People seem to get alarmed easily. It’s a longstanding issue with our mass reactions. Just about every issue out there is subject to it. Innuendo seems to work. I really think we each need to examine how we fall for crap, accept it, and assume our own sources are superior. (And how the Masters work this to their gain.)
Someone recently told me the news is so slanted that he only trusts Fox. Sigh.
Perhaps it is an increasing trend for people to believe only news which conforms to their pre-existing ideological or partisan viewpoint, regardless of whether the news is true or false, or true but presented in a misleading way.
A lot of times its not so much an agenda, but just plain ignorance of the subject about which they write. It’s easy to ‘believe’ the govt official or special sound bites when you haven’t the faintest idea of the topic and therefor don’t/can’t comprehend the questions that you should be asking.
J-schools an Comm programs should required advanced stats, IMO.
Media outlets and professional journalists have a responsibility to filter out news that is truly fake.
Every reader has a responsibility to discern fallacies that are common even in legitimate news stories, editorial opinion, and follow-on discussions (ad hominem and ad populum arguments; red herrings; appeals to fear, spite, and wishful thinking; hasty generalizations; poisoning the well; etc.) These fallacies may have a bigger, more lasting collective impact than fake news. A fake news story is a complete event that can be corrected in its entirety just by exposing it. Demagoguery needs to be decomposed and countered one fallacy at a time, usually without the advantage of appealing to audience passions.
Logic and rhetoric were once considered (along with grammar) part of the foundation of liberal learning. Today they’ve become specialized subjects one might cover in an upper level college course. I doubt 1 in 10 current college freshman can name and describe more than one or two logical-rhetorical fallacies. So even if their news sources are legitimate, they lack a common language to describe fallacious statements that are reported or appear in discussion.
One day I was reading a news article, and I noticed a link at the bottom to an article which was headlined “Former sports legends who are now broke!” The photo attached to the article was of Troy Aikman. Upon reading the article, nowhere was Troy Aikman even mentioned. Talk about disingenuous click bait!
Same with lots of college advice, their supposed knowledge. Buy me! I wrote a book! I run a website! Trust me!
But wasn’t that during the time when relatively few people went to college?
The 23-campus California State University does have a critical thinking course in its general education requirements (area A3). See https://www.calstate.edu/eo/EO-1065.html (Article 4, Area A):
The courses are generally frosh/soph level courses. Students transferring from community colleges are expected to complete such a course before transfer. http://info.sjsu.edu/web-dbgen/narr/static/schedules/general-education-corege.html shows example courses at one CSU that fulfill the requirement.
How effective those courses are, in terms of whether people who have completed such courses apply the critical thinking skills taught therein to various things that they encounter, is another story.
I’m not sure one class (at CSU) is sufficient. Critical thinking needs to be practiced. It was a running task through my hs years. And founded on middle school lessons in standing back to see what was written, not just study it.
I remember a bit of that being taught in elementary school, where there was a lesson on advertising and how it is made to try to convince people to buy whatever is being advertised.
Just yesterday, I read four headlines and it just seemed like a total reversal of what someone had been saying. I thought, “Wow, what a change.” So, I decided to read the transcript of what the person said. And gees, all the headlines were totally wrong and misstated / misinterpreted what the person actually said.
Motto - read direct, unedited transcripts; watch the video with people actually speaking speaking; and, do not depend on any MSM to analyze or explain anything, until you have the raw data to compare and back up what the MSM says.
And as for the actual 100% made-up news that sites put out there, teach your kids how to analyze for consistency and how to analyze data. It is not difficult to pick out the junk, but one has to know how.
I have lived this one in real time.
There is a well-known medical reporter, who everyone probably has read here, who I went to school with. This person washed out of the sciences early in sophomore year and ended majoring in English, I believe, and went on to journalism school.
Jump forward 10 years, and this person becomes the medical reporter of a major weekly publication. A group of us emailed each other immediately just cracking up - this person could not even handle organic chemistry or basic physics or biology and this person was now reporting on medical issues and pretending to explain things to people? Yikes…
She has since retired from that - thank god - but we still laugh about though. No one read anything she wrote with any seriousness. Too many blasé comments, too many unrelated scientific what-ifs, and too many journalist tricks in effort to make article suspenseful and interesting to the uniformed, but the science was lacking in integrity. Yet, readers were told this was a medical savvy person writing the article.
I believe the topic here is Fake News. In a post fact world, where anyone in any country can slap up a website and peddle click bait for profit, we have a problem. Because people in an echo chamber not only read the fake story but they openly share it as fact.
