This article is part of a series on news literacy designed to educate readers to better judge the reliability of news reports and other sources of information. We’re a generation drowning in news. Everybody reports, rehashes, comments,
1. Set aside your own personal biases
2. Maintain your focus
3. Diversify your news sources
4. Distinguish between journalism and other forms of information
5. Discern between journalism’s approaches of verification vs. assertion
6. Identify what’s new and why now.
7. Test yourself
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These are all great suggestions meant to be helpful but won't do the average person much good when dealing with certain topics, like the fake climate crisis or the U.S. war against Russia. In those situations, you actually need to know MORE THAN the sources reporting their convincing sounding false narratives or propaganda and colluding with each other.
This is exactly why hijacking climate science for politics and crony capitalism has been so effective.
Just a sad but true reality of the age we live in because we can't all become atmospheric scientists to understand how they blatantly distort and exaggerate the authentic science, while hiding the tremendous benefits.
There are 100 different articles about fake news, why we believe it and how to fact check and so on. Some of the sources or well written articles, are themselves biased to one side on some issues and actually push distorted news. Some of the fact checkers have the same bias.
I mentioned the 2 topics earlier, Ukraine and climate change, for instance. It's impossible for the average educated person to get the truth because almost every article is distorted.
The ones that question this can be good sources at times but some of them have resorted to developing an extreme bias towards the other side.
Our politicians and news media and message gatekeepers are well aware that people will believe in things they WANT to be true and the targets will give that infomation a free pass.
This is exactly when we are most vulnerable.
My advice would be to use that understanding to apply vigorous fact checks to all the information that you WANT to be true because your natural cognitive bias will completely shut down your ability to filter out elements that are false/wrong if you want them to be true/right.
I only picked out this particular article because the title is the main reason that I'm here..........sharing the trust and exposing the lies/propaganda.......an ANTI echo chamber.
Long time readers will note that people that came here with DISinformation, which I always debunk using authentic facts realized they would be happier going to an echo chamber with people from their own tribe that like to repeat and reinforce things that they want to believe. This mentality is destroying our country right now.
They are always welcome here, (with the exception of those coming with nefarious intentions or to make personal attacks) but they will always be respectfully fact checked and have propaganda/DISinformation debunked.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10796-022-10296-z
