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

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.

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.

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.

[0] https://www.npr.org/2019/05/14/723215498/florida-governor-sa...

==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.==

What leads you to believe this will be partisan? Is it possible that your own partisanship is actually causing that belief?

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.