There are no standards of journalism, no credentials, no fact checking. Fake like a Nigerian prince scam fake. Yet I bet people in your Facebook feed are sharing these “news” stories.
@ucbalumnus
Yes, it’s only been a few short decades that relatively many Americans have attended college. Before WWII, fewer than 10% of white males in the USA attended college. Rates for women and minorities were much lower. In the 1950s, college enrollment increased by nearly 50%. In the 1960s it increased by another 120%. In subsequent decades it continued to grow (at decreasing rates). Source: http://nces.ed.gov/pubs93/93442.pdf
I don’t get the impression we’ve had a corresponding improvement in the quality of civic discourse …
but maybe I’m just visiting the wrong discussion forums (College Confidential excepted, of course.)
So, if you think the mainstream media makes mistakes and has a bias, the solution is what? To start believing posts from Macedonian teenagers? That’s what I don’t get.
That is assume you believe these are unintentional mistake, and the bias is inadvertent and does not affect what facts are printed. Leaving pertinent facts on the floor, which do not advance your bias and would give the reader a different conclusion is, to me, no different than someone intentional making up a story with facts that support his bias/pretense. the goals are the same - to present a fake picture of what is really happening or occurred.
And a philosophical question is at hand - when does intentional bias and not telling an objective story itself become fake news because its elements are written and presented in a way that gives a picture that is philosophically just as fake as a totally made-up story? I do not believe there is a difference in this regard; fake is fake, even if the fake story contains some elements that is true.
As to your question about what could be done - the answer is: 1) nothing, 2) ignore, and 3) educate.
Another defining question - exactly when does satire and parody become fake news for people who do not like being laughed at or made fun of? Do the biased then get to spike a story they simply do not like, even though people have the freedom to express those views? Back to 1984 territory.
In general, I do believe this entire fake news dust-up is fake outrage in itself and only illustrates the MSM and their followers’ frustration that many people do not believe or take them seriously anymore. Well, after being so openly wrong about so many fundamental issues and shown to be wrong in spectacular fashion, why would anyone take them seriously, without secondary and tertiary confirming sources from outside the MSM?
If you believe the mainstream media is trying to mislead you, who can you possibly believe? What kind of sources outside the media, other than your own eyes, could you believe? I guess I can understand watching Fox as a counter to bias in other mainstream media, but looking to fringe stuff is just going to take you down a rabbit hole, where you simply end up believing what you want to believe.
Note: one website I like a lot is fivethirtyeight.com, which does a lot of statistical analysis. I think the people who run it are pretty liberal, but they (usually) let the numbers speak for themselves, which causes them to be accused of bias when folks don’t like the numbers. In the election, for example, they took a lot of criticism for giving Trump a substantial chance of winning, as opposed to other analysts. But they also took criticism for saying that Clinton was more likely to win.
We are all inherently biased, based on our experiences and perspectives, our hopes and our fears. To blame the MSM, without blaming those who accept at face value, is useless.
I raised my kids with this warning, not to go on, “I think it, so it must be true.” Nor its sister, “I read (or heard) it somewhere, so I know it IS.” (You can imagine how frustrating CC sometimes is, lol.)
And what they do is go to a variety of sources, with different perspectives,apply their critical thinking, then form a judgment at the level they need. And then proceed with their lives. They can accept that we do not always know a full story, but they question.
As an experiment, I could relate a news story to you here- and we could see how careful wording hypnotizes a reader. It’s not just that critical thinking is needed, but also the effort to go to multiple sources, the energy to weigh, the savvy not to be swayed by some anecdote or bogus tone of authority.
Yup, it should be taught in schools. And by families. Nope, it’s not always “fun.”
The first time I watched the evening news in a European country, it struck me how similar the reporting was to how I remembered the ABC-NBC-CBS news reporting from decades ago. It was just a man or woman sitting behind a desk (or standing behind a lectern) reading off a list of stuff that happened. You didn’t see panels of shills from the Right and shills from the Left ‘splainin’ everything as a big-haired moderator tried to keep it all lively-but-nice.
^You still won’t if you are watching the ABC/CBS/NBC nightly news. What you are describing is the “fill 24 hours a day” type channels.
I think it is important to distinguish truly fake news from news reported by entities that do not share what I call the “soft lefty” bias that is almost universally prevalent in what most consider main stream sources. To my mind, not recognizing this almost universal tilt to traditional news sources is as wrong as relying on third hand reports posted on facebook about hate crimes, or a story that Hillary is about to be indicted on some blog titled democratssuck.com.
To @hunt’s question about what you are supposed to do if you think the main stream media is biased, I think the obvious answer is to read both widely and critically. Absent that, I advise sticking to bourbon and the sports page.