Nathan J. Robinson has a good article at Current Affairs entitled, “A Guide for High School Students on How to Avoid Propaganda.”
The article addresses students because of the increasing number of school
districts using videos produced by Prager University (a conservative propaganda mill) for classroom instruction.
If you or your friends have wondered how to distinguish fake news from legitimate reporting, I highly recommend taking the time to read this article carefully. It is very good.
In a world where more and more people are wondering if ANY media outlets can be ever be trusted to tell the truth, Robinson offers a clear examination of media bias. He also walks the reader through 4 recent news stories and explains how to separate the “wheat from the chaff” to discover the truth of the matter.
It’s a longer article but well worth your time.
Below is an excerpt, or you can find the entire article here.
It would be nice to think that we ourselves are smarter [than the ancients], that we could never end up being so delusional. But anyone can be fooled, for a very obvious reason: most of our knowledge isn’t arrived at rationally. We develop our understandings of the world through trusting what other people are telling us. That does not just go for religious believers. All of us have to have “faith” that we are being told the truth, because it is impossible for us to prove all the things we need to believe. George Orwell noted that most people believe the Earth is round not because they have personally deduced it to be the case, but because they have been taught it. Orwell said that if we encountered a Flat Earther who asked us to prove it, many people would struggle. Orwell himself was somewhat confident he could deal with a Flat Earther, but less sure he could take on someone who argued, say, that the moon is a flat disc.
