Now combine with the good old “you don’t know what you don’t know” and you have a great tool to mislead the masses.
Add a bit of cognitive bias on top (combined with being profiled by “popular search engines” that give you the results you already believe in) and you’re hooked.
Underlining story: there is so much need for critical thinking in our schools!!!
I'm confused: Isn't this a very common narrative, especially among a certain political group?
> Underlining story: there is so much need for critical thinking in our schools!!!
That is the solution IMHO and IME: Teach critical thinking, not who is right or wrong. That's what my teachers did almost universally, what other teachers I know of did, and what seems to me is happening in this class.
It's common for both political groups...
The people who don't think their political group distorts the truth are a prime target for this class.
> IMO the most effective and most widely deployed (especially among the supposedly more reputable publications) propaganda tool isn’t outright lies, but rather, selective reporting of cherry-picked facts and omission of others to shape stories into their predefined narratives. TFA doesn’t address that at all.
That doesn't mean it isn't taught. The article can't cover everything taught in the class. So that is unfounded.
> It seems to me that students’ main takeaway from this course would be to trust NPR, NYT and the like, rather than viral content.
What makes you say that's the main takeaway; can you cite something in the article or elsewhere? The only argument behind it is the unfounded claim above.
Are you suggesting people should trust viral content? How should they interact with information about their world and decide what to trust?
> doesn’t help when your “trustworthy” media selection decide to suppress all arguments from another side, or remain silent on certain stories altogether.
That's not my experience. Obviously, news sources have limited resources and time, so they can't report everything nor will they always make good decisions. They also are there to serve readers, and thus should omit information that lacks foundation in truth - I certainly don't want to waste my time on it. They won't be perfect, but the only core 'mainstream' source (e.g., major national publications, the NYT, WSJ, ABC News, etc.) that I've seen systematically show bias is Fox News (however, I don't watch CNN or MSNBC) and a little in the Washington Post, which I notice few people remark on.
In the NY Times, for example, I haven't seen it, despite people repeating ad infinitum that it happens (repetition, I hope they teach, has no correlation with truth). They even have an opinion page with as many conservative writers as anything else, and they are among their most popular columns.
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.
No, I really don’t give a damn about whether others accept it. I can post my opinion simply as food for thought.
"... has a bias" is trivially true for just about anything. That also makes that sentence useless unless you add more information.
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 differently is wrong." That endeavor is not useless.
> 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.
In the context of reporting, bias isn't about reporting accurate facts. That's honesty or accuracy. A source could be very biased but 100% accurate (by cherry picking facts that fit an agenda) or neutral but inaccurate (by reporting everything they hear without any evaluation or judgement).
Bias is about choosing what facts are worth reporting, and which words (with similar denotations but different connotations) to use to describe those facts.
> the most important step is understanding one's own, and understanding that you always have biases that are invisible to you.
Agreed.
But my conclusion is the same: The 'story' is usually pretty accurate, IME, within certain limitations (e.g., news moves quickly, and I find the NYT often omits some important questions, though not political ones).
Also, you are drawing the wrong conclusion. "Everyone has..." is simplistic. Some have more, some less is nuanced.
That's one way in which people sometimes choose a "right" or "zero" accent. Another is by social standing ("the queen's English" was literally that).
Either way, that's declaring one accent the right way of speaking, and describing people who speak differently as having a "heavy" accent instead of simply a different way of speaking.
Perhaps a specific example would make this clear. There are many dialects and accents of German in Germany. Which one would you declare the standard, and who would you describe as having a "heavy" accent?
My point is that making such a judgement is wrong to begin with, and one should simply describe a particular accent by its features or regional distribution, not as "heavy".
(And to respond, briefly, to the comment below: when learning a foreign language you choose to learn a particular dialect and accent. That doesn't make other accents "heavy", they just aren't the accent you've learned.)
In linguistics, this is the prescriptive vs descriptive debate. It's not controversial that a prescriptive grammar declares how a language should or ought to be used. Declaring one accent the standard is a similar prescriptive position.
https://taibbi.substack.com/p/aaugh-a-brief-list-of-official...
> Update: Virginia Girl Recants Story of Assault ...
What significance do you see here?
> NY Times title after an islamic terrorist beheaded a teacher near Paris
Again, what is the significance to you? It's not that I can't guess at some of it, but to discuss it I need to know what you think.
