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Comment by eplanit | Hacker News Reader

Given the primary example used on the kids, the 2016 election, this seems more about instilling bias under the name "news literacy". Are they going to do a section studying the "coverage" of hunter biden's laptop? Remember, for weeks it was cast as Russian propaganda. What about the origins of covid.. will they discuss how at first the lab leak theory was discarded as "misinformation"? I could not trust a public school to ever touch such topics.

This is as comforting as hearing that schools are teaching religion.

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I did a module on news literacy at my public high school (not in USA). It typically involved taking some notable story and examining material from every publisher that had written on it. We examined both recent affairs (previous 2-3 years) and historical (women's right to vote, native people's/colonial affairs) and how they were covered in the media at the time. It was a fascinating thing to be taught about, and had a big focus on critical thinking - not just "what is written" but "why is it written this way", "what does the publisher want you to take from this".

When the lab leak theory emerged/was initially dismissed, I was actually reminded of my lessons from high school.

Part of A Level English Language for me. How to read critically, really. It's the old "freedom fighter vs terrorist" exercise.

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.

Yeah we had this at my private religious high school in Canada as part of civics class. It didn't really have a right or left bend, it focussed on critical thought, sourcing (anonymous sources vs named, credentialed source), fact verifiability, and reputation.

Especially with what the internet has done to news this really should be taught in schools everywhere.

I read the article and I disagree that the 2016 election is a specific example of what students in class actually learn about (which is what I interpreted when you said “used on the kids”). The 2016 example is actually part of a study to claim there is evidence that students have poor ability to discern from good quality and bad quality news sources, such as a video of dubious origin on Facebook.

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.

Oh come on...

> 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?

> Your support helps protect the Guardian’s independence and it means we can keep delivering quality journalism that’s open for everyone around the world. Every contribution, however big or small, is so valuable for our future.

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.

Oh yeah I remember this whole charade. It happened rather early and was blatantly transparent.

yeah, and it's sad, because it wasn't something that was unverifiable, it wasn't an "unnamed source"... it was something recorded by many cameras and broadcasted in many places... figuring out it was a lie was a 5 minute process.

How can i trust them then with an "unnamed source" stories, when they lie about stuff recorded on camera?

You can't, and shouldn't. The people in this thread that still have blind faith in the legacy media are mind boggling to me

This is one of my favorite memories from the Trump years; and such a fun example of the depths to which our media establishment has sunk

Fox did multiple coverages on Obama's tan suit that he wore once or twice... lol.

An important part of indoctrination is training children that only regime approved news sources are reliable.

Didn't you study the difference in quality versus non-quality sources as a child? I remember lots of term papers where my references were questioned and only references of certain quality were allowed.

Yes, that's exactly the training I was referring to.

Are you suggesting that all sources are exactly equal? If not, then people need a framework to determine source quality, otherwise we aren't really preparing them for the world. What is your proposal?

It doesn't matter how many times these news agencies get caught making stuff up out of whole cloth, they are "reliable news" because people are conditioned to believe it. Faith is strong.

Not sure why this is downvoted. This is what I was taught in the past - mainstream media is reliable and trustworthy. Hell, those same media organizations reinforce that belief when they attack less mainstream news sources.

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.

The problem is the non-mainstream is worse. It's like the alt-med argument - sure, point at "big pharma" and tell us how corrupt they are. That doesn't mean homeopathy works.

They trained you to divide the world into two neat and convenient boxes where one box is represented by the NYT and the other box is represented by Alex Jones and flat earthers.

No, 'they' didn't train me to do that, I'm capable of using my brain and evaluating sources. If anything 'they' taught me to examine primary and secondary sources, look for bias, and draw my own conclusions. 'They' also taught me statistics so I can understand the use and misuse of such things by journalists.

I've barely ever come across the NYT in my lifetime, not being American.

Good try though.

Sometimes people use concrete examples to explain abstract concepts. If the concrete examples aren't a part of your culture, the underlying abstract argument is disproven.

