Sara Stevenson is a librarian at O. Henry Junior High School in Austin, Texas. She is a genuine warrior for public education. The “reformers” have no one like her; they have to pay people six-figure salaries to write the way she does. For one, she frequently publishes articles in Texas newspapers in defense of public schools and teachers. But her most valuable service is that she is a perennial watchdog for the conservative Wall Street Journal, which can be counted on to bash public schools and teachers with regularity. She writes letters there frequently and they are often published, rebuking the newspaper’s blatant bias against anyone who works for a public school.
She sent me her thoughts about fake news, which are being published also in The Texas Tribune.
She writes:
How to navigate a post-truth world
In the aftermath of the U.S. presidential election, I’ve been reflecting on what it means to live in a post-truth world. I was shocked to read several accounts, explaining that a majority of Americans receive their news via Facebook. “Trending stories” are highlighted in the right-hand margin of your Facebook page and serve as clickbait. Since Facebook has already determined your political bias, these stories — selected by algorithms, not people — play into each user’s biases and fears.
I wasn’t really aware of this problem of fake news until I read an op-ed by Nicholas Kristof, “Lies in the Guise of News in the Trump Era,” that reminded me of a recent day on Facebook. I saw a trending news story with the headline “Michelle Obama Snubs Hillary Clinton.” I thought it was odd, but I fell for the clickbait. Within reading the first two sentences, I could tell it was a totally bogus news story along the lines of The National Enquirer. Then again, our president-elect actually quoted The National Enquirer during his primary battle with Senator Ted Cruz, referring to an article that falsely identified the senator’s father in an old photo with Lee Harvey Oswald, handing out pro-Castro fliers before the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. It wasn’t until I read Kristof’s column that I realized these proliferating fake news stories may have played a profound and sinister role in our just-concluded presidential election.
Many of us find ourselves at times in the awkward position of directing our family members to a Snopes article, proving what they just disseminated on social media was a lie. Of course, when one major political party continually distrusts the “lamestream” media, the fourth estate or journalism, “truth” becomes malleable, merely reflecting the reader’s own suspicions and biases. In the olden days, publishers were the guardians of the truth, and whatever we read in print had a kind of trusted authority behind it. Now, anyone can say anything on the Internet, including a seventeen-year-old boy who creates fake news sites from his home in Macedonia, according to Kristof’s article.
But it’s not just Facebook. According to a recent Washington Post article, the top Google search on the election results led users to a fake news site. Since the Post article’s publication, that selection is no longer in the top 10. After initially denying the problem, Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook has joined Google in working to find ways to alert users to fake news stories, including cutting off these sites from the revenue stream fueled by online ads. There is now even a Google Chrome extension that alerts you to false news.
Then again, there’s no substitute for critical thinking.
All of us who value the truth need to challenge our fellow citizens to be more skeptical and discerning when surfing the web. We have many sources to help us, such as who.is, which allows us to search for the domain owner of every website. For instance, a search for the innocuous-sounding martinlutherking.org leads us to discover the site is owned by Don Black, leader of the white supremacist group Stormfront, which endorsed Donald Trump for president.
We must all do our due diligence and evaluate every website we visit. One way to do that is using what Gettysburg College has termed the CRAAP Test: Currency, Relevancy, Authority, Accuracy, and Purpose.
The very survival of our republic depends on an educated, engaged, and information-savvy populace.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I don’t do Facebook. Or Google. Or Twitter. I read newspapers. Does that mean I get nothing but facts? I don’t know about that. My local rag calls Eli Broad a philanthropist. Just about everyone I know is on Snapchat or Facebook. Does that mean they get false information? Sounds like it. Scary? You bet. Does the fact that people read lies and then vote mean I want the internet cleaned up? Censored, if you will? I don’t know about that. Someone has to call Eli Broad names. As they say in rural parts, Freedom ain’t free.
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First one has to question the idea why anyone would use facebook as a source of information. Then do one of the most critical functions in terms of their daily well being with out verifying the source of that information.
However you are absolutely correct facebook is not only source of false information. The corporate owned media may not completely make up a story. Although Fox and other right wing outlets do so quite frequently or at least push stories that have not been vetted . But even the “Main Stream media ” pushes a narrative and always has. We even give a Journalism prize named after the famous Yellow journalist not Hearst, but Pulitzer.
