you want more police, right?” Like if you had just watched CNN coverage you wouldn’t even understand the forces (crime) that led to Eric Adams overwhelmingly winning the democratic nomination in NYC.
Fox News news was traditionally (and still is, from what I can tell) actual news. What's not declared is the transition from a "news" segment to an "opinion" segment.
People who weren't around forget than CNN up until ~1995 was literally just news, 24/7. Here's what's happening in the world.
Once Fox News launched and trends became clear, all 24/7 news channels switched to a blend of news and commentary. Because that's what the market preferred.
I think the move to opinion is more about influencing decisions of the viewership than giving them what they want. Fox started it right around 9/11 as an approach to drum up support for war, and it worked, and the rest saw how effective that was and adopted it cautiously, of course the common thread and my implication is that there are agendas that they all have that this approach helps them achieve better than just delivering information would.
As an aside, in the legal profession, it’s probably the most monumental shift in legal ethics in centuries. E.g. proposed rule 8.5 which thankfully was voted down: https://reason.com/volokh/2020/01/06/a-new-aba-model-rule-8-.... I’ve heard internal gossip from the ACLU and similar organizations where younger lawyers are rebelling against representing longstanding clients for social justice reasons. It’s really quite remarkable.
https://www.spiked-online.com/2020/02/14/the-aclu-would-not-...
Well, that guy did say that, whoever he is.
It’s bad. Professionals inserting their personal political views into their jobs is destroying public faith in other professions. We can’t risk the legal profession coming to be seen as yet another way for the liberal elite to tilt the very systems of society in favor of their political ideology.
It takes two to tango. People get propagandist content because they willingly consume propagandist content. They like it. If people really wanted to be informed, they would watch C-Span all the time and the usual networks would be relegated to niche interest.
In the words of Obama (paraphrased from Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee), when asked about how smart people in Congress are: 'You've got good people on both sides. You've got a lot of foolish people, but you've got some smart folks too.'
... Unfortunately, everyone gets equal time to speak.
More like that content creates engagement and ad money, and people respond to it even though they feel worse. (Not exclusive to news, social media too)
By the way people also like hyper-palatable processed food and that doesn’t mean we get to ignore the material consequences of the obesity epidemic.
While the staff may have political inclinations, the majority of US universities are operated professionally.
To an outside observer of US discourse, the phenomenon appears to be market segmentation and control, not really "ideology".
As former president Trump (a person who says whatever he pleases, without consistent principles) said when Fox failed him, "you have forgotten the golden goose."
https://nationalpost.com/news/world/they-forgot-the-golden-g...
In my view, you see 20-30% of Americans won't take the vaccine that is patently obviously far better than catching COVID. This is a massive self-inflicted wound due to the misinformation and disinformation of bad actors, charlatans, and Russian agents.
Even with a non-objective teacher, we NEED to give space for debate and discussion on news sources, otherwise we will continue to allow our "freedom" to consume garbage content to overpower our education to process that content. I'm all for freedom of speech, but we should pair that with robust education on information diets, biases, logical fallacies, lying, etc. The fact that still, 60% are educated on vaccines and trust doctors, that is a hopeful sign, that in future generations we can banish this ridiculous anti-expertise narrative rampant on the political extremes.
Is it coming from the universities directly or is it reality shock on the j-school graduate’s first job where they learn that pushin leg narratives is the only way to earn a salary?
For instance, NPR talks about news literacy here, and I'm sure most of the people at NPR "know" how to be critical, but their level of reporting often doesn't reflect that.
For another example, there's a podcast I listen to by journalists that often point out poor reporting and misinformation spread by other journalists. But they'll usually uncritically repeat the "common sense/everyone knows" ideas that permeate the media outside of their wheelhouse. I only saw a realization of this issue once, when they were talking about the Gell-Mann Amnesia affect, then a couple of minutes later were talking about news reports showing XYZ, and they gave some throw away disclaimer to the effect of "although, I suppose going by the Gell-Mann Amnesia idea, we perhaps shouldn't trust these reports 100%."
In the end, it seems that news for most people serves as a form of infotainment. Infotainment that spreads a lot of disinformation, but leaves people with the illusion they're informed. I think most people would do well to take a few months off from the news and see how it effects the things they actually have control over (usually a lot less than they assume), or how out of place they'll feel when they jump back in (usually not much, since it seems most news items are forgotten within a few weeks).
After thinking about it (circa 2008ish?), I switched to the BBC for my base American news source, then check both US liberal and conservative media if it's a topic I'm interested in.
If you really want the facts, you shouldn't have any opposition to objectively reading someone from the other side, trying to make their case.
Im sure my views on media arent popular, but i think differently and paid media that controls peoples lives has no place in my life! Its too easy to tweak the truth an inch or more for money/greed.
Though if there are now classes where part of the class is teaching if that news source is telling the full truth i guess my views on media aren't that crazy. Either way its tuned out and I listen to no boogieman only my friends who work in hospitals across the country.
In retrospect, I think the story of the pandemic is going to be how much was concealed from the public, and the impact those images that did break through had (e.g. Dr Li Wenliang's selfies, hooked up to oxygen support).
It's easy to live in an abstract world, until you've seen someone struggling for breath or being put under for intubation.
After two months into the pandemic I was done with it and went about living my life with a mask on. Some very close family members struggled with Covid .. it is real for sure but this pandemic is a human experiment where the real truth and facts will come in time. Time will prevail and help us best deal with it ... even at this point i feel we are still in the experiment walking blindly as they change things .. get vaccine no mask.. wait now wear mask if vaccinated ..oh wait your gonna need a booster shot .. lol
We are all gerbils even the ones pushing out the dynamic information!
Science is a verb, not a noun.
It's easy to forget that when it's taught as a series of facts, pre-discovered long ago. Most students are never faced with the unknown edge of science (until grad school).
Because fundamentally, usefully, that's what science really is -- a method for systematically exploring the unknown.
What that actually looks like in practice -- fits and starts, ideas and experiments and retractions, conflicting data resolution, framework guesses and confirmations and rejection -- has largely been forgotten (after ~1990, in the developed media?).
And becoming used to reporting on scientific discoveries is fine... until we're mode switched to reporting on scientific research, and neither media nor public understand the distinction.
Science is always wrong. Until it's not. And that's its strength.
If you believe everything you are hearing as fact one day the facts change/the science which it does then cool.. I'm on the fence waiting with a mask on as needed to hear the real science and facts as of now they change quickly so and again I'm waiting for it all to work itself out. Not anti vaxxer or anti science here just a realist
I'm always annoyed when the media sites "anonymous intelligence sources" for a story. You're telling me that you trust spies to tell you the truth? Spies are probably pretty damn good at lying.
The media will cite the Pentagon with a straight face completely forgetting its lies to the whole world about WMDs.
And finally somehow both the Army and Pentagon both agreeing on a version of a story means the story is verified. It's not like they communicate with each other and have the same objective!
I was at that game, it it was all very normal, maybe with higher than average attendance, leaving a bit of a mess. The only way I could imagine the news being written as it was, was that the reporter wasn't there, talked to a few people, and extrapolated making the story exciting. There may also have been a motivation to make a school look bad. In any case, the jig was up for the value of in-black-and-white.
Critical thinking is a general thing, not something for news stories. Besides the idea that school teach critical thinking in anything is laughable in this day and age.
What should be taught is history of news and why it exists. Not how to decipher good "news" from bad "news" because there is no good or bad "news". There is only agenda. Schools should also teach the history of modern school systems and the education department. Quite eye opening.
By your comment, it's apparently clear you didn't learn anything valuable in your class. But then again, it's Stony Brook.
Note: This comment was expanded a few times, but the gist remained the same.
Edit: No, I’m not saying “trust NPR, NYT and the like instead of viral content you see on Facebook” isn’t a good takeaway. I’m saying the more effective type of propaganda (at least for people who don’t tend to fall for the obvious crap) isn’t discussed.
I had some minimal education on scrutinizing sources in high school and that's pretty much what it was. I think we spend maybe 10min talking about yellow journalism.
Topics such as evaluating which parties have what direct conflicts of interests or ancillary motivations and how that may affect their reporting were simply not covered. It would have been trivially easy to dig up a few non-controversial historical examples of people peddling very wrong narratives for the benefit of those who fund them.
Now combine with the good old “you don’t know what you don’t know” and you have a great tool to mislead the masses.
Add a bit of cognitive bias on top (combined with being profiled by “popular search engines” that give you the results you already believe in) and you’re hooked.
Underlining story: there is so much need for critical thinking in our schools!!!
I'm confused: Isn't this a very common narrative, especially among a certain political group?
> Underlining story: there is so much need for critical thinking in our schools!!!