I don't understand why they wouldn't use historical examples or stuff about aliens or big foot. History is a great filter and we can now somewhat reasonably understand smear campaigns and propaganda from decades ago. It's not as clear what's being manipulated at the current moment.

This just seems more like a way to influence children's political leanings.

Like, you know, the multiple times the US has gone to war over misleading and incomplete claims? (1898, 1964, 2002)

It seems like we read different articles.

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.

this is why that education is so critical. because the news literacy is countering the exact type of thinking you are responding to. Any analysis is treated as criticism. Analysis isn't criticism, its analysis.

Yes you are correct, you did read a different article, that’s the core problem. A large portion of Trump’s base still believes that fishy things happened in the election, if the journalist covering this story wanted to cover this without bias and truly believes that the program is a net positive (which I agree is probably true) they shouldn’t be injecting divisive politics into their coverage as these people are completely done with the media at this point, the OP is going easy describing what some of these people believe. They roll their eyes at anything these people say now, they have lost all faith in the media.

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.

Hunter Biden's laptop falls under this category. Corporate media and social media companies claim "fake news" and move to censor it a month before the election. An honest look at the actual reporting, as well as what followed, shows that this was not in fact the case.

As someone who actually engaged with that story, I found the reporting and posited facts to be incoherent and full of holes. It only made sense if one presumed the outcome. Literacy includes evaluating why something was covered by certain folks and not by others as well as the internal coherence and the inter-relationship.

> As someone who actually engaged with that story, I found the reporting and posited facts to be incoherent and full of holes.

Was the story of Russians electing Trump coherent and without holes?

https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/sites/default/files/docu...

It has real evidence. I can hunt down more if you like.

Like the chemical weapons in Iraq, that kind of evidence?

The kind of evidence provided by the GOP? Yes that kind.

The senate council that had those findings was GOP lead. The GOP lies a lot, but usually for their own benefit.

> The kind of evidence provided by the GOP? Yes that kind.

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?

For the record I'm more of a center libertarian.

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).

Nice.

> 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/

Again, both are corrupt.

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.

What did follow? Where is the evidence that we were promised to eventually be shown?

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."

They literally suspended the account of the nation's oldest newspaper for weeks before a Presidential election

"Hype avoidance" is a nice euphemism though. I'll be sure to be wary of anyone using it going forward.

> Using 2016 as an example doesn’t invalidate that goal or imply bias.

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...

You stated that it implies bias without articulating why you believe the bias exists.

Will you elaborate on how you feel the quote you included implies bias?

From that report I just wanted to show that shortly before the 2020 election, the Gallup poll showed that confidence in the mass media has continued to decline among Republicans and independent voters, to 10% and 36%, respectively. Among Democratic voters, confidence rose to 73%.

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...

Will they discuss Roland Fryer’s finding against the misinformation regarding to police shootings? https://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/12/upshot/surprising-new-evi...

Who is using selective reporting to create a false narrative for what purpose?

There has to be some coordination, if suddenly all the protests and antifa demonstrations stopped seemingly overnight in news reporting.

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?

Police lethal force is still covered whenever it happens in my local paper.

The protest coverage faded out over time; anecdotally, so have the protests I've seen while driving around town.

From NPR's reporting, it seemed like the class was more about looking for additional sources or examining sources.

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.

If they had any trustworthiness they would also include the media that led to 2/3 of Democrats falsely believing that Russia had tampered with the votes: https://mobile.twitter.com/peterjhasson/status/1064259048902....

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.

... Did you just use a Twitter link that does nothing but make claims on numbers as a source? More specifically, it provides the claim that there was no tampering without any evidence.

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.

The numbers come from a YouGov poll [0] as the image in the tweet shows.

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 come from a YouGov poll [0] as the image in the tweet shows.

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.

Omg why would democrats believe this it's not like the CIA released a report saying that Russia tampered in the election.