This morning I heard Michelle Rhee is a Democrat (than I must not be)
I heard a nice explanation of trade that did mention the Mid West but neglected to account for the rest of the economy. As if those policies only hurt the job market in the Mid West. There are all sorts of jobs that are related to Trade but somehow no jobs related to domestic production outside the factory.
I herd the robot story once again.. They must have some great robots in East Asia and Latin America.. Certainly enough to defray the shipping costs.
I heard Tom “Flat World ” Friedman alluding to a skills gap in a rapidly changing society.
I heard that Small Business can’t get loans. As Dean Baker pointed out someone forgot to tell small businesses that.
I also heard that small business moves the economy. Nobody seems to have told that to those small businesses in the Mid West. that disappeared with the big boys.
So Leftcoast this one is on you, Perhaps you will have more success creating critical thinkers in future generation of voters.
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Joel,
The next generation will teach us to be critical thinkers on the internet. I will help them take the lead, that’s all. Then they will scoff at our mistakes as the simple mindedness of an earlier time. But if the internet gets censored like the rest of the news which continues to be controlled, it won’t matter; they won’t get the chance to think, critically or otherwise. Democracy is messy. The more so, the better, I think. I go forward undaunted by 2016.
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The mainstream media loves to lump all the blame on the internet, especially Facebook and Google, so there’s a clear Catch-22 when reading any article on this issue published there. So, the advice I was told was a basic rule of journalism—If your mother says she loves you, check it out—applies across the board.
The fact is there are internet news sources like Naked Capitalism and The Real News Network and RT America that are the only place to find the stories the corporate media doesn’t think are good for us. Not that any of those are unbiased—the “unbiased media” concept is not and always has been a myth. However, they are a useful addition to the mainstream.
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Elizabeth,
Very true. We don’t need unbiased press; we need free press. Any citizen should be able to pass out leaflets in the square. Except for altRiech. They should not be in the square.
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I have to disagree. What you’ve just said is you believe freedom of speech and of the press should only apply to those whose ideas and opinions you approve of. That’s not what those freedoms mean. If you object to what’s being said and/or written, it’s your job to have sufficient information to counter it, not prevent it from being presented.
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Cross Posted at http://www.opednews.com/Quicklink/Living-in-a-Post-Truth-Wor-in-Best_Web_OpEds-Bias_Diane-Ravitch_Election_False-News-Reports-161122-719.html#comment630875
with this comment: It is a systemic failure and it is evident on A1 of the nation’s newspapers on Sunday. https://thinkprogress.org/the-systemic-media-failure-of-the-trump-transition-1bdb46167d8#.yma9jhtru
There is nothing on Trump’s growing conflict-of-interest problem or the men that Trump has actually put in charge of the government. These papers reveal a media largely unable to adjust to the new reality of Trump. He is a president-elect like no other being covered like every other president-elect.”
“The result is coverage that fails to adequately inform the public. The trivial becomes central and the essential becomes marginal.”
“The Washington Post : top headline, “Trump: Romney meeting ‘great,'” reflects the traditional belief that what the president-elect says is of paramount importance. This is followed lower down by a three-column story on Trump’s tweets about Hamilton.
New York Times gives Trump what he wanted, an image of himself with Romney. There is also a piece describing his son-in-law Jared Kushner as a “steadying hand.” The piece itself, however, describes him as enabling Trump’s worst instincts, which does not seem steadying. Hamilton also gets three-column treatment just below the fold. In tiny font on the lower right of the page is a piece about Trump, in the middle of the transition, meeting with his Indian business partners. The men were interested in expanding their business relationship now that Trump was president-elect.
“Once you get beyond the national papers, things get even bleaker.”
“In the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, a large paper in a state critical to Trump’s victory, the only article related to Trump was about his meeting with Romney.
The Orlando Sentinel, a major Florida paper, ignores the Trump transition completely”–“except for a small blurb on the left rail about his tweets on Hamilton.
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Bravo
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Quicklink: How the Internet Is Loosening Our Grip on the Truth | OpEdNews
mhttp://www.opednews.com/Quicklink/How-the-Internet-Is-Loosen-in-General_News-Internet_Internet_Journalism_Truth_Truthteller-161103-486.html#comment627018
HENRY A. GIROUX writes
“Nowadays, facts and truth are becoming [more] difficult to uphold in politics (and in business and even sports).” Certainly, in the age of Trump there is a great deal of evidence to suggest that the appeal to reason, informed judgment and facts is at odds with the current political culture. That is, truth and evidence have gone the way of the electric typewriter, or so it seems.
