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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

#361

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.

> Except evidence has shown the the left has moved further left than the right has moved right.

That depends on all of the time frame (are you talking from the height of the mid-to-late-1990s “neoliberal consensus” where the DNC had shifted sharply right on economic issues compared to its previous positions, and when—due in part to the economic boom, broader in reach down the distributional ladder than subsequent expansions—racial issues were at a historically low salience, or some other time), and your political frame of reference (a fix set of policy stands defining degree of left/right-ness, or comparison to evolving global or developed-world standards), and what you are calling “the left” and “the right” that have moved (are you talking about the nth-percentile position in the electorate, are you talking the median position in each of the major parties [and, if so, are you looking at the party-in-the-electorate or the party-in-government], etc.)

And, as with most identity-charged issues, standard selection tends to be biased by the desired outcome (either directly and consciously, or because of worldview, e.g., a conservative will be biased toward the constant-policy rather than evolving-international-norms standard in measuring how far to the right or left things in the US are.)

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

#363
post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

... Did you just use a Twitter link that does nothing but make claims on numbers as a source? More specifically, it provides the claim that there was no tampering without any evidence. Meanwhile [0] shows that they have the capability, and the motivations. This is the exact reason we need a class like this. [0] https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/sites/default/files/docu... Edit: And even looking at the numbers provi…

The numbers come from a YouGov poll [0] as the image in the tweet shows. Also I think it’s funny you link that senate report, because section VI of the report is titled “NO EVIDENCE OF CHANGED VOTES OR MANIPULATED VOTE TALLIES” [0] https://today.yougov.com/topics/politics/articles-reports/20...

> The numbers come from a YouGov poll [0] as the image in the tweet shows.

The numbers provide no evidence for the second claim, which means that the twitter post is being intellectually dishonest.

> section VI of the report is titled NO EVIDENCE OF CHANGED VOTES OR MANIPULATED VOTE TALLIES

And there's not much (or no detectable) evidence of most hacks until suddenly there is. It is not unreasonable to assume a compromised system is compromised. I personally think there probably were not manipulation of the tallies, but I can understand thinking there probably was.

There's certainly much more evidence of it than say, Hunter Biden's laptop.

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

#364
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.

> 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.

People do realize that you don't have to choose between the regressive, anti-intellectual right and the regressive, anti-intellectual left, correct? Every time someone criticizes the left, some left-wing person argues that the right-wing is worse as though there isn't a moderate option. We have to choose between overt left-wing propaganda and overt right-wing propaganda--we can't have a media apparatus that at least pays lip service to objectivity and neutrality like we have had for the last few decades.

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

#365

Not sure how useful this will be. News outlets fights amongst other news outlets to get the most attention and clicks. Surely if you teach kids a recipe on how to spot questionnable sources, these sources will adapt to look legitimate.

So we shouldn’t bother trying to teach them how to catch even the most basic, stupid, obvious attempts to manipulate them, then? I guess we shouldn’t patch security holes in any software, either. Attackers will just spend increasing amounts of effort to find new ones. It’s not worth developing vaccines for any diseases, either. They’ll just adapt. Why lock your car or your house? Determined people can pick the lock,…

It's a bit tricky to say when I don't have the full details of what the course entails and haven't assisted to it myself.

I think my concern here is that this course would give the students a false sense of safety since they now have a recipe they can apply to "filter out the junk" making them blind the next evolution.

I also don't think your analogies fully grasp the matter (alt ought they are really good examples of "races to the bottom").

A more relevant analogy would be akin too: "Should we teach students about known vulnerabilities when attackers keep discovering new ones?".

To that my answer is, I'm not sure. There are a lot of vulnerabilities, and going over each known one would take a considerable amount of time. Perhaps spending more time learning other facets of software development would be a better a better use of time.

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

#366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Its equally easy to see how this was to keep compliance with the orders for as long as possible, then, and in hindsight. Even the most heavily locked places with an overly compliant population couldnt have gotten that result by saying it was going to last for 9 months+

Senators on the intelligence committee dumping shares and buying remote work stocks for … a two week disruption?

I said the same things in March 2020 I just still don't understand how other people process things.

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

#367
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…

I learned to think critically about what I read from one specific incident. There was a local story about a high-school football game that afterward there was widespread vandalism and high levels of aggression/violence.

I was at that game, it it was all very normal, maybe with higher than average attendance, leaving a bit of a mess. The only way I could imagine the news being written as it was, was that the reporter wasn't there, talked to a few people, and extrapolated making the story exciting. There may also have been a motivation to make a school look bad. In any case, the jig was up for the value of in-black-and-white.

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

#368
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…

> the landscape has become a lot more partisan/ideological in the last 10 years

To an outside observer of US discourse, the phenomenon appears to be market segmentation and control, not really "ideology".

As former president Trump (a person who says whatever he pleases, without consistent principles) said when Fox failed him, "you have forgotten the golden goose."

https://nationalpost.com/news/world/they-forgot-the-golden-g...

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

#369
This is a sign of a bigger problem. Why is it that journalism schools are failing so bad that news readers have to do their work for them?

It's like expecting users of software to learn about good software engineering practices to make sure the apps they download are worth using and won't cause any harm to their machines.

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

#370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

NYT has more than "some bias" toward liberal. It has Paul Krugman for regular opinion columnist, for starters, one article from him on today: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/12/opinion/inflation-infrast... But these are opinion, so examine one news story from also today: https://www.nytimes.com/article/emotional-labor.html "emotional labor" you never will hear outside of very leftwing area, same with use of term like…

> NYT has more than "some bias" toward liberal. It has Paul Krugman for regular opinion columnist

They have opinion columnists from the entire spectrum. Check out the opinion page - it's got everything, and in pretty good balance, from (pretty) far right to (pretty) far left.

> "emotional labor" you never will hear outside of very leftwing area, same with use of term like "partner" or specification of "in heterosexual partnership". These are not noticeable for many readers from urban area but are almost jump off the page to any from, say, more rural background.

First, this article isn't news; it's a how-to feature.

Let's assume it's true that the content is better known in 'leftwing areas'. Does that make it less valuable to readers everywhere? Also, the NYT is there to tell people things they don't already know, the most valuable ideas they can find; should they limit it by some political measure? Dumb it down because you think that people in rightwing areas can't handle something unfamiliar (I'm attributing that to you, because it's not my idea or the NYT's)? A more general and far more important question: Must everything be politicized and restricted accordingly?

'Heterosexual partnership' is in this sentence:

In heterosexual partnerships, emotional labor often falls to women, who are generally socialized to take on the emotional lives of others, said Arlie Russell Hochschild, professor emerita at University of California, Berkeley ...

Again, must everything be politicized? Can people in rural areas not handle the language? And what words should be used instead - 'marriages' would seem incorrect, not limiting it to heterosexual relationships would seem confusing.

.............

One problem with the parent's point is that (very, very broadly) liberalism seeks change and improvement, while conservatism seeks to keep things as they are or were. Naturally, innovations will come from more liberal sources.

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