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Sara Stevenson: Living in a Post-Truth World

By dianeravitch
November 22, 2016 //
44

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.

 

Categories Accountability, Media

In Final Months of Election, More People Read Fake News on the Internet than Real News

By dianeravitch
November 19, 2016 //
6

Post-truth is reality today.

Craig Silverman writes in Buzzfeed that more people linked to fake news sites than to real news sites in the final months of the election.

“Of the 20 top-performing false election stories identified in the analysis, all but three were overtly pro-Donald Trump or anti-Hillary Clinton. Two of the biggest false hits were a story claiming Clinton sold weapons to ISIS and a hoax claiming the pope endorsed Trump, which the site removed after publication of this article. The only viral false stories during the final three months that were arguably against Trump’s interests were a false quote from Mike Pence about Michelle Obama, a false report that Ireland was accepting American “refugees” fleeing Trump, and a hoax claiming RuPaul said he was groped by Trump.”

Categories Education Reform, Media

Sarah Mondale: Why I Had to Make a Film About the Importance of Public Schools

By dianeravitch
November 17, 2016 //
5

I am posting this again because I left out the link last time to Sarah’s story. I hope you will read it in full.

Sarah Mondale directed a wonderful new film called A BACKPACK FULL OF CASH, narrated by Matt Damon.

Ten years ago, Sarah and her partners Sarah Patton and Vera Aronow made a four-part series called SCHOOL, a history of the American public school; it was shown on PBS and won rave reviews.

Why did the team reassemble now to tell a new story about our public schools?

Sarah Mondale explains in her post why she cares so passionately about public schools.

She writes:

“My dad, Pete Mondale, was a lifelong teacher who spent most of his career as a professor of American Studies. His mother was a music teacher who taught for a while in a one-room schoolhouse. He went to public schools in the tiny farming town of Elmore, Minnesota, and thanks to the government-funded GI Bill, he was able to go to college. He later earned his doctorate at the University of Minnesota, a great public institution. He reached the pinnacle of his career in the 1960s when he founded the Department of American Studies at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa where he inspired a very special group of students. He also made a difference in the lives of students at George Washington University where he taught for many years. A number of them became family friends, and growing up, I saw how much they respected him. After he retired, his Alabama students invited him back for a celebration in his honor. They came from all over the country to tell him how he had changed their lives, a type of recognition that is rare in the life of a teacher.”

Her father taught her that the public schools were the bedrock of our democracy.

“My dad would often talk about how his parents’ generation, the sons and daughters of poor immigrants, got their start in this country thanks to public schools. His father-in-law, my grandfather, came to America from Italy as a teenager, and talked about public schools as one of the greatest institutions this country had to offer. My mother, became a teacher of English to adult immigrants in the public schools of Washington, DC.”

When Sarah discovered a few years ago that our public schools and their teachers were under assault by powerful forces, she knew she had to do something. She was teaching high school at the time. She thought about what she could do. And she decided to tell the story in a way that a large public would understand. A film.

I have seen it. It is gripping. It should be shown in every community across the nation. Now, more than ever, we need this film to inform the American public about the unconscionable effort to turn our public schools over to private control. We need the people to understand the theft of their public property, the stealth attack on the commons, the harm that occurs when public schools are defended and closed to underwrite privately managed charters.

Please read her story.

Categories Media, Supporting public schools

Google and Facebook Will Try to Curb Fake News, “Post-Truth” Is the Word of the Year

By dianeravitch
November 17, 2016 //
83

Fake news was a problem during the election. Many people circulated stories that were untrue, not knowing that they were untrue. With the continuing decline of mainstream journalism, which typically tries to verify facts, the ubiquity of fake news is alarming.

Google and Facebook have promised to stop subsidizing fake news sites.

Mark Zuckerberg continued to insist that fake news did not change the outcome of the election, but Facebook acted nonetheless to cut off the source of funding for these sites.

