Control the ability to decide what’s “true” and “false” and you will control the people.
Democrat members of the Colorado legislature are ramping up the Orwellism with a proposal that has the ostensible aim of teaching children to differentiate between fake and credible news sources.
Do we even need to ask what types of news sources their legislation would classify as “credible”?
“Whenever somebody starts off a sentence with ‘I read somewhere that this happened’, you think, ‘wait a minute,’” said Colorado State Representative Barbara McLachlan. “I think we all need to be a little distrustful about where people are getting their information.”
McLachlan and fellow State Representative Lisa Cutter argue that schools should help kids discern between real news and disinformation because many young people today have access to social-media sites where information shared is not always accurate.
They pointed to a Stanford University study that claimed 82 percent of middle-school students couldn’t tell the difference between an ad and a legitimate news story online.
Cutter, however, insisted, “We don’t want to teach kids what to think.”
“We’re not taking a stand that one side is right and another is wrong, or one outlet is good and one outlet is bad,” she said. “We just want to give them the tools so they can figure it out and understand what makes a credible source and then they can form their own opinions about that information.”
Despite Cutter’s assurance that her proposal wouldn’t tell students which outlets are “good” or “bad,” the bill would create an online bank of media resources in the Colorado Department of Education that teachers would be able to use to add media literacy to their curriculum.
According to McLachlan, the plan is to incorporate media literacy into every subject in school. “So it’s not like everybody stops and says okay now we’re going to do a unit on media literacy,” the lawmaker said. “It’s every time you do a research paper, every time you’re having a discussion in class and you’re referring to an article or something on TV, that’s where media literacy will be taught.”
Cutter passed legislation two years ago to study media literacy. The Democrat made clear just what type of “disinformation” she wants to keep students’ eyes away from.
“There’s outside entities that are trying to sow distrust in public health, in vaccines,” she said. “They’ve traced some of that to China, Russia with election meddling. So I absolutely, firmly believe this will lead to a healthier democracy and society.”
Not surprisingly, West Ed — an education nonprofit that prepared the report advising the Colorado Media Literacy Advisory Committee on how to incorporate media literacy education into the state’s Reading, Writing, and Civics standards — is pro-Common Core.
As always, the Left’s proposals sound harmless or even good on the surface, but conceal a highly political and downright sinister agenda.
The “media literacy” movement is nothing short of an effort to keep young people, and the public in general, from exploring those scary, bad alternative news sources feeding them “right-wing conspiracy theories.”
Who will be on the “approved reading list?” No question, those sources will include the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, and the Associated Press — all of which have a definite leftist bias. Past editors and journalists at the New York Times have been very forthright in interviews about their left-wing ideological slant.
Who will be on the blacklist? The New American for one, along with anyone else courageous enough to publish the inconvenient truth about every leftist sacred cow, from climate change to vaccines to mass migration.
You know this is a partisan attack on conservatives because it attacks certain news sources, rather than teaching students how to discern ideological slant from either the Left or the Right and teaching kids how to discern good evidence from poor evidence. The fact of the matter is this: If someone isn’t able to verbalize and make a strong case for both sides of a contentious subject, he simply doesn’t understand the subject; hence, he is being taught what to think — no matter what some legislators or educators claim.
It’s important for Americans to understand that using the media for political and propaganda purposes is not new. It has always been the case. Many today have this mistaken notion that there was a time that only ended a few years ago when journalists were magically fair and balanced.
In reality, political movements (be it the communists, the fascists, the Nazis) and political parties have always created newspapers and other media outlets in order to advance their agendas; in other cases, such outlets are created by business interests to report the news in such a way that is favorable to their dealings. Very rarely are news platforms created by impartial altruists whose only motivation is the propagation of the truth.
Those who want to see the mainstream media’s dominion come to an end would do well to go beyond merely complaining about media bias. The MSM will not miraculously decide to change its coverage just because of conservative outrage.
Americans should continue supporting alternative outlets such as TNA, which cover national news, while also working to build, in their own communities, local news platforms that report on state, county, and municipal politics from a constitutionalist perspective.