That is the solution IMHO and IME: Teach critical thinking, not who is right or wrong. That's what my teachers did almost universally, what other teachers I know of did, and what seems to me is happening in this class.
It's common for both political groups...
The people who don't think their political group distorts the truth are a prime target for this class.
> "But modern propaganda has long disdained the ridiculous lies of past and outmoded forms of propaganda. It operates instead with many different kinds of truth— half-truth, limited truth, truth out of context. Even Goebbels always insisted that Wehrmacht communiqués be as accurate as possible."
> IMO the most effective and most widely deployed (especially among the supposedly more reputable publications) propaganda tool isn’t outright lies, but rather, selective reporting of cherry-picked facts and omission of others to shape stories into their predefined narratives. TFA doesn’t address that at all.
That doesn't mean it isn't taught. The article can't cover everything taught in the class. So that is unfounded.
> It seems to me that students’ main takeaway from this course would be to trust NPR, NYT and the like, rather than viral content.
What makes you say that's the main takeaway; can you cite something in the article or elsewhere? The only argument behind it is the unfounded claim above.
Are you suggesting people should trust viral content? How should they interact with information about their world and decide what to trust?
> doesn’t help when your “trustworthy” media selection decide to suppress all arguments from another side, or remain silent on certain stories altogether.
That's not my experience. Obviously, news sources have limited resources and time, so they can't report everything nor will they always make good decisions. They also are there to serve readers, and thus should omit information that lacks foundation in truth - I certainly don't want to waste my time on it. They won't be perfect, but the only core 'mainstream' source (e.g., major national publications, the NYT, WSJ, ABC News, etc.) that I've seen systematically show bias is Fox News (however, I don't watch CNN or MSNBC) and a little in the Washington Post, which I notice few people remark on.
In the NY Times, for example, I haven't seen it, despite people repeating ad infinitum that it happens (repetition, I hope they teach, has no correlation with truth). They even have an opinion page with as many conservative writers as anything else, and they are among their most popular columns.
Why should I trust anything you say, then? I don't doubt that there are biases, they're certainly are. But you're expecting us to just accept it out of hand.
No, I really don’t give a damn about whether others accept it. I can post my opinion simply as food for thought.
"... has a bias" is trivially true for just about anything. That also makes that sentence useless unless you add more information.
Recognizing that "everyone has an accent" and "everyone has a bias" is about learning to think in greater depth than the natural human tendency to believe "I'm right, and everyone who sees the world differently is wrong." That endeavor is not useless.
Also, you are drawing the wrong conclusion. "Everyone has..." is simplistic. Some have more, some less is nuanced.
That's one way in which people sometimes choose a "right" or "zero" accent. Another is by social standing ("the queen's English" was literally that).
Either way, that's declaring one accent the right way of speaking, and describing people who speak differently as having a "heavy" accent instead of simply a different way of speaking.
Perhaps a specific example would make this clear. There are many dialects and accents of German in Germany. Which one would you declare the standard, and who would you describe as having a "heavy" accent?
My point is that making such a judgement is wrong to begin with, and one should simply describe a particular accent by its features or regional distribution, not as "heavy".
(And to respond, briefly, to the comment below: when learning a foreign language you choose to learn a particular dialect and accent. That doesn't make other accents "heavy", they just aren't the accent you've learned.)
In linguistics, this is the prescriptive vs descriptive debate. It's not controversial that a prescriptive grammar declares how a language should or ought to be used. Declaring one accent the standard is a similar prescriptive position.
> Recognizing that "everyone has an accent" and "everyone has a bias" is about learning to think in greater depth than the simplistic tendency to believe "I'm right, and everyone who sees the world differently is wrong." That endeavor is not useless.
I'd add that the most important step is understanding one's own, and understanding that you always have biases that are invisible to you.
In the context of reporting, bias isn't about reporting accurate facts. That's honesty or accuracy. A source could be very biased but 100% accurate (by cherry picking facts that fit an agenda) or neutral but inaccurate (by reporting everything they hear without any evaluation or judgement).
Bias is about choosing what facts are worth reporting, and which words (with similar denotations but different connotations) to use to describe those facts.
> the most important step is understanding one's own, and understanding that you always have biases that are invisible to you.
Agreed.
But my conclusion is the same: The 'story' is usually pretty accurate, IME, within certain limitations (e.g., news moves quickly, and I find the NYT often omits some important questions, though not political ones).
https://taibbi.substack.com/p/aaugh-a-brief-list-of-official...
Did they post the syllabus in the article and I missed it? Or did you get on your hobby horse and just make unfounded assumptions?
This is as comforting as hearing that schools are teaching religion.
Was there a time when it wasn't?
Things were never perfect, of course. And we have never had as many facts available to reach our own conclusions (so, it's arguable if people are less or more informed today), but looking only at the media, things weren't always that bad.
I'm sure the students could find tons of examples of NPR's nonsense using these methods. Especially relevant is checking photos or videos accompanying articles, the main example given in the report, cause all the big players get caught on this one constantly.
Media literacy classes have already been shown to turn some percentage of kids into nazis no matter how you teach them, so any particular bias that might be getting instilled probably doesn’t matter too much.
If you tell kids to “Go on YouTube and do your own research about the Jews,” then whatever the teacher thinks stops being relevant after about 30 seconds.
Quite a claim. Where has this been shown?
That's not what is being taught, according to the article.
Which of course is accurate, but at the same time a lot of people would be better off just blindly trusting the media.
> The entire premise of "media literacy" is that what the mainstream media is telling you might not be true
For example, the class studied a video that spread on Facebook, not in the mainstream media, for misinformation.
Did you watch the Danah Boyd video I linked to? There aren't many better Internet ethnographers than her. Like I don't know if she's the absolute best person in her field, but she's pretty easily top 10.
When the lab leak theory emerged/was initially dismissed, I was actually reminded of my lessons from high school.
Of course, this was pre-Internet and the focus was on written English... it's not like we were taught (say) how video editing can control perceptions.
Especially with what the internet has done to news this really should be taught in schools everywhere.
My takeaway is that they’re trying to teach students how to identify bad sources/reporting or outright fake news, not litigate specific news reports.
Using 2016 as an example doesn’t invalidate that goal or imply bias.
Was the story of Russians electing Trump coherent and without holes?
It has real evidence. I can hunt down more if you like.
The senate council that had those findings was GOP lead. The GOP lies a lot, but usually for their own benefit.
Do you assume I somehow care? This and then Obama's 8 years of drone bombing of weddings in Pakistan, hospitals in Afghanistan, prolongation & expansion of mass surveillance all over the world just shows how "trustworthy" your government is (or in fact, any monopoly of violence).
> The GOP lies a lot, but usually for their own benefit.
For whose benefit is DNC lying?
I dislike both political parties, and wish we would pass ranked choice voting ASAP so we can break out of this two party system already.
Both parties are corrupt. However, only one has recently tried to overthrow our entire governmental system.
Edits for clarity, and to add that if someone takes an attack on their party as a personal attack, there are larger issues there (not that I am claiming you are, but it seems something worth mentioning in a discussion like this).
> wish we would pass ranked choice voting
Do you believe that parties that in a joint effort "fortified" debates in 2000 to make sure no 3rd party could receive air time and wider audience, would commit political suicide introducing a mechanism that'd shake their positions?
> Both parties are corrupt. However, only one has recently tried to overthrow our entire political system.
I'm an outsider, is it the one that "fortified" the election [1]? I mean, Trump is an egotistical narcissist who didn't drain any swamps and probably didn't fulfill a single promise. But all those things "Trump has dementia", "he attacks the media", "writes too many executive orders like a dictator"... Weren't they just projections? Whose "press conferences" are even more disgraceful and staged than Putin's "pryamaya liniya" ("direct line")? Whose administration admits they're responsible for the censorship policies of social platforms? Who's flirting with oligarchs (not to be confused with entrepreneurs) and who lifted sanctions on Putin's pipeline while banning the building of a local one? The people from Bush administration, on whose side were they?
[1]: https://time.com/5936036/secret-2020-election-campaign/
But I was referring to the one that incited a riot that rushed the Capitol.
However, neither will change until forced. The best way to accomplish that that I can see is for someone either independent or in a splinter group in one of the main parties to run on ranked choice. Until then, the best we can do is vote for whoever is best (or less bad :/ ) for each job, regardless of their party.
As entertaining as it is, mudslinging between parties doesn't accomplish much. There's so much garbage both have done, we'd just all get covered with plenty of mud left to spare.
If you make big claims and then don't back them up, it's hard for me to see it as "censorship" vs "hype avoidance."
"Hype avoidance" is a nice euphemism though. I'll be sure to be wary of anyone using it going forward.
