I heard this morning on NPR another story about one impact of fake news. A man in D.C. walked into a pizzeria with a machine gun because he'd gone there to "investigate" some fake news story about Hillary Clinton running a prostitution ring out of there!
For the past year and a half, we've heard and read countless fake news stories. According to the NPR report, social media have been deluged with fake news stories, which countless people have read and, apparently, believed. These stories have been invented by fake news writers to disparage political candidates, but they've had a far-greater impact in making truth slippery.
One of the courses I taught at UTSA was a course in writing argument. We taught students to consider and research the sources of information and to vet those sources by reading widely on their topics. The most popular topic back then was abortion--which, after a few years, I refused to allow. I had abortion fatigue.
We also taught them to consider their own biases. If we are biased in a certain way, we're much more likely to agree with sources that agree with us. That's called bias confirmation. To write a persuasive argument, we need to support our propositions with sufficient evidence from credible sources.
Today we are living in a time when truth doesn't seem to matter to many voters whose opinions are swayed by catchy slogans without support and by outright false "news" stories. While the screaming headlines in grocery store tabloids are obviously false, the National Inquirer has a booming business of people willing to believe whatever they see in print.
What frightens me now is that we are letting down the gates and allowing anyone's trumped up stories pass for truth. We need courses now in college for media literacy in which students are taught to recognize that "the media" is not one thing, but a conglomeration of things--and that some are outrageously sloppy with facts on the scale of tabloids.
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