Americans seem to have a growing fondness for ignorance, an attitude that reinforces the downsizing of the civic function of language. Falsehoods and deceptions no longer appear marginal to political debate but now seem to shape much of what is said by the presidential candidates. This is shockingly true for Trump, who has organized much of his campaign around endless fabrications, sending fact checkers into a frenzy of activity. When Trump is caught in a falsehood, he simply ignores the facts and just keeps on lying. His followers could care less about whether he deceives them or not.”
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Susan Lee Schwartz
Trumps followers could not get through two paragraphs of Giroux. Perhaps that is part of the problem. Certainly easier to listen to his lectures, than to read him. . I gave a copy of his 2013 book to a friend(a college grad) who handed it back a few weeks later after reading a few chapters.
Trump may not tell the truth but he speaks in language they can understand. He may be full of manure, but he comes off authentic. That is something that Hillary was incapable of doing.
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To Joel Herman, who writes: “Trump may not tell the truth but he speaks in language they can understand. He may be full of manure, but he comes off authentic. That is something that Hillary was incapable of doing.”
Coming off authentic when you are really full of manure . . . now that’s a skill. (I missed that class.)
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Catherine Blanche King
Probably why you are in education and neither of us is in politics.
Somehow he got enough people to vote for him to become president .Obviously it was not his qualifications or his temperament. So there had to be some communication skill. His most effective approach probably was.; I have screwed people all of my life, I know how it’s done. But I’ll be there for you.
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Joel Herman: And their belief is founded . . . what? Certainly not his habit of truth-telling.
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“President-elect Donald Trump’s search for a secretary of education has narrowed to two candidates, the school reformer Michelle Rhee and Republican megadonor Betsy DeVos, according to two people familiar with the search process.”
Ugh. Poor public school kids. Two “choice” zealots.
Guess the unfashionable “public school sector” won’t have an advocate in DC for another 4 years. At the end of Trump’s term that will be TWENTY YEARS we have been following this dogma and public schools are the worse for it.
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Ugh is right. No more Rhee. Go Beasty — I mean Go Betsy.
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The American Muslim registry is an example of fake news that I see repeated in comments on this website. Trump is considering reinstating a screening process from the George W. Bush era of all visitors from countries that sponsor terrorist. Hillary Clinton proposed the exact same thing. I know this because she said so at a rally I attended last year. There was an instance when Trump was caught in a trap by an unscrupulous reporter re: Muslim registries. He immediately denounced it, but the MSM allowed this lie to fester. As we know, cable news does not have a legal or moral obligation to be factual.
More:
http://nypost.com/2016/11/21/trumps-supposed-muslim-registry-is-just-more-fake-news/
Another example of fake news is that Trump will cut funding for scientific research. His website says the opposite. The area where there could be a dramatic change is at NASA where he has stated that the organization should stick to its mission which is not climate change research. He supports full funding of technology and medical research, contrary to your blog post last week.
Trump’s statements on immigration are frightening. But Obama and the Democrats should not get a pass. Their cruelty towards our undocumented guests, tearing apart families inhumane treatment in detention centers, deportations of children back to the most violent Central American cities needs to be recognized and addressed.
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2016/11/08/immi-n08.html
To me, the Democratic Party has moved far from its fundamental values and core principals.
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You must be kidding. Forget the website forget the news. Just go to the video tapes.
As for any of his economic policies from Research , to Education,to Labor ……. unless he abandons the Republicans we know what we are in for.
https://mediamatters.org/research/2016/11/21/media-should-not-sanitize-trump-immigration-adviser-kris-kobach-s-extremism-ties-white-supremacists/214588
Lastly one should not wrap dead fish in the NY Post, no less read it.
Unless you are looking for nude pictures of the first lady elect.
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JOEL HERMAN says: “So Leftcoast this one is on you, Perhaps you will have more success creating critical thinkers in future generation of voters.”
Did I miss something? Wow. I didn’t know the “left coast” was responsible for educating everyone in the United States; and, if I remember correctly didn’t our state remain blue?
And to RAISE THE BAR HIGHER: How about we “raise the bar higher” and get beyond party politics–to regard that legitimate complaints, in their general form, are rarely if ever party-specific. Lying, for instance, though appropriate in some few instances, is “virtually” a universal all-parties No-No. Claiming a concrete failure in one party does not negate the same kind of concrete failure in another (especially in exponential form as it is with Trump); nor does it release either from personal and corporate accountability or responsibility.