It actually does:
> Republicans' trust has not recovered since then, while Democrats' has risen sharply. In fact, Democrats' trust over the past four years has been among the highest Gallup has measured for any party in the past two decades. This year, the result is a record 63-percentage-point gap in trust among the political party groups.
https://news.gallup.com/poll/321116/americans-remain-distrus...
Will you elaborate on how you feel the quote you included implies bias?
Then you have other other polls from Gallup, like this one showing that six in 10 in US see partisan bias in news media. From the report:
> Americans Believe News Media Favors Democrats
Gallup asked those who perceive political bias in the news media to say which party the news media favors. Almost two-thirds (64%) of those who believe the media favors a political party say it is the Democratic Party. Only about a third as many (22%) believe the media favors Republicans.
> This is not new. Americans who perceive media bias have always said the direction of that bias leaned in favor of the Democrats, although the percentage holding that view has varied. The gap was smaller in 2003 and 1995, but was more similar to today's attitudes in 2000.
https://news.gallup.com/poll/207794/six-partisan-bias-news-m...
The story reads like the journalist is completely unaware of their implicit left wing bias and makes little effort to fix it - to them, this example is an obvious example to use but it will alienate readers on the other side (like the OP), yet they used it anyway.
The actual examples used in class was influencers talking about nutrition and a teacher talking about jan 6 being controversial in the class. And I think your concern that news literacy may be defined too simplistically in the classroom is valid but your reading of the article seems to have poor comprehension.
Yet if you look at the list of mistakes the mainstream media has made in the past decade I’m not sure why anyone would assume they are worthy of an assumption of good faith reporting.
I've barely ever come across the NYT in my lifetime, not being American.
Good try though.
> https://web.archive.org/web/20171106063502/https://www.thegu...
> Trump dump: president throws entire box of fish food into precious koi carp pond
> While his host, Japan’s prime minister Shinzo Abe, spoons small amounts of feed, the US leader gives the fish a large feast
> Having apparently lost patience with tempting the fish to the edge with modest offerings of food, Trump simply upended his wooden container and dumped its entire contents into the water.
> White House reporters captured the moment on their smartphones and tweeted evidence of the president’s questionable grasp of fish keeping.
> Abe is seen grinning, as is a woman in a kimono standing to one side. Next to her, Rex Tillerson – perhaps grateful for a moment of comic relief after he was named in the Paradise Papers – could not suppress a laugh, according to witnesses.
> Some speculated that a poor palace employee would be dispatched to the scene of Trump’s faux pas to the clean up the mess as soon as the two leaders disappeared inside.
> Trump is not alone in misjudging the fishes’ appetite, however. According to the Aquascape website, overfeeding is the most common mistake made by keepers of koi carp.
> “This can make your fish sick, and excessive amounts of waste that strains the limits of what can be biologically reduced, results in a decline of water quality,” the site says.
The whole article is written as "trump stupid, kill fish"
Of course the reality is... trump did it all by protocol, doing what the host did, first feeding by the spoon, then throwing in the rest... but they even managed to crop the video, showing only what trump did, and cutting Abe out of the frame.
This is not some random guy on facebook, or some cheap rag.. it's a (once) respectable newspaper. If I cannot trust them with reporting about something, that was recorded by many, many cameras, and with video available everywhere, how can I trust them with reporting about something, I have no direct insight to?
How can i trust them then with an "unnamed source" stories, when they lie about stuff recorded on camera?
Lol "quality journalism" as they say it themselves. Not my level of quality. They have good pieces. But hit-pieces like this makes me unable to support them at all.
Who is using selective reporting to create a false narrative for what purpose?
I would be surprised if interactions with police quite suddenly turned less confrontational. People still do things to attract police intervention and police still respond and have to leverage lethal force, but we don't hear that much about it in the media. so, what gives?
The protest coverage faded out over time; anecdotally, so have the protests I've seen while driving around town.
I suppose you have to pick an example to work from and frankly, the 2016 election was the most noteworthy and groundbreaking disinformation campaign.
A teacher could certainly talk about the latter, but neither Hunter Biden's laptop and Lab Leak Theory have the bulk of documentation to point to.
You could have spared yourself that dig, it's beside the point and stupid.
The comparison with religion is actually good. In some countries religion is taught in school because religion is part of human culture, which is firmly within the bailiwick of school. So teachers teaching religion must be accredited by both the government (for competency) and by their religious authority (for adherence to dogma). That's good, because you know who they answer to, and since religious authorities are usually mainstream you won't get revolutionaries or apocalyptic types either.
But reading the news in school, it's like the Soviets teaching how to trust Prawda.
Religious authorities have a long history of oppressing free thought, including questioning the authority or tenants of the religion, and rationality, such as science. I would not say they are usually 'mainstream', unless we circularly define mainstream as whatever the religion says.
Second, again using Poland as an example, this is largely outside of government control: the state cedes all authority about this part of schooling to Church, and Church is free to choose whatever propagandists it likes.
We went from it being banned on Facebook to it having mainstream acceptance in like a week despite ZERO change in the underlying evidence. The evidence was always just "well there's a lab there". The only thing that changed was Trump isn't president anymore.
It's the perfect rorschach issue for underlying bias, free of any clearcut facts that might be evaluated neutrally.
If someone had collected US research grant money and went the other way would we call them 'paid by America'?
Like I said. The perfect rorschach issue.
Very disenchanted with the media over the last 5 years, and it did not used to be this bad.
It really doesn't matter if it came from the lab or from the environment. The fact that they covered it up shows the lab was breaking protocols and they believed it could have been the lab that released the virus.
The lab needs to be shut down and similar labs shut as well to institute a major overhaul of the system.
Why would China give them ammunition? Even if we assume that the virus didn't come from a lab, it's impossible to prove and handing over a bunch of raw data to a motivated actor has no upsides.
The politically appointed or "hired by reference" committees and/or teams of bureaucrat that are responsible for setting curriculum at the state level would never do that because then they'd have to answer to politicians on both sides of the isle for making their job harder. People operating at these levels of bureaucracy don't need to be told what the boss wants, they read the room and know in which direction they should be erring. Your career doesn't take you through those sorts of positions that far if you're not the kind of person who does that.
Furthermore, the career arc of someone who believes that society's problems will be solved or mitigated by helping the masses think critically is unlikely to take them anywhere near the high levels of public education policy.
And even if it did happen the schools wouldn't teach it and they'd have to be dragged kicking and screaming over a decades long period (because the unions and the municipalities have enough power to play that stalling game for that long) because corralling teenagers is harder when they can call you on your bullshit forcing you to address tough topics that have no good answer other than "I'm in charge, deal with it".
I've heard about it before, but I struggle hard to understand what does it mean
like parents will go to school to flame teacher cuz their kid disagrees with them on $hot_topic?
Worse: for even bringing up a hot topic without bending entirely to the parent's opinion on it (where these opinions differ from a straight description of the facts, is when it's really annoying to deal with this—no amount of neutrality will make them happy, because that's "indoctrination" from their POV). Definitely doesn't have to get to the point of the kid disagreeing with the parent, just presenting anything that they don't agree with can result in angry calls or visits from parents.
Note also that you'd probably be very surprised what can count as a "hot topic".
This just seems more like a way to influence children's political leanings.
At the beginning, the lab leak "theory" was really just a baseless conspiracy theory since there was zero evidence of it. No wonder it was mostly racist right-wing media personalities pushing it.
Yet again, as in 2020, I was unable to share the link below in a private Facebook Messenger group. What else will be censored next, at the behest of the government?
I severely mistrust when the government tells you what and who to believe, and that includes our schools. Teach critical thinking, logic and fallacies, and leave it there - the students can make up their own minds.
[0] https://nypost.com/2021/08/11/video-reportedly-shows-nude-hu...
Wow, you could probably get a Pulitzer
>Facebook Messenger group
>the government
Does.
Not.
Compute.
Error
However, I do applaud your silliness as "Facebook government" almost sounds slightly correct for some swath of people.
https://www.newsweek.com/biden-administrations-admission-the...
In recent times, there has been lots of evidence about how the government and social media companies have been colluding together to "prevent the spread of misinformation" [0]. They have been very transparent about this, and discuss it openly [1].
However, it must not be up to the government to determine what is or is not misinformation - this transposes to government censorship in the worst case, and prevents a healthy marketplace of ideas in the best case.
In the case of the "Hunter Biden Laptop" story (which was misrepresented often), it wasn't Facebook deciding on its own to censor it - it was at the behest of the government.
You don't know what you don't know. What knowledge are you missing because it could never be shown, because it wasn't shown to you? In the last few years, I've seriously worried about this. I've had to diversify my media intake as an attempt to mitigate this, even when the reporting itself was of worse quality in non-standard media channels. (In many cases, I found it to be of higher quality, which was surprising).