“But such reassurances have buckled under mounting criticism. On late Monday, Zuckerberg acted, joining Google in taking the most serious steps yet to crack down on purveyors of phony stories by cutting off a critical source of funding — the ads that online platforms have long funneled to creators of popular content.

“The move has raised new questions about long-standing claims by Facebook, Google and other online platforms that they have little responsibility to exert editorial control over the news they deliver to billions of people, even when it includes outright lies, falsehoods or propaganda that could tilt elections.

“Such claims became increasingly unsustainable amid reports that News Feed and Trending Topics, two core Facebook products, had promoted a number of false, misleading and fantastical political stories, such as an article saying Pope Francis had endorsed Donald Trump, which was shared by over 100,000 users. There were “vote online” memes that assured Democrats in Pennsylvania that they could cast their ballots from home and a widely shared news release claiming Hillary Clinton’s health disqualified her from serving as president.

“Over the weekend, the No. 1 Google hit for the search “final election count” was an article from a little-known site claiming that Donald Trump had won the popular vote by 700,000 votes. (Clinton won the popular vote).

“Facebook, Google and other Web companies have sought to walk a fine line: They don’t want to get into the practice of hiring human editors, which they believe would make them vulnerable to criticisms of partisan bias and stray from their core business of building software. Yet outsiders, as well as some within Silicon Valley, are increasingly clamoring for technology giants to take a more active role in policing the spread of deceptive information.”

In a related story, the Oxford Dictionarieschose “post-truth” as the international word of the year, one among many new additions to the language. It beat out “alt-right.”

“The use of “post-truth” — defined as “relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief” — increased by 2,000 percent over last year, according to analysis of the Oxford English Corpus, which collects roughly 150 million words of spoken and written English from various sources each month.”

Categories Media

The Internet, Fake News, and the Election

By dianeravitch
November 11, 2016 //
35

How many stories did you read or hear that came from fake websites?

 

Did ‘fake news’ on Facebook send Trump to the White House?

 

Did it affect your vote?

 

Whom can we trust?

Categories Education Reform, Media

The Danger of Fake News

By dianeravitch
November 8, 2016 //
46

During this election season, we have seen the power and danger of social media.

We have also seen that social media gives voice to the powerless who can’t afford to flood the airwaves with propaganda. Parents in Massachusetts, for example, deftly used social media to build a statewide organization to counter the multi-million dollar blitz by out-of-state billionaires who were pushing charter schools.

The flip side is the way that social media has been used to spread falsehoods. We have seen the rumor mill at work on Twitter and other sites.

The fact that this coincides with the decline in print media, where there are (sometimes) fact checkers, is cause for concern.

Are we in the post-truth era? How will we sort fact from fiction?

Categories Fraud, Hoax, Media

Mercedes Schneider: The New York Times Rebukes the NAACP for Demanding Charter Accountability

By dianeravitch
October 17, 2016 //
23

Mercedes Schneider dissects the decision by the national board of the NAACP to call for a moratorium on new charter schools until charter schools agree to transparency and accountability. As she points out, the New York Times education editorial writer chastised the NAACP in advance for expecting charter schools to be accountable.

The Times acknowledges that some charters are disasters, and that more than half the students in Detroit are in charters, with no discernible benefit.

It is worth noting that the same person has been writing the Times editorials on education for the past 20 years. He loved No Child Left Behind, he loved Race to the Top, he loves charters. He loves tests and the Common Core. Once when he was on vacation, the Times ran a reasonable education editorial.

Who is out of touch?

Mercedes writes:

“It is not good enough to note that when charters excel, they’re great, or tossing off the charters “are far from universally perfect” line (which the NYT does in its op-ed) and that failing charter schools “should be shut down”–another pro-charter, clichéd non-solution that only leads to unnecessary community disruption– disruption that could be curbed if there were stronger controls in place to begin with.

“As is proven by its “misguided” editorial, the NYT editorial board is ‘reinforcing an out of touch impression,’ not the NAACP.”

