Opinion
You wouldn’t let Bernie Madoff teach your kids about business ethics. You wouldn’t let Gary Glitter teach them about personal safety.
So, why would you let the mainstream media teach them about “the harms of online misinformation and disinformation”?
Bryce Corbett […] formerly a journalist for 60 Minutes, the Australian Financial Review, and the Australian Woman’s Weekly — also runs a school-based initiative that he says has taught thousands of Australian kids how to think critically when they consume online media.
Newshounds, which was initially funded by the Google News Initiative, is a free classroom tool that uses a cartoon dog and games to show 8- to-12-year-olds how to detect misinformation (incorrect information that isn’t spread maliciously) and disinformation (incorrect information that is spread deliberately). Corbett, a parent of two teenagers, says the programme has been adopted by more than 2000 teachers throughout Australia and was positively evaluated by researchers at Queensland University of Technology.
Google News Initiative? Google literally makes money from fake news. Queensland University of Technology? The same QUT which published a lengthy Jeremiad on the #DanLiedPeopleDied hashtag, calling it an “information disorder”… without once admitting that the Victorian Premier did lie.
In terms of it being “democracy threatening”, you only have to look at the way that misinformation and disinformation flourish at times of elections. The way that information can be manipulated and the ease with which it can spread on social media. We have seen that it can have the effect of completely destabilising democracy, and I really, honestly believe that unless we start to teach media literacy as a vital life skill, unless it starts to assume the same importance as reading and writing and arithmetic, then we will be sleepwalking into a kind of anti-democratic dystopia.
It’s too late: we’re already there. Not because of social media, but because of mainstream media lies.
The mainstream media lied about Hunter Biden’s laptop. Polls since have indicated that, had voters known the truth, the 2020 election result would have been reversed. Recall, too, that in the critical Florida presidential vote of 2000, the anchors of the five major news networks repeatedly stated that polls in Florida closed at 7 pm. The problem was that polls in the heavily-Republican Florida “panhandle” closed at 8 pm. They always have, and the big five news networks and their veteran election reporters couldn’t have not known it.
Some people reading this would push back on the notion that you can trust the established news media.
Of course they would, and that’s unfortunate. As a journalist myself and somebody who trained in legacy media newsrooms, I do care very deeply about the future of trusted sources of information and I think we discount them and write them off at our peril.
Really? Here are just a sample of some of the biggest lies — not mistakes, not “misinformation” — but outright lies the so-called “trusted sources of information” have told:
“Russian collusion”: this was a lie from the start. The media knew it was a lie. The FBI knew it was a lie, too, cooked up by the Obama administration and Hillary Clinton. Yet, they hammered it for years. They’re still at it. The ABC in Australia has never once apologised, corrected, or retracted their massive three-part Four Corners story pushing the lie.
In 2004, veteran anchor Dan Rather published fake memos attacking President Bush’s National Guard service. Rather eventually resigned, but the media complex doubled down on the lies by making a dodgy Hollywood movie depicting Rather as a “courageous” “victim”.
The Daily Mail falsely claimed Melania Trump had worked as a prostitute. Rolling Stone published a completely fake article, “A Rape on Campus”. NBC anchor Brian Williams repeatedly lied about: being shot at in a helicopter over Iraq, flying in to Baghdad with Seal Team Six, and being at the Brandenberg Gate when the Berlin Wall fell.
NBC deliberately edited the transcript of George Zimmerman’s 911, to frame him as “racist”. The NYT’s Jayson Blair repeatedly fabricated stories, including fake details of the Beltway Sniper’s police interrogation, and fabricating fake quotes for troops in a US naval hospital. AP reporter Christopher Newton fabricated at least forty sources for stories in just two years.
In 1993, NBC faked a story about a Chevrolet pickup exploding after a “low-speed collision”, by lying about the crash speed (it was much faster), and by rigging the truck with explosives. In 1981, Janet Cooke won a Pulitzer for her story about an eight-year-old heroin addict — who was completely made up.
At least Cooke had the decency to return her Pulitzer. The NYT still hangs on to Walter Duranty’s Pulitzer for his knowing lie that there was no famine in the Ukraine in the 1930s. Even seventy years later, the Times continues to defend Duranty’s lies.
And herein lies the rub: teaching media literacy to kids is actually a good idea. But is that what’s really happening here? Or is it, as with so-called “critical thinking” lessons in schools, claiming to teach media literacy, but merely indoctrinating kids to think only in approved ways?
Especially when the bias of so-called “misinformation experts” is almost total and extreme:
We surveyed 150 academic experts on misinformation […]
Experts leaned strongly toward the left of the political spectrum: very right-wing (0), fairly right-wing (0), slightly right-of-center (7), center (15), slightly left-of-center (43), fairly left-wing (62), very left-wing (21).
A survey of expert views on misinformation: Definitions, determinants, solutions, and future of the field
Media literacy is the ability to see through that fake news and recognise it for what it is.
NZ Herald
Oh, we can. We can.
That’s why the mainstream media are dying.