I would recommend the same to you, because, especially in this case, you won't know what you're missing unless you look for it.
[0]https://reclaimthenet.org/fb-cdc-misinfo-collusion/
[1]https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2021/07/15/psaki_wer...!
(Maybe students get credit for credibly challenging anything mentioned in the class)
For example, suppose I claim that using brand X soap can give you cancer because they use fat harvested from animals that grazed at a toxic waste dump and that fat contains the toxic chemicals that the animals ingested. Suppose it turns out that brand X soap can in fact give you cancer, but it is because some chemical used to make the soap's wrapping paper is carcinogenic and leaches into the soap. The soap itself is vegan soap with no animal products used in its manufacture. Same for the paper.
My claim is then misinformation even though my claim that the soap can give you cancer is true, because my reasons for the claim were wrong and I had no even remotely plausible evidence to believe those reasons.
No. We gotta try.
1: Rudy Giuliani is involved
2: Rudy Giuliani specifically traveled to Ukraine in 2019 to dig up dirt on Biden, a mission that he publicly announced.
3: Rudy Giuliani is the GRU's "useful idiot" according to a report prepared for the White House by US intelligence services.
1: https://www.rferl.org/a/ukrainian-lawmaker-says-he-met-trump...
2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrii_Derkach
3: https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/sm1118
4: https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/giuliani-bi...
They could also look into all the Russia Collusion stories that turned out to be hot air. People’s overreliance on the Steele Dossier would actually be a good example.
Like there’s actually plenty of stuff on both sides to put together a pretty well balanced unit and I think it would be valuable. But you can’t expect partisans with ideological blinders to teach kids how to be objective.
Meanwhile [0] shows that they have the capability, and the motivations.
This is the exact reason we need a class like this.
[0] https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/sites/default/files/docu...
Edit: And even looking at the numbers provided this is a mischaracterization. Slightly over 30% of Dem's believe it happened, and another slightly over 30% think it probably did. These two things are not equivalent.
Also I think it’s funny you link that senate report, because section VI of the report is titled “NO EVIDENCE OF CHANGED VOTES OR MANIPULATED VOTE TALLIES”
[0] https://today.yougov.com/topics/politics/articles-reports/20...
The numbers provide no evidence for the second claim, which means that the twitter post is being intellectually dishonest.
> section VI of the report is titled NO EVIDENCE OF CHANGED VOTES OR MANIPULATED VOTE TALLIES
And there's not much (or no detectable) evidence of most hacks until suddenly there is. It is not unreasonable to assume a compromised system is compromised. I personally think there probably were not manipulation of the tallies, but I can understand thinking there probably was.
There's certainly much more evidence of it than say, Hunter Biden's laptop.
What's more, Trump and his entire campaign lied about all of this, and Trump threw his weight and the weight of the government he controlled into obstructing the subsequent investigation. When the Mueller Report was finally released, it was torpedoed by Trump's attorney general, whose representation of the Mueller Report was characterized by a federal judge (who has seen more of the Muller Report than you or me) as "misleading" and "lacking candor":
"The inconsistencies between Attorney General Barr's statements, made at a time when the public did not have access to the redacted version of the Mueller Report to assess the veracity of his statements, and portions of the redacted version of the Mueller Report that conflict with those statements cause the Court to seriously question whether Attorney General Barr made a calculated attempt to influence public discourse about the Mueller Report in favor of President Trump despite certain findings in the redacted version of the Mueller Report to the contrary"
"The speed by which Attorney General Barr released to the public the summary of Special Counsel Mueller's principal conclusions, coupled with the fact that Attorney General Barr failed to provide a thorough representation of the findings set forth in the Mueller Report, causes the Court to question whether Attorney General Barr's intent was to create a one-sided narrative about the Mueller Report—a narrative that is clearly in some respects substantively at odds with the redacted version of the Mueller Report." [4]
[1] https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/sites/default/files/docu...
[2] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e4/Report_O...
[3] https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/jy0126
[4] https://www.courthousenews.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/Ba...
Coursework should focus on aspects of information gathering/research; understanding sources, credibility, incentive/motive structures of those sources; comparison techniques between information sources for cross comparison; and then with all the information they gather, skills to apply critical thinking and assessment of the information. You also need to understand human biases that can creep in even when you're aware of the biases that often effect critical assessment.
In the information age, we need a population that's more educated about information, disinformation, misinformation, common propoganda/manipulation techniques, and so on. We also need a population who under certain conditions can do primary information gathering. Unless you're in the business of manipulating people or those who manipulate people align with your interests (they usually don't), then it's to your benefit to have informed peers to help fight off nonsense.
What exactly do you mean by this? Do you mean explaining how it was a giant ratfucking [1] shit-slinging fuckfest perpetrated by political animals? I don't think they ever really make their viewers aware of the fact that they're non-stop hounding a dude, who happens to be the child of a politician, that had to witness his mother and sister be literally crushed to death at a young age [2], while he too was being crushed to death. Gee, I can't imagine why somebody who had to live through that as a child might go on to live a slightly fucked up life.
I hope, that when discussing something such as "Hunter Bidens Laptop", they discuss the fact of how no coverage was given to conflicts of interest around a point like this regarding the other political party, such as the Trump Orgs fairly massive outstanding debts to China, the near infinite list of fucked up things Trump's children have gotten up to, disgusting facts such as when Trump offered to pay for a family members (child) cancer treatment, then took the money back because the parents did something to make him slightly mad, the fact he's had to pay prostitutes hundreds of thousands of dollars after being sued, going back to the fact he'd parroted donating the entirety of his salary to something charitable, and then... imagine this... actually didn't, lol.
But yes, of all the things and conflicts of interest that should be covered and reported on, surely "Hunter Bidens Laptop" is one of them. Man. Remember when people said "maybe it's not a good idea or very nice thing to do in having secret service members drive around a contagious Trump for a small self-serving driveby of a rally of supporters" that was reported by most reasonable news stations? Turned out they were right and one of said service members got so sick with COVID he had to have a leg amputated, and even with whatever insurance being a secret fucking service member entails, he's seriously struggling to afford care. I do not see any news stations bringing this back up though. Why isn't it reported on? This is something that should be discussed in any reasonable class they're attempting to create.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ratfucking
[2] https://www.biography.com/news/joe-biden-first-wife-daughter...
What was it, actually? I've lost track.
> will they discuss how at first the lab leak theory was discarded as "misinformation"?
If 50 or 100 years from now, we find out that aliens did in fact visit Roswell, NM, would we posthumously rehabilitate the UFO nuts and conspiracy theorists of today? Even if all their details were wrong?
It's possible to write the right answer on an exam through pure guesswork; that's why teachers say "show your work". It's possible to be a kook and say something that later turns out to be true. It's possible to call lab leak "misinformation" in 2020 but give it a bit more credence after new facts come to light. Especially when "lab leak" was being used as cover or deflection for incompetence and mismanagement of the pandemic response.
I should add that I am in no way validating either of your claims. I have not seen any info that warrants a "smoking gun" analysis of something evil happening in either case. So far we have chatter and some data points. Would love to be proven wrong on this as that would be a more interesting result.
Remember how this story was botched by an entertainment show (not my definition, theres) disguised as news (Fox News)?[0]
I think this is the point. It's hard to take a "journalist" seriously when there's so many obvious points of amateurism. Kids should be taught to keep those stewards of information accountable and that shock jock news entertainment (CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, etc.) should warrant extra criticism (if not downright ignored completely).
[0] - https://www.newsweek.com/tucker-carlson-says-he-had-authenti...
I was willing to give them the benefit of the doubt on this, but their "punchline" conclusion was that "the video came from Russia". Sometimes if something isn't reported in certain countries because of bias it can be reported from other countries, even if the only reason they do so is to make that country look bad. It doesn't mean that the video was fake, or that it didn't show evidence of ballot stuffing.
I am not saying it was true, I haven't seen that particular video and I'm not one that pushes that particular idea and at this point I don't really care anymore. I'm just unimpressed if that's the reason they discounted it. They also talk about fossil fuel companies funding studies about climate change. While this can certainly be nefarious, it's also possible that they are the only ones motivated to study a particular aspect of climate change because no other groups will touch it because of politics.
"Look at the source" is only one piece of the puzzle. I think it's often sought after because it's a good way to dismiss something out of hand.
It would have been better, in my opinion, if they looked through the video and had the kids see if they can come up with other possible reasons for the actions they are seeing in the video other than "ballot stuffing", and then come up with ways they could try to validate those hypotheses and assign a "truthiness" rating to it. It doesn't matter who publishes a video if it's actually showing what it says its showing.
That sounds fantastic. What is known about, and what are your experiences with, the outcomes? After class? 1 year later? 5 years later? 20 years later?
