Howard Schneider: How Do You Know If You're Getting the Truth from the Media?

As the Digital Age spawns a flood of information and misinformation around the clock and from around the world, Dean Howard Schneider describes specific strategies to sort fiction from fact, uninformed opinion from news and unsubstantiated rumor from verifiable news accounts. Learn how you can become "news literate."

Category:

Education

Tags:

• Howard Schneider
• truth in media
• Stony Brook University
• Samuel L. Stanley
• inauguration

[Cruton2025]

I appreciate what you are trying to do here but getting good audio is critical. I can hear every movement of the camera guy clearly, but the actual speaker I sometimes lose in the background noise.

[888zzz]

Of course critical and even cynical thinking about the information we're presented with is essential if this country has a chance to even come close to the democracy we've always been told it is, but by choosing examples that are distractions from the real, business created, systemic problems to illustrate media bias and avoiding addressing the fact that mainstream media is rotten to the core the lecturer undermines the critical thinking ability he professes to promote.

[888zzz]

Universities are businesses too. They're funded by corporations, wealthy individuals, and students from non-poor families for the most part. So the faculty is overwhelmingly conservative and the teaching conservative. Part of the meaning of education is political education. We come out of school politically miseducated with a blindly accepting, religiously patriotic perception of the country and unable to fulfill our role as responsive, involved, responsible citizens.

[888zzz]

The lecturer is too trusting of the mainstream media. The media is a business like any other. It's job is to sell audience share to advertisers. It's corporations selling to corporations and 95% owned by 5 corporate conglomerates. The fact that the mainstream media has always been corporate propaganda is a far greater problem than biased reporting outside the mainstream media. Every example he gave except the biased war footage from Iraq are distractions from the real problems.