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Civil Rights, Corporate Reformers, Democracy, Discipline and Suspensions, Education Industry, Equity, Failure, Media, Privatization

Jim Sleeper: The Second Debate Was an Indictment of the Media

By dianeravitch
October 11, 2016 //
49

Jim Sleeper blames the media for allowing the second debate to degenerate into empty posturing and failing to ask sharp questions. Worst of all, the moderators forgot that it was supposed to be a “town hall,” where citizens were supposed to interact with the candidates. Not much of that happened.

He writes:

“This is a crisis of American journalism, not only of American politics. Media critics should stop letting their colleagues off the hook in explaining what’s happening to us. Chris Lehmann did it devastatingly well in The Baffler late last month. Neal Gabler has eviscerated the journalists’ performance even more comprehensively today at Moyers & Co. Where’s everyone else?

“Journalism deserves a lot more blame for Trump’s success as a vulgar self-marketer, because that’s what so much of journalism itself has become.

“The journalism that pretends it’s a civic art that makes public deliberations go well is firmly in harness to publicly traded media corporations that, with increasing intensity and mindlessness, come on to us as passive (or infantile) consumers, not citizens. They bypass our brains and hearts on the way to our lower viscera and our wallets with moderators, pundits, and “reporters” who care mainly about ratcheting up drama and their own self-importance as tribunes.

“Neither Cooper nor Raddatz gave any hint of wanting to stimulate and to draw out anything thoughtful and strong from “ordinary” people. Their every gesture and word demonstrated only that they don’t care about that. Cooper withdrew into astonishing passivity, punctuated by little bursts of civic remonstrance, and Raddatz tried to sound both tough and balanced while hiding both her mind and her face under her bright blond helmet.

“Sorry about putting it like that, but since “production values” are all that matter to these people and their producers, I’m actually not sorry at all. What I’m writing is what they deserve for forgetting how to practice journalism as a civic art, not as reality TV.

“What especially galls me is the contempt with which the “ordinary” citizens who’d supposedly been recruited to ask good questions were set up and then ignored by the program’s designers as much they were by Trump and, to a lesser extent, Clinton. At the very least, the producers could have vetted and enabled more astute questioners.

“The truth is that they no longer knew how to do that. The few live questioners that the moderators did call on, leaving the rest to sit in silence, were decent but little prepared and intimidated by the bright lights and, undoubtedly, the Big Bully himself.”

Categories Media, Politics

Michael Massing: How to Cover the 1%: Part 2

By dianeravitch
September 24, 2016 //
18

Yesterday, I posted the first part of Michael Massing’s excellent two-part essay on covering the world of power and influence in which the 1% live.

Today, I conclude the essay with part 2, where Massing offers numerous examples of untold stories and a few examples of excellent investigative reporting, such as the time that David Sirota broke the story that hedge fund manager John Arnold’s foundation was underwriting a PBS series on “the pension crisis,” without noting that he was a funder or that he has led an attack on public sector pensions. Sirota’s investigation compelled PBS to return Arnold’s money and to cancel the series.

He suggests several sectors that are not adequately covered by journalists: first, the philanthropies, which these days use their largesse to press their own political or ideological agenda; second, the world of higher education, which have come to rely on very wealthy donors who make gifts with strings attached; third, the world of think tanks, which have become increasingly dependent on donors who push their private agendas; fourth, the world of private equity operates beneath the surface, a world where vast sums are accumulated, along with vast political power; and for good measure, Wall Street, Hollywood, Silicon Valley, and corporate America.

We learn from Massing that the media occasionally pull back the curtain, but all too often are willing to rewrite press releases and respond to marketing and branding campaigns. Investigative reporting requires energy, effort, and resources.

Massing himself, in a recent private communication, told me he is trying to set up a website to do what he calls for.

Let’s hope.

