On Media "Literacy" And "Reliable" News Outlets
Corporate Media Still The Worst Purveyor Of "Fake News"
In California, thanks to California Assembly Bill 873, students in grades K-12 will now be receiving “instruction” in something called “media literacy”, which presumably aims to combat “misinformation” and “fake news”.
It is therefore the intent of the Legislature to ensure that all pupils in California are prepared with media literacy skills necessary to safely, responsibly, and critically consume and use social media and other forms of media.
Why is this important to Californians? Because apparently “misinformation” is the great threat of the modern age, according to the findings within AB873.
(6) The proliferation of online misinformation has posed risks to international peace, interfered with democratic decisionmaking, and threatened public health.
The irony, of course, is that the leading sources of inaccurate and outright false information have repeatedly and demonstrably been the corporate media, usually while peddling whichever narratives are endorsed by the entrenched political class.
This is no small initiative by the state. California intends to weave this notion of “media literacy” throughout the entirety of the school curriculum:
33548.
(a) For purposes of this section, the following definitions apply:
(1) “Digital citizenship” means a diverse set of skills related to current technology and social media, including the norms of appropriate, responsible, and healthy behavior.
(2) “Media literacy” means the ability to access, analyze, evaluate, and use media and information and encompasses the foundational skills that lead to digital citizenship.
(b) When the English language arts/English language development (ELA/ELD) curriculum framework is next revised after January 1, 2024, the commission shall consider incorporating the Model Library Standards developed pursuant to Section 18101. The commission shall also consider incorporating media literacy content at each grade level.
(c) The commission shall consider incorporating media literacy content into the mathematics, science, and history-social science curriculum frameworks when those frameworks are next revised after January 1, 2024.
Note that last subsection (c). “Media literacy”—whatever that is—is to become part of the teaching of mathematics.
Let that sink in. California is seriously proposing that accepting “2 + 2 = 4” hinges on whether one reads it on CNN or on Breitbart. No, that is not an exaggeration; that is exactly what putting “media literacy” in the math and science curricula means.
Advocates for the legislation are naturally enthusiastic about the prospects of being able to indoctrinate educate an entire generation of Californians on “fake news”, of being able to rescue them from the perils of independent thought and analysis.
Media literacy can help change that, advocates believe, by teaching students how to recognize reliable news sources and the crucial role that media plays in a democracy.
“The increase in Holocaust denial, climate change denial, conspiracy theories getting a foothold, and now AI … all this shows how important media literacy is for our democracy right now,” said Jennifer Ormsby, library services manager for the Los Angeles County Office of Education. “The 2016 election was a real eye-opener for everyone on the potential harms and dangers of fake news.”
Excuse me? The 2016 election was an “eye opener” on “fake news”?
Does Ms. Ormsby mean the Intelligence Community Assessment from January 2017 which embedded in the corporate media the core of the later disproven narrative that Russia somehow subverted the 2016 election?
Let we forget, much of that narrative was falling apart almost as soon as it was put out there, as by May it was already apparent there were severe problems of fact and of logic with the narrative.
Nor should we overlook the reality that, by the summer of 2018 and after over a year of Robert Mueller’s Special Counsel “Investigation” of Donald Trump, there was no evidence that Donald Trump had committed any crime whatsoever.
Those who have studied the history of special counsel investigations will understand that such investigations have always been far more likely to be fruitless than fruitful.
Oh yes, the Trump Administration were indeed an eye-opener on “fake news”—that era proved just how committed corporate media was to pushing a particular narrative, facts be damned. We learned that when, after two years of investigation, Mueller ultimately was compelled to concede there had been no criminal conduct by Donald Trump or any of his immediate political circle.
That was learned also when the corporate media went into meltdown over then-Attorney General Bill Barr’s assertion before Congress that the Deep State had in fact been spying on Donald Trump.
The 2016 election and the Trump Administration were indeed valuable and instructive years. They taught us that the corporate media is by far the worst purveyor of “misinformation” out there.
As the informercial shtick often goes, “but wait! There’s more!” For it was not merely Trump Derangement Syndrome that highlighted the perils and pitfalls of “fake news.” Whatever parts of that lesson were not learned from media reporting on the Trump Administration were there to be learned from the Pandemic Panic Narrative the media began pushing in early 2020 and is still attempting to push even to this day.
It was corporate media which most egregiously mishandled the early reporting on the emergence of the SARS-CoV-2 virus.
It was the alternative media that gave us the earliest facts indicating the virus originated in a bioweapons laboratory.
Yet all media completely missed—and continues to miss—the extraordinary dichotomy between how COVID-19 appeared to circulate within China and how it circulated beyond China.
