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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

#431

Post by haswell »

throwawayswede wrote: post #72
haswell wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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:…

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?

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

#432

Post by janeroe »

Shared404 wrote: post #326
janeroe wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

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

#433

Post by Shared404 »

janeroe wrote: post #432
Shared404 wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

#434

Post by unclebucknasty »

Tarsul wrote: post #419
ethbr0 wrote: post #401

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. 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, bu…

and that's why nowadays I'm very happy to being coerced to pay 20 Euros/month for the German public broadcasting, which doesn't have the incentive to make money but rather to inform and raise questions. There have been quite a few articles in the Atlantic and The Guardian that basically said that these public broadcasters are helping to guide the public, so that these total culture wars are somewhat weakened in count…

Our public broadcasting here in the U.S. is another casualty of the culture war, as it is accused of having a liberal bias.

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.

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

#435

Post by throwaway894345 »

elliekelly wrote: post #422
throwaway894345 wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think we're also increasingly seeing journalistic "power" consolidating on the coasts, in the bluest of blue districts (of course the most prestigious newspapers have always been coastal, but they've grown in prevalence while regional newspapers have fallen). This means that journalists for the largest publications are overwhelmingly far more left-wing than the rest of the country.

Have you read the WSJ lately? They’re a prestigious paper in a “blue” coastal city and they’re definitely not what I would call left wing.

Of course there are exceptions. It doesn't have to be literally 100% of outlets or journalists for it to be a problem.

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

#436

Post by janeroe »

wolverine876 wrote: post #415
janeroe wrote: post #403

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Too bad the government is terrible at all of those things.

It is too bad, but it's your government. What are you doing about it? It's like the cliched response to complaints re OSS, but at least that's arguably not your and my responsibility; our government is. It's our job to care for it, make it work, and pass it to our kids in better shape than we got it. I find the government functions very well given it's necessarily a large institution (which all are bureaucratic and i…

> It is too bad, but it's your government.

"Too bad, but it's your monarch. He's anointed by God. You must care about him".

Not really a very strong argument.

> Think of NASA - the greatest explorers in the history of humanity, with nobody even close - is a government agency.

USSR had dozens of space projects, all by a government ministry. Doesn't mean you'd want to cherish the regime and all its inefficiencies & injustices.

And the Chinese government was building huge ghost cities where no-one lives at the greatest pace in human history, with nobody even close. Yet that isn't considered a positive achievement.

The thing is governments are taking resources out of economy. People don't devour money, they'd spend them or invest anyway (using their own scale of preferences). They could go to a cafe, sponsoring this industry, to a journey, buy a new car, start a new business. But after the central authority takes that much away, there will be that much less for the industries of people's preference. That means new people wouldn't be hired, new car models created and produced, new enterprises started; no new building would appear that otherwise could. And the central authority will at best build something useful at twice the price; because private citizens are motivated to be efficient, the state bureaucrats don't. And at worst, the funds will be squandered, directed to their oligarchic pals, stolen.

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

#437

Post by unclebucknasty »

ModernMech wrote: post #388
JamesBarney wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Journalism is changing. And to pretend like it's not is adding fuel to the fire. 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.

Journalists have never been "neutral arbiters of truth". That's just never been their role in society. The role of journalists is to collect and analyze information, and to disseminate it to the public. The "truth" of this information is determined at an individual level, no one is an "arbiter" in this process. Journalism as a field maybe can help us arrive at some truths eventually, but it's an iterative process of…

The problem is that being an arbiter of truth and a presenter of truth were once not very different things. That is, simply presenting facts was the key to both. More specifically, once those facts were presented there was no need for arbitration.

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.

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

#438

Post by chitowneats »

majormajor wrote: post #315
chitowneats wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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

#439

Post by janeroe »

Shared404 wrote: post #433
janeroe wrote: post #432

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

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

#440

Post by busymom0 »

polytely wrote: post #402
busymom0 wrote: post #357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Until a decade ago, journalists used to be in touch with the everyday average Joe, made sustainable salary but not too much, used to go on ground to sites to report what was going on, present the facts and let people make up their minds. 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 o…

Which journalists are getting multimillion salaries, that seems extremely high to me

Salary comparisons:

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.

https://archive.is/aDOav

> “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.”

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