This should be the top post, something we can learn from. Thank you.
It was explained to us in simple terms that everyone's experience with the world is unique. As such, there is no such thing as unbiased sources and we should always consume news critically. They were simpler times. The most political it got was when my teacher brought in the 3 main newspapers in our area and candidly shared with the class how they were stereotyped in their political editorial leanings. For Americans, think of it like sharing this statement: "Fox News leans toward Republican policies. The New York Times leans toward Democrat policies. USA Today is somewhere in between."
There wasn't any discussion of whether these newspapers were accurate or inaccurate. Fact checks weren't rattled off to us about each source. Rather, the teacher kindly explained to us that it was impossible to be unbiased and we did exercises to critically interpret news sources and see how the same topic might be covered by multiple sources.
I'm going on a bit of an aside for the historical context in which I had these lessons for the next two paragraphs, so feel free to skip to the final paragraph.
In some ways while they were simpler times informationally, Canada was going through wilder times politically back then. There's an argument to be made that Canada as a country was more divided in the early 1990s than the US is today. Québec separation was a very real possibility during this time and actively being sought within our political system. This wasn't just the online pissing contests that some Americans have talking about California or Texas separating from the union. Separatist parties were elected both at Québec's provincial level and as the official opposition party in Canada [EDIT: for Americans unfamiliar with this concept, our Prime Minister and the ruling party had to spend the majority of their daily routine responding to attacks from separatists in the House of Commons and every day the news would have this front-and-centre].
For those too young to remember, the political turmoil culminated in a referendum in the province of Québec -- 50.58% to stay in Canada and 49.42% to become an independent country. The Canadian military had to strategically fly its CF-18s out of their Québec base to American ones in case the referendum passed lest they fall into a foreign nation's hands. Our Prime Minister was busy actively seeking the support of President Bill Clinton and shoring up our gold supplies while the would-be leader of an independent Québec had an official visit to France complete with red carpet and television crews to discuss what their relationship would be once Québec separated.
What's my point? I suppose just to give Americans who still believe in the core concept of the country, a bit of hope. As divided as things are today, they can quickly change. Furthermore, I believe that it is possible to teach these things so they have real merit and aren't just tools of the current political ruling party even in uncertain and highly divided times.
* with some minor exceptions like literal fascists who spam things with their bots or puppets.
Almost every HN thread has a large proportion of attacks on the source and/or their methods. But interestingly, much of it is not (IME, IMHO) 'news literacy' or skepticism, it's the opposite:. Distrusting everyone is as unskeptical and illiterate as trusting everyone.
Skepticism requires examination of the facts, critical thought, and skepticism about ourselves and our own arguments and facts too. The results aren't simple, but nuanced: 'The report is this degree of good in that way, and that degree of bad in this way.' One potential signal is that if it doesn't add nuance it's not really critical thinking.
Also, if it repeats something we've already heard many times - memes, politicized talking points, etc. - it's not critical thinking. Finally, every work of humanity is flawed; critical reading is finding what we can gain from it, despite the flaws. Given the inescapable truth of our flaws, that is the only way we move forward.
I loved kebman's summary of the what they learned in Norway: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28168435
Summed up, it's about how trustworthy a source is, what method was used to obtain the data or opinions in the material (if any), whether the observations or claims in it are first hand or second hand, and whether its conclusions are reasonably objective or subjective.
I hate to take the wind out of your sails because you do have a good point that I think people should pay attention to it but in a literal sense what you're saying is incorrect with respect to the both history of philosophy[1] and just the dictionary definition of the word[2]. What you're talking about is critical thinking, not skepticism. Skepticism is literally a position of general distrust within some domain or even globally. It's probably best not to conflate the two concepts.
This seems to be the modern default of online political arguments. Everyone spams their rehearsed talking points without any real engagement of what was being said. They may quote opponents, but the refutations often to have little or nothing to do with what was being refuted.
Then again, public debates have never had truth-finding as a goal: they’ve always been exhibitions to rally your base. Changing minds happens at the private scale.
That's defeatist. And the world has never had a public forum like the Internet. We're just learning how to use it well.
In fact, when my mother got her masters of library science, I was suprised at how much of the curriculum was basically 101-level comp sci- databases, Unix, basic programming, Internet tech, etc. Being a school librarian is basically about Internet and news trust, maker tech, and research skills, rather than books and literacy.
edit: We can thank Ronald Reagan for this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FCC_fairness_doctrine
The media (en masse) can be factual and yet instill a large bias. Stories with uneven sourcing, presentation and priority of different news stories, biased accompanying photographs, weirdly scaled graphs ... there are millions of ways to use facts selectively and tell a story that is factual but not truthful.
Skepticism is probably the most important part of media consumption. What am I reading? Where does it come from? Does the headline try to beg the question? Are there an equal number of sources on both sides? Do they have equal gravity? Where can I confirm these facts? Do they confirm or reject my pre-existing beliefs? And so on ...
It's a lot of work! That's why most people have poor media literacy. That's why we read something on social media at under 256 chars and believe it.
That’s at least what was claimed. I don’t really know how you overcome that.
Definitely best to read from a lot of different slants.
Seems like it hasn't been a thing for a decade, so I'm not so sure.
There is a lot you can find that isn't in propaganda machines. One essential piece of propaganda is to say that everything is propaganda, like a liar saying everyone lies. The very good news is that, while nothing will meet a standard of perfection, there are excellent news sources - you have more access to quality news than anyone in history, thanks to the professionalization and expansion of journalism and to, of course, the Internet.
The first trick: Skip all opinion pieces. They are all BS from every side, IMHO.
Despite what those propagandists and opinion pieces say, the NY Times, Washington Post, and similar publications do provide quality news (don't read their opinion sections either).
They do, but only on certain subjects they approve of. There are often major world or local events that are never covered in these outlets. Just to give some recent examples, the largest worker protests and strike in history happened in 2020 across India, and not 1 mainstream outlet in the US and UK covered it at all. Similarly, the miners' protests in NY were not covered in mainstream media.
I do agree that on the news they do cover, you can get decent facts from the papers you cite.
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=india+worker+protests+site%3Anytim...
I didn't see the New York miner protests in the NYT in a quick search, but I lack search terms and time. Do you mean the protests in support of Alabama miners?
I'm not saying that they don't miss stories and can't improve, a lot, but I think attacking journalism is trendy and normalized, and much of it is BS.
I am talking about the 2020 general strike(s) (trade unions estimate 250 million people joined, though others push for much smaller numbers): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_general_strike_of_2020.
I have not found a single article about this in the NYT, BBC, Washington Post. The Guardian in the UK did cover these.
> Do you mean the protests in support of Alabama miners?
Yes, I mixed things up a bit. I have not been able to find an article about either the strike, nor the NYC protests about it. Rather amusingly, looking for UMWA or Alabama miner strikes, there are several articles about this, from ~1900s.
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=Alabama+miner+strike+site%3Anytime...
The main point I was making is that there is systematic bias on certain topics - especially workers' rights - in mainstream publications. There are other such topics as well, usually to do with the nitty gritty of US imperialism.
I wish all the critics would compare notes.
The claim is not necessarily that they ignore essential topics, so much as that they present a biased narrative of the world, even in the facts that they chose to cover at all - one biased against workers and against America's (perceived) enemies.
The people who accuse the NY Times of being biased towards liberals or progressives often forget how pro-war they were for example, how friendly they are to the military and security apparatus in general etc.
What is that based on?
> 90+% of their journalists are self-proclaimed liberals this should be immediately obvious
People can do their jobs without injecting their political opinions. I see that every day.
Yes, but ...
> I'm not saying to disregard those sources as illegitimate, but take them with a grain of salt
we agree.
You ever read Noam Chomsky's Manufacturing Consent[1]? If you can't bring yourself to read the book, he made a film about it too [2]. But the book has hundreds of examples (well sourced) of why you should probably rethink that.
1. https://www.amazon.com/Manufacturing-Consent-Political-Econo...
I'm mostly responding to attacks on the NYT from the right; it's interesting to think about it to a great extent. My first impression is that the NYT has broken from the 'consent manufacturing' apparatus, which is why so many 'moderates' attack it.
I may not remember much of the European history taught in the class, but the idea of analyzing bias has stuck with me ever since. My experience may have not been universal amongst my classmates though which exposes how this type of incidental teaching to analyze bias might be insufficient and a more intentional approach is warranted.
The fact that I was taught the concept in a history class devoted to a different continent helped to mitigate some of the problems that might present themselves when trying to teach it in the context of current events. My hope would be that this type of news literacy education would similarly focus on historical accounts which, while not wholly sufficient, could create some distance between the daily news onslaught which can distract from actually developing the skill.
> Students reportedly got a lot better at spotting questionable sources.