> (interpretations of Trump and Biden motives)
Trump and Biden are different people with different motives; should they report those motives are the same? Trump brazenly pushed those motives into the public, as an attempt at cultural change and attack on his opponents. Biden seems open about his too.
Also, according to the article, Trump backed his statement with lies, as he often did; should they be reported as facts? Should that be ignored?
Finally, circumstances had changed. The murder was years ago, for example.
> Ahmad Al Alawi Alissa killed 10 people in Boulder, Colorado, the shooter is referred to as a "gunman whose motives remain a mystery"
Do you know the motives? Was there evidence of them at the time?
> "How White Women Use Themselves as Instruments of Terror"
That's an opinion piece, which is very different. You can find all sorts of agendas and biases in NY Times opinions, the entire spectrum (almost).
.....
My impression, very possibly false, is you want the NYT to assume and appease the propaganda of neo-reactionaryism (or a segment of it): anti-immigrant and religious prejudices, and the unsubtle propaganda of 'anti-white racism'. Not only are those evil, dangerous and ugly, they are baseless. Certainly they don't belong in journalism, and you won't find them in anything serious from any source.
I had some minimal education on scrutinizing sources in high school and that's pretty much what it was. I think we spend maybe 10min talking about yellow journalism.
Topics such as evaluating which parties have what direct conflicts of interests or ancillary motivations and how that may affect their reporting were simply not covered. It would have been trivially easy to dig up a few non-controversial historical examples of people peddling very wrong narratives for the benefit of those who fund them.
Secondly, I did read the article. All it talks about is spotting questionable sources, comparing reports to shake out fake news, etc. As I said, the most effective propaganda tool is omission. You’re not going to compare sources on something you never even read about. After fact-checking a hundred times you’ll decide that NPR does report facts, but do those facts paint the whole picture? Also, comparing sources in this day and age is not helped by biases baked into search engines.
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 and limitations? And wouldn't you learn if facts are sometimes omitted?
I think we form nuanced, detailed, if often tacit opinions about the sources. For example, I'll articulate a little of mine:
* Rule #1: Never trust opinion pieces.
* NPR: Quality news, no deception or try to push an agenda, won't always dig deeply. Always present a pleasant tone and has light information density. An inefficient source, but sometimes have stories and facts that others lack - I wish I had more time for them.
* NY Times: World-changing revelations are taken for granted. Reporting is nuanced, never satisfying the desire for clarity (which is good - the world isn't clear). Sometimes leave critical questions (IMHO) unaddressed and can be lacking hardcore, expert analysis, and bury key facts in long, wordy reports. Recent, more narrative style is annoying.
* WSJ: Never quite trust them: Murdoch demonstrates they'll embrace the Reactionary movement at any cost to truth or society. WSJ reporting looks excellent - up to the standards of the best, like NYT, etc. - and they cover important stories, but a lot of doubt lingers.
you... may want to take a refresher course in the topic at hand
You may find my position is far from yours and what you've normalized, but if you do understand these issues, you know that that's not a signal about accuracy; it's often a signal about biases when we don't have room for considering other POVs.
The majority of people get their news from the limited 'free' articles that have been linked to them by Apple/Google/Facebook's recommended news based on your browsing habits to sell you more ads.
I don't need a study or source to make that claim. You need critical thinking to understand it.
0 https://greenwald.substack.com/p/the-media-lied-repeatedly-a...
1 https://taibbi.substack.com/p/aaugh-a-brief-list-of-official...
Often times people complain about the mainstream media and then post their own media, without convincing me why I should trust this media over any other media.
Did they post the syllabus in the article and I missed it? Or did you get on your hobby horse and just make unfounded assumptions?
> "But modern propaganda has long disdained the ridiculous lies of past and outmoded forms of propaganda. It operates instead with many different kinds of truth— half-truth, limited truth, truth out of context. Even Goebbels always insisted that Wehrmacht communiqués be as accurate as possible."
Note: This comment was expanded a few times, but the gist remained the same.
Edit: No, I’m not saying “trust NPR, NYT and the like instead of viral content you see on Facebook” isn’t a good takeaway. I’m saying the more effective type of propaganda (at least for people who don’t tend to fall for the obvious crap) isn’t discussed.