In the particular, most of what I have drawn from Trump has come from his own words–then “walked back” by his drones. And much of what I have heard from him has been either/both lying, diversions, and/or morally AND politically reprehensible. Good grief–put Trump in the context of John Kerry’s “flip-flopping.”
In that context, I would feel completely naive to merely believe anything Trump or his drones say or what is put up on his website–until I see it actually implemented with my own eyes. Of course, I can do little or nothing to change things; so that, in the words of the Prime Minister: Wait and See.
And back to party politics, I do like Chuck Schumer’s attitude–go with what is good, and push back on what is not; and Obama’s, who is apparently appealing to Trump’s “better angels” though that comment did raise my skeptical eyebrows.my e Certainly those attitudes beat all-to-hell the idea that came from Mitch McConnell and that was implemented for 8 years: Go against anything Obama wants, regardless. And then, after Washington gridlock, came Trump.
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Catherine Blanche King
I am sure leftcoast is up to the task at hand . I thought it was obvious
that that i used him as a proxy for educators, as that I was responding to him. Harboring no illusions as to the difficulty of the task at hand.
“I do like Chuck Schumer’s attitude–go with what is good, and push back on what is not”
But I do not like that attitude .First Democrats since Reagan have always been to willing to compromise at the expense of the American people. But more importantly Trump like the child predator he is (and he is that was a real law suit not fake news ) will lure the American people in with an infrastructure stimulus package possibly with some poison pills attached. The economy will boom on the fiscal stimulus that was denied to Obama by the phony budget hawk Republicans .At that point he and the Republicans will be free to decimate what is left of the New Deal and Great Society and Public
Schools .
So go to the tape for the preview after appointing who he has . Gone were any references to those extreme right wing policies.Do you believe he has had a change of heart . Anybody who ran for office the way he did does not deserve the benefit of the doubt.
Harry Reid got it right we can not allow him to be normalized. Discredit and obstruct .
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Joel: I don’t and won’t believe anything Trump says until I see it implemented, and then I’ll look for how he and his family benefited by it regardless of the American people. I think you are correct in most of what you say. However, you say you don’t like Chuck Shumer’s attitude of going with what democrats think is right and can work with, and not if we don’t.
Then you say “First Democrats since Reagan have always been to willing to compromise at the expense of the American people.” But Shumer is talking about compromising, or going along IF it’s for the American people. It’s NOT just countering Trump on principle–as McConnell and that group of political morons did for Obama. They never realized that Obama won the election–not really. How dare him act like the president. They even stalled when the plan was developed by the Republicans in the first place.
So that none of it had to do with what was good for the American people. It was just going against Obama. What good is that? It was central to Congressional gridlock and played its part in the vacuum of power that created Trump. They never turned around and looked at the simmering disgust of the American people over closing the government and the threat to do so again and again, losing our trust status in the world economy, or blocking of the appointment of judges–all of which got dumped on Hillary because she was one of the “establishment.” What a bunch of screwballs.
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I am LeftCoast. I’m a teacher. Just one teacher, not a coastline. Sorry if my username confused anyone.
By the way, it’s hard to practice critical thinking in class under the boot of test prep obsessed leadership. Just sayin’.
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LeftCoastTeacher: Great big silly me. Thanks for the correction.
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Catherine Blanche King
.
In the course of my career, I have been in close contact with the inner power circle of a powerful NYC construction trade Union and still am.
Trump is a builder one who has almost always built Union,He is proposing massive infrastructure spending. You would think that would give him the support of this Construction Trade Union, it does
not . They are well aware that the only reason he built Union was that at the time he had little to no alternative in NYC.
Here are their nightmare scenarios :
Attached to any infra structure spending bill will be provisions suspending “Prevailing Wage” temporarily or on a more permanent basis, possibly legislation to have a national “Right to Work Law”
Any combination of those two is game over for the entire Union Movement turning back the clock prior to the 1920s. So will a Democratic congressman in the Mid West, in Flint for example, turn down the Federal dollars to rebuild the water supply.