Like that's definitely a step in the right direction, i.e., don't just blindly trust what you see on Insta or FB, but I worry it'll just teach kids to blindly trust mainstream media like the NYTimes, which are not without their own biases.
It gave me a lot of insight about why it's unlikely someone who's invested a lifetime into a career would intentionally jeopardize all of it by not following the journalistic standards and ethics they had learned and studied for so long. About the difference between a factual statement and a biased statement. The purpose of an editor. What are the consequences when an editor makes a mistake. And so on.
At that time a lot of it was also how to develop film and run a darkroom, but that's obviously not taught anymore!
This form of journalism is pretty much dead in America.
Moreover, journalists violate journalistic "ethics" all the time and there is very little risk to your career unless you do something really bad and obvious like plagiarism. Even then, you can often stage a comeback if people like your writing.
Nearly, but we need it to come back.
We can't depend on every citizen having loads of spare personal time to spend doing their own journalistic research on every topic. It's impossible. And we can't just let "entertainment news" become the standard. The current chaos will just keep ramping up and up until the collapse of democracy. Yeah I know, many democracies have collapsed over human history. But we need to do something to bring back journalism, not just educate people about how to do their own journalism. That's about as sustainable as having everyone grow their own food. Which is to say, not sustainable at all.
Seems like a weird suggestion.
I'm trying to craft a more coherent and unfortunately long response to this whole conversation...HN is making some wild practical epistemic swings at this that are largely without merit.
The NYT is not an arbiter of truth. However I am much more likely to pay attention to a piece of journalism from them moreso than my neighbor who can't read saying vaccines are just microchips. At the very least there is a credibility factor that they have.
The US has always had biased media - people forget the famous newspapers of the federalists and the republicans as early as the birth of our country - however at times it was able to align with certain truths between factions. It seems this is what was really lost.
Journalism has taken a huge hit in this country and the effects are widespread. I'm not against hearing an argument for something. I am against hearing an argument based on an unsubstantiated rumor and "we don't know if it's true but WHAT IF IT IS true" reporting that exists today.
It's a hard project, students largely presume that news sources have bias, and some clearly do. But telling apart bias from good faith misunderstanding and sincere attempts at simplification of a message for an audience is really hard.
The issue isn't just 'statistics' its audience, its communication, its argumentation, its pre-existing knowledge...its a lot of factors.
Part of this is human nature and, frankly, our evolutionary brains inability to process the amount of information now available.
There is some good research...I'll find it and add it...with undergraduates that shows something really itneresting about information seeking and use behaviors:
* undergraduate engineering students often treat the act of searching for information on ther internet and getting results as directly akin to understanding the information their search returned.
* said differently, they think that the act of googling something is the same as understanding the results - even if they don't click on the results.
- Mark Twain
I try to summarize below by skipping some extra words:
"media literacy" means the ability to access, analyze, evaluate, create, and communicate using ... print, visual, audio, interactive, and digital texts.
every public high school shall include ... a unit of instruction on media literacy [to] include:
... Evaluating ... the general landscape and economics of the platforms, [and] issues regarding the trustworthiness of the source of information.
... Deconstructing media representations according to the authors, target audience, techniques, agenda setting, tereotypes, and authenticity to distinguish fact from opinion.
... Conveying a coherent message ... to a specific target audience.
... Assessing how media affects the consumption of information and how it triggers emotions and behavior.
... Suggesting a plan of action ... to engage others in a respectful, thoughtful, and inclusive dialogue over a specific issue ...
What you posted is fairly dense and obtuse to someone not in the field...it's technical, and it is abstracted from concrete meaning. So the news article about it used examples. People are now reacting to the examples used in the article, and more examples provided. Rather than the underlying meaning.
This thread is the metapoint.
It's the reason education folks and STEM folks generally have a hard time talking to each other.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=hWLjYJ4BzvI&feature=youtu.be
Description: dozens/hundreds of newscasters reading the exact same script.
But - warning: editorial - The System is intentional in creating this mindless mindset. Not to worry Big * has it covered. Don't think. Just follow contentional wisdom, follow the narrative.
Moi? I spend a fair amount of time reading / listening / watching for what isn't said. This forces me to duck the click bait, hyperbole, sensationalism, etc. So often there are obvious questions that are ignored. That's a tell. I'm also recommend becoming hypersensitive to language and words. When there are big sweeping phrases (e.g., "everybody...") it's another tell.
I highly recommend it - teenagers, students, adults - it's for everyone!
Thomas Jefferson"
I distinctly remember realizing for the first time that you could tell a lie with a graph. I also remember seeing an "article" that was actually a disguised advertisement, which I would probably have overlooked in the past. Good class.
So, to me this doesn't seem new, but it seems like not everybody had that experience.
Still, I think the point of this article is not that schools have not taught those skills in the past, but that those fundamental literacy skills are now identified as 1) more important and tricky than ever, and 2) now there's a (branded) name for them.
You might be getting a biased sampling of responses here in that people who haven't had it and don't know what it is might be the most vocal (or something else like that.)
Bandwagon
Testimonial
Emotional Appeal
Humor
Anti-bandwagon
Slogan
Glittering Generality
Product Comparison
Repetition
Weasel Words
Understanding the basic construction of ads can help people understand when they are "being sold something" as opposed to informed.
The majority of journalists end up spending almost no time generating their own stories, or even checking them. Most of what you read in broadsheet newspapers is just parroting wire services, PR firms, the government, etc. Davies commissioned studies showing only 12% of stories in major broadsheets in 2 random weeks were generated by the journalist, and only 12% of the key facts were checked. He calls this churnalism, and it goes a ways to showing how it is that these institutions set the bounds for "acceptable" discourse, without any conspiracy -- just don't hire enough journalists and make them too busy to do the real work. Eventually the new cohort will think they're doing real work anyway.
I should say, I don't know the basis for Davies' critique of wire agencies, or why it is important to generate one's own stories. I haven't read the Suppliers chapter yet.
Most of them are as brainless as the average news reader, quite more of a zealot for the system they're supposed to scrutinise than an impartial informer of daily events.
Just check most journalists' twitter accounts.
you don't need a new school course to know that you should always double check anything you read and try to go to the primary sources directly.
Since time at school is zero sum, every political victory that results in a new pet topic being taught will inevitably shrink core education.
Maybe this trend helps explain events like this: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.oregonlive.com/politics/202...
Most of the first graders I know can read, it can be hard to fathom how you make it 12 years without knowing that…
News outlets fights amongst other news outlets to get the most attention and clicks.
Surely if you teach kids a recipe on how to spot questionnable sources, these sources will adapt to look legitimate.
I guess we shouldn’t patch security holes in any software, either. Attackers will just spend increasing amounts of effort to find new ones. It’s not worth developing vaccines for any diseases, either. They’ll just adapt. Why lock your car or your house? Determined people can pick the lock, or just break a window.
There is absolutely no benefit to be found in raising the bar so that the stupidest, low-effort attacks no longer work. None at all.
I think my concern here is that this course would give the students a false sense of safety since they now have a recipe they can apply to "filter out the junk" making them blind the next evolution.
I also don't think your analogies fully grasp the matter (alt ought they are really good examples of "races to the bottom").
A more relevant analogy would be akin too: "Should we teach students about known vulnerabilities when attackers keep discovering new ones?".
To that my answer is, I'm not sure. There are a lot of vulnerabilities, and going over each known one would take a considerable amount of time. Perhaps spending more time learning other facets of software development would be a better a better use of time.
Consider CNN calling out the times: http://www.cnn.com/2003/US/Northeast/05/10/ny.times.reporter...
After fraud is discovered, the public forgets and then the "news" continues.
If it is always followed by a retraction and only happens a small fraction of the time then yes.
Now I don’t know if we add it into the SAT / ACT, but it should at least have some dedicated time set aside for it in History/Language Arts courses.
It's like expecting users of software to learn about good software engineering practices to make sure the apps they download are worth using and won't cause any harm to their machines.
This gives me hope. The boomers’ blind allegiance to their news sources and political parties has allowed evil to flourish unopposed.
My wife (who went to the same school district) and I both recall situations where politics were in the classroom. I recall in grade school with vivid detail my teacher saying “anyone who voted for bush is an idiot” and kids in the class becoming upset and the teacher doubling down. My entire time at school (through college) conservatives were demonized. Quite literally, I watched teachers call them evil. Anyone who spoke out would get punished. You could see the unequal treatment.
Conservatives are against equality, their racists, they cut education budgets, etc. when have any one here seen positive discussion about conservatives in your lives? think about it.
Just last year, during the pandemic, my wife’s younger brother was doing a zoom class behind me. His teacher was telling the students in home economics that “we need to reduce taxes or give universal income to black people”. She went on and on about inequity and how whites were evil.
