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

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

#301

Post by minikites »

abnry wrote: post #267
chapium wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reactions explain a lot about why critical thinking/analysis is rarely taught in US secondary schools.

No, it reveals that trust in establishment institutions are at record lows. When noteworthy institutions (Twitter, Facebook, Google) are claiming "promotion of truth" as the reason for what many believe is in reality pushing a biased agenda, it is not unreasonable at all to be highly skeptical of any institutional effort to promote "critical thinking". The Democratic Republic of North Korea is in fact democracy. It s…

>trust in establishment institutions are at record lows

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.

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

#302

Post by Nursie »

refurb wrote: post #194
Consultant32452 wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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.

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

#303

Post by wolverine876 »

kdkdkdkso wrote: post #215
wolverine876 wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As I said, the most effective propaganda tool is omission. You’re not going to compare sources on something you never even read about. How is that a risk? What are the chances that anyone will only see news from one source? > After fact-checking a hundred times you’ll decide that NPR does report facts, but do those facts paint the whole picture? After fact-checking a hundred times, won't you learn NPR's strengths a…

You have too much trust for NPR and the NYT after the revelations that so much of their reporting on Russian collusion and the first impeachment were false[0] and the Brian Sicknick death by fire extinguisher lie that was completely fabricated[1] by the news media. 0 https://greenwald.substack.com/p/the-media-lied-repeatedly-a... 1 https://taibbi.substack.com/p/aaugh-a-brief-list-of-official...

Or maybe you have too much trust in those sources? I don't find Greenwald credible, for example.

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

#304

Post by ethbr0 »

slibhb wrote: post #227
wolverine876 wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. 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 co…

> 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. > 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 sayi…

I am totally adopting "radical skepticism" as a summary of my personal beliefs. Good phrase!

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

#305

Post by beaner »

kesselvon wrote: post #260
hn8788 wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't have to "what if" it, people have already looked into it. In "The Coddling of the American Mind" they cite studies showing that universities are more left-leaning than they've ever been.

It's not surprising that universities are more left-leaning when the right has taken a stance against higher education and pushes anti-intellectualism for political gain. 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 dunno, I went to college. I've seen what it's like on the inside. Before I ever had political opinions it was pretty easy to see that people came out kind of brainless and all thinking the same things. It did not seem like an institution that really developed peoples' ability to think for themselves.

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

#306

Post by oefrha »

forz877 wrote: post #274
oefrha wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry but I don’t have time to write a case study on NYT biases. Also, you seem to be thinking purely in terms of U.S. politics, Democrats vs Republicans, left vs right. I’m talking more broadly. You’re not going to get a balanced view on a lot of international topics by consuming and comparing an ensemble of U.S. mainstream media (you can even throw British media in there) for instance, however bitterly they fight a…

Is that not problematic? You make an extraordinary claim, but then "there is no time for me to back it up." But there was time to make the claim, and this is ultimately the problem. You have just accepted out of hand that it is truth and want others to accept it. 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…

> You have just accepted out of hand that it is truth and want others to accept it.

No, I really don’t give a damn about whether others accept it. I can post my opinion simply as food for thought.

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

#307

Post by IIAOPSW »

throwaway894345 wrote: post #181
bonyt wrote: post #98

I've taken a news literacy class at Stony Brook about 10 years ago, when it was then a relatively new program. I think it's an incredibly valuable thing. 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 jo…

> 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. Provided it can stick to that, I…

>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"?

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.

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

#308

Post by temp8964 »

saynay wrote: post #253
temp8964 wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not sure why are you asking. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_1619_Project Copy a little bit to show the dishonesty of the project creator: > In September 2020, lead 1619 Project writer Nikole Hannah-Jones criticized conservatives for their depiction of the project, arguing that it "does not argue that 1619 is our true founding".[12] Atlantic writer Conor Friedersdorf responded on Twitter by citing statements f…

So, no, you can't provide examples of errors?

I need to copy paste the Wikipedia page for you?

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

#309

Post by wolverine876 »

leereeves wrote: post #247
diffeomorphism wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is also like an accent in that a bit of one is not bad at all, but a very heavy one makes things almost unrecognizable. "... has a bias" is trivially true for just about anything. That also makes that sentence useless unless you add more information.

Even the idea that an accent is "a bit" or "heavy" depends on believing that some particular way of speaking is the standard, with zero accent. It's very close to declaring some accent the "right" way to speak. 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 differentl…

There isn't a 'right' way to speak, but there are accurate facts against we can measure bias.

> 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.

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

#310

Post by guerrilla »

wolverine876 wrote: post #196

This discussion (like many on HN) is a good example of the tool of skepticism about sources: 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 tho…

> Distrusting everyone is as unskeptical and illiterate as trusting everyone.

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.

1. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/skepticism/

2. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/skepticism

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