Secondly fiscal stimulus will temporarily boost GDP to rates not seen in over a decade. The markets are already reacting to this with record closes, interest rates are rising up on the expectation of inflation. Like the internet bubble and the real estate bubble, when the crash occurs, when the stimulus ends we will be in a far worse place. But while the economy is booming Trumps approval ratings will be sky high. There will be no one willing to challenge his, the republican rights agenda.
This is just Machiavellian analysis, do we want to chance it? For me the risks far out way the potential gains. Therefore I say obstruct. The Republicans obstructed for 8 years through the worst recession since the Great Depression. The Democrats paid the price. I can give all sought of reasons why the economy is nowhere near full employment. But on the surface it appears to be to the point that the Fed is looking to raise rates. If the Republicans could block spending in the heart of the Great Recession now is not the time to give them a dangerous weapon.
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I was disturbed, too, to read about Miriam-Webster’s referring to the post-truth era. And who could reasonably disagree with Sara Stevenson’s note or her call to be more critical in our reading of the news. So I don’t want to draw away from the much-needed truth of her essay. It should be posted on everyone’s refrigerator as a reminder.
My thought, however, is to question the term “post-truth” to define our times, and suggest it’s rather a “post-fact” era. My reason: people who lie, by whatever motivation, are not denying that there is a truth. As a matter of fact, they either think (mistakenly) that they have it, often shouting it loudly in Shakespearean protest; or they know that what they are saying is a lie or, at best, a half-truth. In either case, the truth as such is not at issue but central to the argument.
The third motivation is that they are just nuts; or, if functional in some regard: involved in socio-pathology. (Being insane is commonly defined as being unable to distinguish truth from falsity on principle, or as assuming that our own thinking, regardless, is necessarily true by the singular fact that I think it. (Hmmmmm. . . .)
If that’s the general case, then either we have truly (ahem) entered an era of cultural insanity (the term “cultural” is necessarily loosely-defined here), or as with most of us, we are clear about truth, especially pragmatic truth where it immediately influences our living; but hopefully like fewer of us, we refuse and confuse facts instantly, denying or watering-down our own critical powers, when those facts conflict with our political (or other) ideologies, or our personal desires and fears.
I think the later is more like our “era” and like what we have recently passed through and probably are still in, if today’s headlines are an indication of that suggestion. Again, if that’s the case, then we are in post-fact, but not post-truth era, even though “insanity” may be gaining fast.
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The “post-truth” language suggests that lies are as good as facts, that facts are negotiable, that opinions are as valid as facts, that there are no facts. The other day, someone commented here that the play “Hamilton” was plagiarized. I called that claim “meretricious.” It is a lie. “Hamilton” won the Pulitzer prize and many Tony awards. If professionals saluted it, how does someone’s slander become fact? Yet another commenter wrote to rebuke me for taking issue with the original comment, saying that this person was entitled to his opinion. But opinions require some factual basis. I googled the play and “plagiarism” and nothing came up. Zip. No one has said the play was plagiarized.
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The issue is rife with ironies; chief among them is the fact that the germ for many fallacious tidbits is news objectively reported in the mainstream media.
When I pick up on a “breaking” distortion, I can usually find its source quickly, and more often than not, it’s Breitbart, or even worse, InfoWars.
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Hello Diane: I understand. My reflection was noting the difference between truth-as-such, and facts as concrete expressions of what happens to be the case. Even liars harbor a regard for truth as such, but not for facts or factual-ness. It goes back to the idea that we can have our own opinions, but not our own facts. Such a statement carves-out the distinction between truth and putting forth false and misleading opinions as facts.
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Hah! Speaking of fake news. Campbell Brown’s anti-public school website is funded by the DeVos family:
“The Dick & Betsy DeVos Family Foundation funds arts, community and education organizations, including The 74. We interviewed DeVos at length during our AFC-sponsored August 2015 New Hampshire Education Summit, which was attended by several of the Republican presidential candidates.”
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Honestly, I surprised that Ms. Stevenson wasn’t aware of the problem of fake news until recently. My children are in their early 20s, and throughout their teen years, I had many conversations with them about the dubious “facts” they passed along to me, garnered from social media and fact-free websites.
Fortunately, their public school curriculum placed a lot of emphasis on evaluating sources of news and information for research projects related to current events, (as well as an emphasis on using high-quality electronic resources in general).
In my opinion, the degradation of public discourse and the rise of the low-information voter has a great deal to do with the fact that two generations of our population graduated from high school before the internet became a quick and easy source of “information,” and many never learned how to evaluate electronic sources of news and information for credibility.