I’m sure some of you believe I’m being hyperbolic, but here’s a near by school district:
https://legalinsurrection.com/2021/06/critical-race-theory-i...
This will be just a further weapon to indoctrinate and marginalize. People I know in the younger generations (in their 20s) who are conservatives are scared to speak and have been for years.
Now let’s consider something they may teach.. are they going to teach to check citations? I want you to open CNN or MSNBC right now, look at a few articles and check the citations. You’ll see why this is a problem.
I never encountered anything like it or met anyone who did. My teachers always taught us to think critically; they didn't care what the topic was or what our conclusions were; it was about learning to think. Is there any research, such as a survey, of student experiences of political speech by teachers?
I'm sure we can find a few examples of anything, but we also all know well that there's a political group that is trying to denigrate and politicize every institution, from the media to schools to the FBI to the courts to scientists, etc. by saying they are biased toward liberals. Repeating its claims doesn't help; if we are going to think critically about it, and we should, we need some credible evidence.
isn’t the classic argument that being black in America is awful and whites can’t understand because they aren’t marginalized? I actually agree to an extent, but only so far as people don’t realize how it feels to be on the outside, unless that’s at there or have experienced it.
That being said, there’s a long list I can cite. Differing world views lead to dramatically different understandings in even interpretation.
An excellent example, my friend and I in school had to do an essay on the impacts of global warming. We chose the impact on animal populations in the Arctic, as there was a news article about some poor starving polar bears. Turns out (at the time) the population of polar bears and other animals was booming (while a few were decreasing). We showed some graphs, we were surprised about this honestly. We failed because “we didn’t show the impact of global warming” - seriously, I don’t have evidence, but it’s an ideological world view that teachers push.
In my AP government class in high school it was so bad the students would scream at the teacher. He had to regularly remove and suspend kids for getting aggressive at what they were being taught. Believe it or not, idk It was a personal experience.
> I'm sure we can find a few examples of anything, but we also all know well that there's a political group that is trying to denigrate and politicize every institution, from the media to schools to the FBI to the courts to scientists, etc. by saying they are biased toward liberals. Repeating its claims doesn't help; if we are going to think critically about it, and we should, we need some credible evidence.
I linked a lawsuit. You can also request the ciriculum from school districts you live in. You can also attend school board meetings. I urge you to do so and see for yourself.
Conservatives aren't demonized they are just disliked because of their political party affiliation and the actions of their elected representatives. I like conservatives, I would even say I love them, but I think they have moronic brain-dead opinions especially on things like CRT that they don't understand.
As I’m sure you’re aware, CRT discusses implicit bias and how to mitigate.. perhaps apply it outside of race?
I haven't noticed this at all. The only time I've seen widespread silence from my conservative friends & family is after January 6th of this year. Could just be my circle, but almost all of them have gone radio silent, nothing at all to say any more. But before that they were definitely anything but quiet.
“Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them.
In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.” - Michael Crichton
Even though the article spends most of the time talking about an example orthogonal to politics, it is clear that politics will be the main topic of this course. I have zero faith in the system to show the numerous examples of bad articles by the NYT, WP, NPR... anybody remembers the Covington kid?
The issue goes beyond self criticism of course. The state should not play a role in telling kids what they should or shouldn't read as a news source - because that's what will end up happen. I have zero faith that such class will actually engage in fruitful debates.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/January_2019_Lincoln_Memorial_...
The bill, the classroom experience, the examples are all about tools and heuristics to evaluate ANY news source.
Strawman argument...
No? Okay, nevermind then..
It's their teachers and parents who need educating about news literacy!
* … but China argues they voluntarily attend centres which combat "extremism" *
Public resources such as TV frequencies are now auctioned. The owners have no pro bono requirements any longer. Cable News' 24/7 Eyeball grab search for revenue has changed the game forever. The internet has lowered the Bullshit barrier to a new low.
An individual like Alex Jones can literally go to Amazon and buy a couple hundred dollars worth of equipment and start an internationally available cesspool of disinformation. Just as the covid unvaccinated are dying in the hospitals the infotainment unvaccinated will fall prey to conspiracy.
> Circulation is, therefore, the means to an end. It becomes an asset only when it can be sold to the advertiser, who buys it with revenues secured through indirect taxation of the reader...A newspaper which angers those whom it pays best to reach through advertisements is a bad medium for an advertiser. And since no one ever claimed that advertising was philanthropy, advertisers buy space in those publications which are fairly certain to reach their future customers. One need not spend much time worrying about the unreported scandals of the dry-goods merchants. They represent nothing really significant, and incidents of this sort are less common than many critics of the press suppose. The real problem is that the readers of a newspaper, unaccustomed to paying the cost of newsgathering, can be capitalized only by turning them into circulation that can be sold to manufacturers and merchants. And those whom it is most important to capitalize are those who have the most money to spend. Such a press is bound to respect the point of view of the buying public. It is for this buying public that newspapers are edited and published, for without that support the newspaper cannot live. A newspaper can flout an advertiser, it can attack a powerful banking or traction interest, but if it alienates the buying public, it loses the one indispensable asset of its existence.
And:
> This is the plight of the reader of the general news. If he is to read it at all he must be interested, that is to say, he must enter into the situation and care about the outcome. But if he does that he cannot rest in a negative, and unless independent means of checking the lead given him by his newspaper exists, the very fact that he is interested may make it difficult to arrive at that balance of opinions which may most nearly approximate the truth. The more passionately involved he becomes, the more he will tend to resent not only a different view, but a disturbing bit of news. That is why many a newspaper finds that, having honestly evoked the partisanship of its readers, it can not easily, supposing the editor believes the facts warrant it, change position. If a change is necessary, the transition has to be managed with the utmost skill and delicacy. Usually a newspaper will not attempt so hazardous a performance. It is easier and safer to have the news of that subject taper off and disappear, thus putting out the fire by starving it.
The whole thing is worth reading. It's free on Project Gutenberg, and there's also a free audiobook of it on Youtube.
I see a similar outcome among adults, but these are adults who I know were raised to be skeptical (in the sense of science or critical thought), to think independently and critically, to look for bias in themselves and others, and to distrust power. I know they thought that way for most of their lives.
And now they accept things that have a paper thin veneer of truth and deep flaws, things that they would have easily penetrated just 5-10 years ago. If I examine it with the tools we've used our entire lives, conversations we've had many times in the past, I find myself beyond the pale, unwanted in the conversation.
Why? I don't know. I haven't before lived through mass insanity and mob psychology though I know it's happened, such as in Nazi Germany and arguably the Soviet Union. What are they doing? One thing I've noticed is that the 'reactionary' movement (I don't know another name - it's amazing that it's unnamed even at this date) first attacked postmodernism (while continuing to embrace its skepticism where it serves them), and as people were swept along and embraced that, they unilaterally disarmed themselves against the threats of personality cults, mob psychology, and other mass delusion.
But why? My impression is that ruining their game, as if we were playing Monopoly and I was seriously questioning the economics of it. But my real question is, how could they embrace it? How could they make such an obviously grievous error that will destroy their lives, their relationships (the poison affects all their behavior and thinking, not just about politics), communities, country, and world?
My opinions having weight
Followed by being able to afford multiple appeals courts (which also suggests my opinions match the reality I perceive, more than the generally assumed reality)
Followed by people assuming I'm part of a lizard race masquerading as human, thats when you know you've made it by every metric.
The first one has had various rungs, from casual conversation, to product managers agreeing without even playing devil's advocate, to board rooms. But being amplified across broad populations is even better. Being on this path, I can see how a lot of the population is susceptible. Its not really just about critical thinking or having been a critical thinker in one field before, its just degrees of susceptibility where certain formats of ideas occupy open registers in people's minds.
A tasp is a device that stimulates the pleasure centers of your brain. This rapidly leads to addiction and enslavement of the person(s) the tasp is used on.
We’re very easily controlled, and so many of us don’t even realize it.
https://energycommerce.house.gov/sites/democrats.energycomme...
Social media preys on the most primal parts of your brain. The algorithm maximizes your attention by hitting you repeatedly with content that triggers your strongest emotions - it aims to provoke, shock, and enrage.
NPR deleted a tweet (with no retraction) that heavily implied a person who was violently attacked in his vehicle and then sped away to avoid the violence was a "right-wing extremist" involved in a "vehicle-ramming incident" [1] -- with zero reference to the violent attack initiated on the vehicle.
[1] https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EbEIlsUUcAACYht.jpg
Additionally, the protesters who attacked the vehicle were arrested, including one who brandished a gun at the vehicle and another who assaulted the driver. [2]
[2] https://www.wave3.com/2020/06/18/protesters-arrested-followi...
NPR's tweet came after the arrest and live video footage of the incident. They chose to run the story anyway.
