Cultural Resources
Disinformation / Media Literacy / Knowledge / Reality
Activists
To drive policy change in every state and at the national level to ensure all K-12 students receive comprehensive media literacy education and skills, now and in the future.
Advocacy/Services
A nonpartisan national education nonprofit, provides programs and resources for educators and the public to teach, learn and share the abilities needed to be smart, active consumers of news and information and equal and engaged participants in a democracy.
Produces and distributes documentary films and other educational resources to inspire critical thinking about the social, political, and cultural impact of American mass media.
Articles/Essays/Op-Eds
Don’t Believe What They’re Telling You About Misinformation, Manvir Singh.
People may fervently espouse symbolic beliefs, cognitive scientists say, but they don’t treat them the same as factual beliefs. It’s worth keeping track of the difference…. Thoughtful scholars—including the philosopher Daniel Williams and the experimental psychologist Sacha Altay—encourage us to see misinformation more as a symptom than as a disease. Unless we address issues of polarization and institutional trust, they say, we’ll make little headway against an endless supply of alluring fabrications. [read more]
The Constitution of Knowledge, Jonathan Rauch.
How Do We Get to Herd Immunity for Fake News?, Greg Weiner.
“We need to match our focus on the supply of misinformation with a focus on the demand for it.... That is why liberal education seeks to foster intellectual virtues. One is humility,... Another intellectual virtue is the ability to embrace nuance — the fact that most of life occupies a realm of opacity that is neither stark truth or fiction nor obvious right or wrong — without collapsing into nihilism.”
As Local News Dies, a Pay-for-Play Network Rises in Its Place, Davey Alba and Jack Nicas.
“A nationwide operation of 1,300 local sites publishes coverage that is ordered up by Republican groups and corporate P.R. firms. Brian Timpone’s network of local news outlets is mostly online, but it also prints newspapers in some towns.” Propaganda, not journalism.
The First Amendment in the age of disinformation, Emily Bazelon.
“The ideal subject of fascist ideology was the person ‘for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e. the reality of experience),’ [Hannah] Arendt wrote, ‘and the distinction between true and false (i.e. the standards of thought) no longer exist.’ An information war may seem to simply be about speech. But Arendt understood that what was at stake was far more.”
To Recognize Misinformation in Media, Teach a Generation While It’s Young, Amy Yee.
“There is no silver bullet to slay internet lies and fictions. But students can be taught to know when information is reliable.”
Podcasts
“Debunks the stories of the past. But its real subject isn’t so much facts as the process by which we absorb them.”