"How Real is Fake News?" Sharyl Attkisson Ted Talk and Points Media Literacy

Sharyl Attkisson presented a Ted Talk recently on the topic of "fake news." It is a balanced perspective that she is famous for.



The main points are as follows:

1. Fake News has been around a long time, and used to be mostly the domain of tabloids. Examples of it include the "Jewell Olympics Bombing" and "Sandy Hook Killing Hoax."

2. National use of the term began in the 2016 Presidential campaign. It originated with a Google-related nonprofit "First Draft," and was then spread widely in MSM as a "threat to Democracy." First Draft was funded by rich Clinton supporters.

3. Trump used the term against MSM so successfully to the point of backfire that the Washington Post urged that the term should be laid to rest in early 2017. All POVs claim opposing POVs are "fake news."

4. "Media Literacy," a proposed school curriculum, is funded by the same people who originally promoted the term "fake news."

The topic of this thread is whether and to what degree "media literacy" should be taught in schools. My opinion is that it should -not- be taught as such, but rather Logic and Critical Thinking should be formally taught in HS. Such a class would contain no politics whatsoever, but rely on basic Logic 101 textbooks, a thorough exploration of informal fallacies, and possibly the classic "How to Lie with Statistics" or similar.

Thoughts?

 

Bumping this up because it's a great video everyone should watch and hopefully folks may want to comment on, particularly the proposed "Media Literacy" school program.

More about the "media literacy" initiative:

https://www.voanews.com/a/alarmed-fake-news-states-push-media-literacy-schools/4186222.html

 

Will watch later.