Funny enough it was NPR that clued me into this mess 20+ years ago. I was listening to them on a long drive. The same story came up over and over. Each NPR station pretended like they had wrote it themselves. Conan has a few fun skits that shows off this effect. If they are willing to lie about something so cheesy I have no choice but to think the 'big lies' would be easy. Our news is corrupt to its core, controlled by few large conglomerates and read by pretty faces and smooth voices.
If we are going to teach them to think critically, they not only need to think about the biases of sources, but to make decisions about trust. 'Everyone is equally and absolutely untrustworthy' is no more critical or skeptical than 'everyone is equally and absolutely trustworthy'. We can trust different news sources to different degrees, and in different situations. The National Enquirer is not the same as the New York Times.
> The same story came up over and over. Each NPR station pretended like they had wrote it themselves. Conan has a few fun skits that shows off this effect. If they are willing to lie ...
Should an important story only be available to listeners in one locality? If you drive between localities, you're going to hear some redundancy.
How is it a "lie" to broadcast a segment produced elsewhere? I think listeners are much better off getting the best segments in the country, and not being restricted to the limited resources of the local station. It would be very redundant (and obviously unaffordable) if every station ran a global news operation.
How did they "pretend"; did they say 'we produced this segment here in town X'? I've heard plenty of NPR and never had that impression at all (in fact, IIRC they say 'from our sister station in ...').
This is true. But the NYT has an agenda, would you not agree? The Enquirer is easy to spot. The NYT is more subtle about what they do (mostly). I ask "If you have to 'unfilter' everything why am I reading this"? Look at the stories they choose to cover and ignore. Then look at the particular phraseology they use to talk about particular groups. Which groups are always in glowing terms. Which groups are constantly downed on. No group is that 'good/evil'. Selective editing of stories to make one side look better/worse is their typical weapon of choice.
Many are also using the Richelieu method "If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him."
> How did they "pretend"; did they say 'we produced this segment here in town X'? Yes they did say they had done it. They did not say 'from someone else', probably just a goof in the mad-lib script. It was just what keyed me into the subtle deceptions that go on in our news. On the face of it by itself it is not really that big of a deal. It is the pile of little lies that are not technically lies that are cause for concern. They are using top shelf persuasion techniques. Not for the good of the public or you or me. But as a way to get 'clicks' these days or move paper years ago. What the new set of persuaders call 'engagement'.
I can not honestly sit and say 'oh read this set' as they are brain junk food. Many are little more than outrage machines that try to keep engagement, usually by stroking cognitive biases and primed assumptions using the bernays techniques. You can try to sift through it but if they are just copying from each other and amping up outrage for something, playing the game of telephone. You are going to have a very hard time untangling that mess. Many times you roll backwards in time and have to become a news detective to find out the original source.
Everyone has an agenda, including you and I, but it's like saying 'everyone lies' or 'everyone can write' - the significance is in how much they lie and how well they write.
For the NYT, I see some bias toward their readers in the lighter features - e.g., right now there's a headline, '6 Ways to Tame Airline Nightmares'. That's obviously biased toward people wealthy enough to fly frequently. My impression is of some bias in those articles toward serving a more liberal readership, but I can't cite anything ATM, but that is different than an agenda.
In hard news, I don't see an agenda, i.e., a program to promote something, or much bias. They do talk about things that conservatives object to, such as discrimination against minorities and women, but a large part of journalism is reporting things others want covered up. They do the same to liberals - they break stories about major liberal figures, such as Hilary Clinton's email. They are hated by all sides, a great sign.
They don't report stories in the reactionary conservative sphere that lack facts, or if they do, they investigate and report the facts as they are, such as the election fraud and anti-vaccination claims. They label claims 'false' if they are well-established to be disproven or 'baseless' if appropriate. Journalism isn't affirmative action for political ideas and bad information; it's about what's actually happening in the world.
Their opinion pages have an entire spectrum of columnists; there is (almost) every kind of agenda there, absent the more extreme claims of neo-reactionaries. Their NY Times Editorials, from the newspaper, are definitely liberal in general, but that is labeled opinion.
> You are going to have a very hard time untangling that mess. Many times you roll backwards in time and have to become a news detective to find out the original source.
I don't find it hard. There are many sources, I know their natures, and I can put it together pretty easily. I rarely find I am surprised by changes in information: For example, the lab leak theory went from not 'false' as critics say, but 'unfounded' to 'potential' (and still not nearly established): I wasn't surprised; knowledge changes with new information. In part that's practice, I'm sure, but I think the agenda of many is to discredit the institution of journalism. I don't buy it.
But these are opinion, so examine one news story from also today: https://www.nytimes.com/article/emotional-labor.html
"emotional labor" you never will hear outside of very leftwing area, same with use of term like "partner" or specification of "in heterosexual partnership". These are not noticeable for many readers from urban area but are almost jump off the page to any from, say, more rural background. Coverage clearly is more than "a little" bias.
They have opinion columnists from the entire spectrum. Check out the opinion page - it's got everything, and in pretty good balance, from (pretty) far right to (pretty) far left.
> "emotional labor" you never will hear outside of very leftwing area, same with use of term like "partner" or specification of "in heterosexual partnership". These are not noticeable for many readers from urban area but are almost jump off the page to any from, say, more rural background.
First, this article isn't news; it's a how-to feature.
Let's assume it's true that the content is better known in 'leftwing areas'. Does that make it less valuable to readers everywhere? Also, the NYT is there to tell people things they don't already know, the most valuable ideas they can find; should they limit it by some political measure? Dumb it down because you think that people in rightwing areas can't handle something unfamiliar (I'm attributing that to you, because it's not my idea or the NYT's)? A more general and far more important question: Must everything be politicized and restricted accordingly?
'Heterosexual partnership' is in this sentence:
In heterosexual partnerships, emotional labor often falls to women, who are generally socialized to take on the emotional lives of others, said Arlie Russell Hochschild, professor emerita at University of California, Berkeley ...
Again, must everything be politicized? Can people in rural areas not handle the language? And what words should be used instead - 'marriages' would seem incorrect, not limiting it to heterosexual relationships would seem confusing.
.............
One problem with the parent's point is that (very, very broadly) liberalism seeks change and improvement, while conservatism seeks to keep things as they are or were. Naturally, innovations will come from more liberal sources.
> what words should be used instead - 'marriages' would seem incorrect, not limiting it to heterosexual relationships would seem confusing.
Marriages probably the choice in other parts of the country, maybe "romantic relationships". Specify "heterosexual" is only left-wing thing, most others realize that gays are only small part and so do not bother to make mention. Saying "emotional labor often falls to the woman" would be most elegant though because it make implicit the normal man-woman scenario and avoid extra words.
> Must everything be politicized
Not in necessity but it does show significant bias on NYT. Also this is not all so much political as cultural.
> liberalism seeks change and improvement, while conservatism seeks to keep things as they are or were
You make a conflation between change and improvement, liberalism seeks the former and sometimes gets the latter. Some liberalism good and represent progress, some pointless and only change for change's sake. Example being push to use "nice words" for things every so many years. Idiot become retard become mentally handicapped become learning disabled... point here is that not every change is good change.
The Democratic Republic of North Korea is in fact democracy. It says so in their name. The Ministry of Truth is also, in fact, a truthful organization. It is also clear in their name.
Okay. None of this is proof of anyone's opinion. But if you can accept that this is how many earnestly see the world, you don't have to psychoanalyze the comments here and come to a derogatory view of those writing them.
Yes, because one political party in particular has spent 40+ years working very hard to destroy trust in public institutions (you only mentioned private companies, but it's true in general for both). A media literate populace threatens that work. Their motivation for destroying trust isn't to replace it, but to make people think there is no truth, there is no way to determine right from wrong. There absolutely are ways to do these things, it just threatens their views and their power.
>But if you can accept that this is how many earnestly see the world, you don't have to psychoanalyze the comments here and come to a derogatory view of those writing them.
This is why I want media and information literacy to be more widespread, so the general public can understand what is happening and how things have changed since the days of Walter Kronkite. It's why I want education in all subjects to be more widespread and why people arguing against this do not.
This just seems to be instilling propaganda from a young age.
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" That can be as simple as opening a new tab and leaving the post to find more about the source of information. It appears to be effective. "
And then the article goes more depressing from there, it's not per se news literacy, but general information technology literacy.
Anyone can spin up a LAMP stack and run a web server, or a blog and post content, buy a $9 domain and put a portrait of someone who does not exist - and link it to some scientific or even hijack an accredited offical.
What then? You're going to teach students how a WHOIS works?
(Granted I knew about WHOIS since middle school, but 99% of students though and todays generation I'm sure don't even care how the Internet works outside..)