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Lucia writes: “In my opinion, **the degradation of public discourse and the rise of the low-information voter **has a great deal to do with the fact that two generations of our population graduated from high school before the internet became a quick and easy source of “information,” and many never learned how to evaluate electronic sources of news and information for credibility.”
Great insight. I couldn’t agree more. So many are probably still thinking “Walter Cronkite.”
Add that structural/historical deficit to the loss of (1) history education, (2) civics education and (3) political gridlock in Washington, and you have the vacuum that produced Trump. Apparently, if they taught history and civics in Trump’s school, his great mind was engaged elsewhere.
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Correction: (3) Political gridlock wasn’t “lost.”
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Everyone here is omitting the importance of knowledge in discerning true info from fake. Yes, it’s important to develop the habit (not really a special skill) of scrutinizing the source. But unless you have a lot of knowledge in your brain, you’ll still be vulnerable to hoaxes. Example: at lunch one day a whip-smart colleague of mine informed us that the state Department of Environmental Protection was using hippopotamuses to control weeds in the delta marshes. She had seen it somewhere on the Internet. A couple of us laughed and knew this must have been a fake story. How did we know? We happened to know more about hippos that she did: specifically that, despite their looks, they are extremely dangerous animals and account for many human fatalities in Africa each year.
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@ponderosa
Hippopotami clear out all the alligator and duck weed in my pond. I’ve only been chomped a couple of times.
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Not to mention the fact that you must know something about sources to decide which are credible. One influential fake news story came from “the Denver Herald”. I know that sounds fishy –the main paper in Denver is the Post. If I saw a story from professors at Sawyer University, I’d be a bit dubious as I’ve never heard of Sawyer University. Now if you’ve never heard of most newspapers and universities, how can you even begin to discern? Are you going to Google all the names in your dutiful effort to be the ideal critical reader? Come on. No one is going to do that. Thus a well-stocked brain is really the only practical firewall against false information, and so schools need to stock brains with a ton of world knowledge.
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I disagree that you need prior knowledge to sniff out fake news.
The internet is the vehicle of the problem, but it’s also the vehicle of the solution for me, personally. For example, the fake news that Hillary Clinton had a seizure. Google “Hillary Clinton seizure” and see the hits you get. Even just glancing at the URLs you can tell it’s garbage.
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YOU can tell it’s garbage. Can everyone?
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Not unless and until we as parents and teachers make teaching critical analysis of internet “news and information” a centerpiece of public education, in my opinion.
For what it’s worth, here is an example of why I don’t reject the CCSS emphasis on shifting to reading and analyzing more informational text in the middle and high school grades —which can happen in social studies classes, (and is where my kids learned these skills).
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Evaluating credibility definitely requires prior knowledge.
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I disagree again. I maintain that evaluating credibility requires determination to become informed and persistence in informing oneself.
What prior knowledge of climate change, for example, have I needed to evaluate the credibility of the scientists who recognize it and the agendas of politicians and business interests that want to pretend it’s not happening?
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“evaluating credibility requires determination to become informed and persistence in informing oneself.”
I think we’re essentially saying the same thing. You just seem to be saying that people can acquire prior knowledge (it’s “prior” knowledge because you acquire it before you make the credibility evaluation) on their own.
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The Leftist Antonio Gramsci predicted that the attempt to teach critical thinking skills in lieu of knowledge would result in impotent minds. We’re seeing the truth of his prediction now. Knowledge is power –thinking power.
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It is the biggest lies that do the most harm. Remember that Nazi propaganda was based on the idea that big lies become believable if they are repeated. Now we have “lie factories” that people believe or even enjoy because they recognize the lie but do not care. I have a friend who has spent the last decade repeating lies about Obama even though he knows they are lies. His justification? Obama is so corrupt that no tale told can be too much. He has decided that the man is guilty, so saying false things about him is OK because it hurts an adversary. If this is right, I am immoral.
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Irony or coincidence. This morning the Wall Street Journal reported on a study of the inability of Stanford University students to determine facts using a Google search. I think Larry Cuban posted on the same study. There are other studies that show students cannot/do not routinely notice the difference between an ad and a website that might be credible. I don’t Tweet or Facebook.
http://www.wsj.com/…/most-students-dont-know-when-news-is-fake-stanford-study-finds-147.
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I hear what your saying ,the truth is sometimes hard to comeby…
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