Corporate media, of course, was fine pushing the narrative fiction that face mask mandates were an effective public health mitigation against infectious respiratory disease.
Corporate media was fine promoting the idea that lockdowns were somehow necessary and vital to contain the spread of COVID-19, when from the outset it was plain that this was not at all true.
The corporate media has been complicit in spreading the demonstrable falsehood that the mRNA inoculations were safe and effective at stopping COVID-19.
It was corporate media pushing again and again and again the fiction that emergency rooms and ICUs were overwhelmed by COVID-19 patients, when the data showed again and again and again that this did not happen anywhere.
It was for my efforts in pushing back against this blatant example of media misinformation that I was censored, silenced, and suspended from LinkedIn in December of 2021.
Nor do the teachable moments on media propaganda end with the Pandemic Panic Narrative. The media’s reporting on the state of the US and global economies is every bit as atrocious and every bit as erroneous.
Corporate media has consistently mis-apprehended and misunderstood the damage inflation and rising prices have done to the US economy.
Corporate media has repeatedly promoted the Fed’s preferred narratives on how inflation and the overall economy should be handled—and been wrong every time.
Even when criticizing the Fed, corporate media and/or the talking heads being given a platform by the corporate media either overlook key bits of information or their significance.
Time and again, corporate media—the ones generally considered to be the “reliable” and “trustworthy” news sources—are the news outlets promoting the most egregiously false or fallacious news or analysis.
The new reader will note that this article is filled with links to earlier articles of mine. While there is a bit of self-promotion at work here, there is also an important context that deserves extra mention: the data, the facts, the evidences which all too often shred the narratives being promoted by these “reliable sources” are generally freely available. By far the bulk of my writing involves researching these evidences and seeing where they lead, learning what conclusions they support.
Which highlights the great danger of teaching impressionable young minds about such things as “media literacy” with a view towards combating “misinformation”. The sources we are told to just trust have been proven time and again, and in every possible subject matter imaginable, to be not at all trustworthy.
The “reliable sources” have helped the government lie to us about COVID, about Donald Trump, about the state of the US economy. Where they have not simply lied outright, they have displayed an appalling ignorance of the facts or an horrifying inability to analyze those facts to grasp their full implications. This Substack is in large measure a testament to corporate media malevolence, indolence, and incompetence.
At the same time, alternative media has also frequently gotten the narrative spin wrong. Whether we are assessing the strength of evidence supporting a “bioweapon” hypothesis on the origins of SARS-CoV-2 or the nature of the corruption surrounding the government approvals of the mRNA inoculations, not every proposed narrative arc has withstood the scrutiny of time and available information. Even my own early understandings of the COVID-19 pandemic proved to be inaccurate, as more data became available. My own assessments of Fed strategy and of the economic dynamics currently in play are always an ongoing work in progress, with each new report and each new metric adding a bit more understanding of what is truly happening both within this country and globally. This is the nature of data—as we get more of it the conclusions we are able to support with it necessarily shift and evolve.
Yet I will restate something I say from time to time: I invite all readers to scrutinize my work, to challenge my analyses, and to question my conclusions. If you think I have gotten something wrong, post a comment telling me what and where and why you think I have gone off the rails. That is true “media literacy”—the ability and the willingness to question what anyone is telling you.
Contrary to the implied agendas of organizations like Media Literacy Now, which intend for you to just trust what you read, see, and here in corporate media, I encourage you not to trust anything, including my own work. Verify my research, and verify everything you read when and where you can. Make note of those moments where you cannot verify what is being said—and be skeptical of it until there is either confirmation or refutation.
We do not need to teach young people how to recognize “reliable sources.” We need to teach them that all sources are unreliable. We need to teach them to question, to challenge, and to verify. Only then are we teaching them to think critically for themselves. Only then are we equipping them properly to face the challenges of an ever-changing world.
California has decided against independent critical thinking for its coming generations. Instead of rational skepticism about everything, Californians are to teach their children blind faith in the “established” narratives.
Far from combating “misinformation”, this California legislation is guaranteed to institutionalize it.
How about they just revive Civics classes? But then we’d know what our rights are and how government is supposed to work...
They keep making up new words in avoiding the truth, so they cannot even use the words truth or true, they make them so uncomfortable. They always seek to impersonate the truth while being filled with lies. Like satan. Let’s share their actual meanings:
misinformation = the real & true info people missed, often kept hidden, canceled, jailed, and at times disappeared.
disinformation = the real & true info people dismissed, often maligned, altered, slandered, and at times disappeared.
digital citizenship = congratulations, you are now actually just a number, unless you do not comply and stand up against enslavement.