Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Illinois Is the First State to Have High Schools Teach News Literacy

npr.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 490 posts

Re: Illinois Is the First State to Have High Schools Teach News Literacy

#41

Post by NDizzle »

weimerica wrote: post #9
eplanit wrote: post #2

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 scho…

Don’t forget that COVID isn’t a threat and to head on down to all the nice restaurants in Chinatown!

[flagged]

Re: Illinois Is the First State to Have High Schools Teach News Literacy

#42

Post by refenestrator »

colinmhayes wrote: post #38
refenestrator wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 an…

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.

Re: Illinois Is the First State to Have High Schools Teach News Literacy

#43

Post by colinmhayes »

endisneigh wrote: post #30

I don't see the point of this. a typical English class should already be teaching one how to critically think anyway and engage with text. There's no need for a specific "news literacy" course IMHO.

The point is that the current strategy isn't working.

Re: Illinois Is the First State to Have High Schools Teach News Literacy

#44

Post by caseysoftware »

vmception wrote: post #33
altcognito wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It will be over in April! A lot of people were just wishing it away

I've run into a variety of people that made savings, travel and career choices based on that idea, and it wasn't good for them. Of course they were from the midwest and so likely all of their influences would have been reinforcing the words of the President , but I also don't understand how that would be convincing, given how viruses work. Given how this virus works and spreads.

We were also told "two weeks to stop the spread!" by the CDC and most major news sources.

"two weeks" from mid-March would be April

"stop the spread" could reasonably interpreted as "we won, all is well"

Therefore, it's easy to see why people - including Trump - would be convinced this would all be done in April 2020.

Re: Illinois Is the First State to Have High Schools Teach News Literacy

#45

Post by mwint »

vmception wrote: post #33
altcognito wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It will be over in April! A lot of people were just wishing it away

I've run into a variety of people that made savings, travel and career choices based on that idea, and it wasn't good for them. Of course they were from the midwest and so likely all of their influences would have been reinforcing the words of the President , but I also don't understand how that would be convincing, given how viruses work. Given how this virus works and spreads.

I was once of the “this’ll be over by the end of April” people, but I didn’t mean the virus would be gone. Only that the initial response would be over (“flatten the curve”) and we’d go back to normal, accepting the deaths.

I didn’t think the new goal would become “no one can ever die of this”. Had I known that, I wouldn’t have said this would be over soon.

Re: Illinois Is the First State to Have High Schools Teach News Literacy

#47

Post by Lendal »

fatjokes wrote: post #11

I feel like they should just teach more statistics. Learn about bias, sampling and significance. > 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.

They should do that. They should also teach about actual journalism and not just information found online. I realize now that I had a great advantage in dating for several years someone who was in the College of Journalism at my University. I learned a great deal about what journalists do and why they do it that way.

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!

Re: Illinois Is the First State to Have High Schools Teach News Literacy

#48

Post by minikites »

I'm surprised to see such negative reactions to this effort. Information and media literacy is sorely lacking in the present day USA and we could be doing much more to educate future generations on topics like this to help them make sense of an increasingly complex world of information.

Re: Illinois Is the First State to Have High Schools Teach News Literacy

#49

Post by Alex3917 »

wolverine876 wrote: post #36
Alex3917 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 ab…

> 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.

Re: Illinois Is the First State to Have High Schools Teach News Literacy

#50

Post by chitowneats »

haswell wrote: post #13
eplanit wrote: post #2

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 scho…

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.

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.
Post reply on HN