We know that Trump's campaign manager (working for free for Trump yet deeply in debt to a Russian oligarch) funneled internal campaign data to a Russian intelligence officer. This is according to Senate Republicans [1]. We also know that this info was passed on to the Russian FSB, which was engaged in a psyops campaign against the American public in an effort to elect Donald Trump. This is according to the Mueller Report and the US Treasury Department [2] [3]. Further context includes Trump's son, son-in-law, and campaign manager (the very same one working with a Russian FSB officer) meeting with a Russian spy at Trump's house to discuss trading dirt on Clinton in exchange for relaxed Russia relations (including lifting sanctions related to Russia's invasion of Crimea) [2].

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]

Actual collusion between the Russian FSB and the Trump campaign occurred. It's documented and has been investigated by several bodies. Actual hacking of our political system by a foreign government in favor of one candidate occurred and has been investigated.

[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...

The problem with both of your examples is that they came from a source which had cried wolf (lied) a nearly unfathomable number of times. As an indie I hate to say it, but when there is so much noise to signal coming from one source, it's very likely for a rational person to default to ignoring info from that source. It's actually a decent strategy when there is more data than processing power. I have no problem with teaching that behavior at all. It would encourage sources to have a better SNR.

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.

I think it should be more generalized than "news" related but other than that, I applaud such lessons in public education.

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.

If someone claims X is true because of Y it can be misinformation even if X is in fact true and it can not be misinformation even if X is in fact false.

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.

> Are they going to do a section studying the "coverage" of hunter biden's laptop? Remember, for weeks it was cast as Russian propaganda.

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...

They should teach independent thoughts. Sadly this is so inconvenient for most of the adults.

It's nice to dream about but it will never happen. The incentives are all wrong for public education to teach critical thought.

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".

>Sadly this is so inconvenient for most of the adults.

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?

> 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".

It actually happens a lot (either teacher flames parents for injecting too much "independence thoughts" or the other way around). It is also very inconvenient for politicians/big corps/media.

Yep, the news has become just propaganda... no responsibility, no nothing. But people like to consume stuff they believe in...

> "has become"

Was there a time when it wasn't?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_bias#History

The media has had a "golden age", where the largest vehicles did research and presented well fundamented ideas. It lasted for at least a few decades, as it was visibly improving at the 40's and was still very good at the 80's.

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 mean one way to teach this class would be to simply cover current events in an over the top, biased way and then discuss the tricks used and concerns.

(Maybe students get credit for credibly challenging anything mentioned in the class)

I taught high school for a hot second. I think the approach you suggest would be terrifically engaging for students. Teach them the tricks and make a game of trying to fool one another by setting up two competing teams of "news media," print and talking heads. Essentially, you're teaching them informal fallacies.

I agree this would be a great tool. But I hesitate to think how they will overrun reddit and other places with their newfound tricks to dupe the olds.

The importance of coming to a common consensus on key issues and ideas as a society means that we gotta try, and public institutions is where it should happen foremost. Writing them all off with broad generalizations and cherry-picked moments from the last few years to justify it is just a long way of saying that everyone should give up without trying.

No. We gotta try.

If the English lessons in the US are covering text analysis, reading comprehension then nothing stops teachers or whoever is responsible for managing the curricula to include issues like fake news, propaganda in today's media - especially in the virtual forms. Of course this might look easy on the paper and be hard to achieve in reality.

Why is it instilling bias specifically? Is this because it's your team that comes out badly in this example?

Sounds like your news literacy deficiency is being unable to judge the relative importance of news stories, given your ridiculous examples.

In what way are they ridiculous?

Why should anyone care so much about Hunter Biden? It's not like Joe Biden filled his staff with his own children like Trump did. Hunter is just another shady businessman, not an elected official.

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.

That lab leak theory is the most amazing example of widespread bias on all sides I've ever seen.

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.

I've always been of the opinion that a lab leak is certainly possible, but still very unlikely. It's been wild seeing this rollercoaster that is entirely based on media coverage without one shred of evidence either way.

Very disenchanted with the media over the last 5 years, and it did not used to be this bad.

The coverup with a man who authorized the funding for the lab being the only American on the WHO scientific panel investigating the lab was the smoking gun for me.

