Live data from Hacker News

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

npr.org

441–450 of 490 posts

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

#441

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

#442
post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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

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

#443

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 DN…

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).

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

#444
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 was taught in more the general sense of how to apply critical thinking to judge news stories.

Critical thinking is a general thing, not something for news stories. Besides the idea that school teach critical thinking in anything is laughable in this day and age.

What should be taught is history of news and why it exists. Not how to decipher good "news" from bad "news" because there is no good or bad "news". There is only agenda. Schools should also teach the history of modern school systems and the education department. Quite eye opening.

By your comment, it's apparently clear you didn't learn anything valuable in your class. But then again, it's Stony Brook.

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

#445

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 DN…

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 the…

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/

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

#446
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…

> One also wonders 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"?

Is it coming from the universities directly or is it reality shock on the j-school graduate’s first job where they learn that pushin leg narratives is the only way to earn a salary?

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

#447
post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 flat out started dropping classes when I showed up and lecture was regurgitating the assigned reading. I understand some students are lazy. But that's what an F is for. Even in undergrad, I valued my time and tuition dollars more than that. As my father told a student who complained about a D in his course: "No, I didn't give you a D. You earned a D. I would have given you an F." (Went to GT and had family who taug…

Was this a problem more frequently in some departments than others? For that matter, were they real profs or TAs?

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

#448

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…

Go back and compare CNN reporting from today to the 1980s. And even the straight news is extremely partisan in story selection: compare the coverage of De Santis to Cuomo in 2020.[1] Plus, fully half the content on CNN (and 80% on MSNBC) is opinion. I’m not a partisan. I spent most of my life as a registered Democrat and read the NYT every day as recently as 2012-2013. But wokeness has definitely taken over and the p…

You had me until the "wokeness" stuff. I don't think we have to have the culture war to critique structural problems in cable news; these are attention-driven ad-sales businesses, and they're competing with each other to drive to extremes. As you point out, thankfully, cable news has less control over day-to-day politics than the impression you'd get from... cable news. On the ground, it's mostly Kiwanis Republicans and PTA Democrats.

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

#449

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's two ways to lean left. Do some leftward leaning, or stand still while your reference point ("the right") leans away. I personally think both of these have happened. I bristle at the inference that only one of them is taking place.

Except evidence has shown the the left has moved further left than the right has moved right. Both have moved but the left has moved further left in the US.

Which evidence?

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

#450

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…

> if it repeats something we've already heard many times - memes, politicized talking points, etc. - it's not critical thinking

This seems to be the modern default of online political arguments. Everyone spams their rehearsed talking points without any real engagement of what was being said. They may quote opponents, but the refutations often to have little or nothing to do with what was being refuted.

Then again, public debates have never had truth-finding as a goal: they’ve always been exhibitions to rally your base. Changing minds happens at the private scale.

Post reply on HN