Information sustains democracy. Without it, we are all in the dark, not knowing who is pulling the levers of power. Those of us in education have seen the immense power of the Gates Foundation, the Broad Foundation, the Walton Foundation, and hedge fund managers, yet the media usually is blissfully aware of who is manipulating public opinion and what their goals are.

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Democracy, Inequality, Media

Michael Massing: How to Cover the 1%: Part 1

By dianeravitch
September 23, 2016 //
24

This article came out in the New York Review of Books several months ago. It is one of the very few articles I have seen in the mainstream media that was written by a non-educator and that recognizes that the 1% want to privatize public education.

Michael Massing published a two-part essay on the 1% and how journalists should cover them.

How should the media cover the power elite, he asks.

He writes:

Despite fizzling out within months, Occupy Wall Street succeeded in changing the terms of political discussion in America. Inequality, the concentration of wealth, the one percent, the new Gilded Age—all became fixtures of national debate thanks in part to the protesters who camped out in Zuccotti Park in lower Manhattan. Even the Republican presidential candidates have felt compelled to address the matter. News organizations, meanwhile, have produced regular reports on the fortunes of the wealthy, the struggles of the middle class, and the travails of those left behind.

Even amid the outpouring of coverage of rising income inequality, however, the richest Americans have remained largely hidden from view. On all sides, billionaires are shaping policy, influencing opinion, promoting favorite causes, polishing their images—and carefully shielding themselves from scrutiny. Journalists have largely let them get away with it. News organizations need to find new ways to lift the veil off the superrich and lay bare their power and influence. Digital technology, with its flexibility, speed, boundless capacity, and ease of interactivity, seems ideally suited to this task, but only if it’s used more creatively than it has been to date.

And here is some detail on a member of the power elite:

To get an idea of how journalists might proceed, imagine for a moment that DealBook decided to adopt a new approach dedicated to revealing the power and influence of the financial elite. What might it look like? A good starting point is a DealBook posting that appeared in May on the “Top 5 Hedge Fund Earners.” For each, DealBook provided his 2014 earnings along with a brief biographical note. Heading the list was Kenneth Griffin, the CEO of the Chicago-based Citadel, whose income for the year came to a whopping $1.3 billion. Here in full was the accompanying note: “Mr. Griffin started by trading convertible bonds out of his dormitory at Harvard. His firm, Citadel, posted returns of 18 percent to investors in its flagship Kensington and Wellington funds.”

Appearing beneath the note was a link to two Times articles. One of them, from July 24, 2014, described the acrimonious divorce proceedings between Griffin and his wife, Anne Dias Griffin, who ran her own investment firm and who had helped elevate her husband’s status in the art world. The other article, dated April 2, 2015, described Griffin’s contribution of more than $1 million to Rahm Emanuel’s campaign for his second term as mayor of Chicago. It mentioned some of the large political donations Griffin has made in the past, including the more than $13 million he gave to Bruce Rauner, a Republican, in his successful campaign for governor of Illinois in 2014. The piece also noted that Griffin has given $150 million to Harvard College for its financial aid program and spent $30 million for two apartments in the Waldorf Astoria Chicago.

While useful, this information barely scratched the surface of Griffin’s influence. Going online, I tried to piece together a fuller picture. According to the Chicago Business Journal, Griffin is considered the richest person in Illinois. A post on CNBC’s website said that Citadel’s recent success “has arguably made Griffin the most powerful figure in hedge funds.” Unfortunately, it did not say what forms that power takes. At OpenSecrets.org—the excellent database of the Center for Responsive Politics—Griffin and his then wife are listed as the thirteenth-largest contributor to Super PACs in 2014, with large sums going to both American Crossroads (cofounded by Karl Rove) and America Rising, which does opposition research on Democratic candidates.

That’s pretty interesting that the same billionaire funded Rahm Emanuel, Bruce Rauner, and Republican super-PACs.

I will post the second part tomorrow.

Sit down and enjoy a good read.

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Inequality, Media
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