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.

Covered what up? It's not like the virus signed out at the front desk and they're hiding it. Nobody knows, there's no evidence to cover up.

They decided not to collect the evidence. Much more pressure could have been put on China to make the lab and its records available for review.

It's already been telegraphed wide and clear that there are a bunch of Western people dying to pin covid on China and that western media will give them airtime and print.

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.

There was that scientist who said it wasn't a lab leak but it turns out he may have been paid by China.

May have! And how would he know anyways? He can't prove a negative.

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.

>Are they going to do a section studying the "coverage" of hunter biden's laptop?

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...

Well let's examine all the reasons you might suspect the silly Biden laptop story to have been planted by the GRU.

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.

Wait what? Number 3 doesn't ring a bell. Which report specifically? Was that the exact phrase?

Giuliani met[1] with Andriy Derkach[2] on his 2019 Ukraine trip. Derkach is the target of a long-running US counter-intelligence operation. In September 2020 the Treasury Department sanctioned[3] Derkach for his work against American interests on behalf of Russian intelligence services. Prior to the sanction, US national security adviser Robert O’Brien personally advised President Trump that Giuliani's information should be considered tainted by Russia[4].

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...

> Given the primary example used on the kids, the 2016 election, this seems more about instilling bias under the name "news literacy". Are they going to do a section studying the "coverage" of hunter biden's laptop?

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.

This week, a story broke how Hunter Biden had yet another laptop stolen from him, this time with videos of him doing "crazy sex acts". [0]

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...

>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?

>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.

The Biden administration has openly admitted that they are working with Facebook to fight “disinformation”.

https://www.newsweek.com/biden-administrations-admission-the...

I don't think it's silliness; I actually find it quite concerning.

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...!

I'm sure you know this, but you're only being downvoted because they think you're making shit up. I, unfortunately know that you are not making this shit up.

You know that the government has Facebook's internal codebase backdoored and are able to push out new commits, and that they are explicitly doing so to censor the messenger system?

Wow, you could probably get a Pulitzer

They don't need access to the codebase to influence Facebook to censor information. You could just ask the social media companies to "block misinformation". There are sources in this thread showing the government admitting to doing that.

fwiw, I thought I was replying to the comment one level up from the one that I did.

Absolutely. This is somewhat similar to terms like "scientific creationism". It has nothing to do with science. From what I read in the article, this "news literacy" is more like pseudo-literacy, and similar to "scientific creationism", it lacks empirical support and cannot be meaningfully tested.

Please join the school board if you are so concerned. Schools have been teaching critical thinking when it comes to research topics for probably decades/hundreds of years. Remember primary sources? Remember conflicting sources and having to dig into why they were conflicting? Public school ain't perfect but I'd rather have kids know that there -is- bias, than do what you are suggesting which is....? nothign.

> Remember, for weeks it was cast as Russian propaganda

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.

> Given the primary example used on the kids, the 2016 election, this seems more about instilling bias under the name "news literacy".

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.

This is as comforting as hearing that schools are teaching religion.

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.

> 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.

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.

First, the parts of religion that are a part of human culture are usually not religious at all. That’s what the “cultural Christian”, or “Christian atheist” means. What happens in schools in countries like Poland is a religious indoctrination, and usually focuses on promoting social pathologies, such as denying reproductive rights and spreading hate speech against minorities.

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.

> this seems more about instilling bias under the name "news literacy".

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.

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0I7FVyQCjNg

> Media literacy classes have already been shown to turn some percentage of kids into nazis

Quite a claim. Where has this been shown?

> If you tell kids to “Go on YouTube and do your own research ..."

That's not what is being taught, according to the article.

Of course it is. The entire premise of "media literacy" is that what the mainstream media is telling you might not be true, so you should do your own research.

Which of course is accurate, but at the same time a lot of people would be better off just blindly trusting the media.

The article says otherwise. Could you provide have evidence of your claims?

> 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.

> Could you provide have evidence of your claims?

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.

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