How many stories did you read or hear that came from fake websites?
Did it affect your vote?
Whom can we trust?
Archives for category: Media
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?
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.”
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.”
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.
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.
The press strains to show “balance.” They do not differentiate between a conventional candidate with experience and knowledge and a candidate who lacks experience, is woefully uninformed, and uses his speaking skills to appeal to the mob’s basest instincts.
Many people, especially Bernie supporters, dislike Clinton’s policies, but she is not a menace and a threat to the future of the nation and the world. Trump is. He makes outrageous statements every day, which the press no longer finds novel.
She dares to say that “half” his supporters are “Deplorables,” and the press blows it up into a media firestorm. But was she right? David Duke tweeted last night, “We are the Deplorables.”
Do you want to see the faces of the Deplorables? Read and watch this article that appeared in the New York Times a. On the ago. The NY Times has published other articles about the neo-Nazism, white nationalism, and race hatred that Trump’s rallies bring out.
CNN and MSNBC have reported on Trump’s avid interest in and support for the Birther movement. He claimed repeatedly that he needed to see President Obama’s birth certificate. He claimed he sent a team of investigators to Hawaii and what they were finding was “unbelievable.” True, it was unbelievable. They found nothing. Now Trump surrogates like Rudy Guiliani and his campaign manager now say that Trump acknowledges that the President was born in America, but Trump has never said it. He thus manages to signal the paranoid right that he is on their side without saying anything more. He owes the President an apology but it will never happen.
Thanks to the media’s lust for trivia, scandal, headlines, and false equivalence, this unhinged conspiracy theorist could be elected president. Those who facilitate the ascendancy of this dangerous know-nothing are the Deplorables.
I exempt the Huffington Post from this generalization because it states at the end of every article about Trump:
“Editor’s note: Donald Trump regularly incites political violence and is a serial liar, rampant xenophobe, racist, misogynist and birther who has repeatedly pledged to ban all Muslims — 1.6 billion members of an entire religion — from entering the U.S.”
Leonie Haimson has written a stunning article about stories in the New York Times that promote investments of Bill Gates without acknowledging that the writer’s outside organization is funded by the Gates Foundation.
She refers in amazing detail to two laudatory articles about Bridge International Academies, the corporation that is providing for-profit schools in poor countries in Africa and elsewhere. Gates is an investor in BIA. The Gates Foundation supports the organization that supports the journalist. BIA is encouraging countries like Kenya and Liberia to outsource their responsibility for primary school education to the corporation, which charges the families about $6 a month. Haimson points out that when the cost of uniforms and supplies and food are included, the total is far higher, and represents about a quarter of the family income. If there is more than one child, the cost may be 2/3 of the family income. You can be sure that the business is highly profitable, and it relieves the country of the necessity of building universal free public education.
The article goes into detail about the research on both sides of the issue, which is not reflected in the Times’ coverage.
Other articles in the New York Times have praised the “flipped classroom,” a favorite of Bill Gates, and edTech schools that Gates endorses.
I hope the Public Editor of the New York Times reads this timely and important critique of their coverage.
2010 was the high watermark of the corporate reform movement.
In spring 2010, the entire staff at Central Falls, Rhode Island, was fired because of low test scores, which created a national sensation. Arne Duncan and President Obama hailed the courage of Deborah Gist, the state superintendent, and Frances Gallo, the city superintendent, who ordered and confirmed the strategy. Duncan said the firings showed that the administrators were “doing the right things for kids.”
Thus began the reformers’ war against teachers.
In September 2010, “Waiting for Superman,” debuted with a multimillion dollar campaign to promote it: the cover of TIME, appearances by the “stars” on Oprah (Michelle Rhee, Geoffrey Canada, Bill Gates, etc.), and NBC’s Education Nation, focused on promoting the film and its advocacy for charters. “Superman” was a hit job on unions, teachers, and public schools. Its data were skewed, and some of its scenes were staged. It was denied an Academy Award. But Bill Gates put up at least $2 million for public relations.
Thus launched the reformers’ fraudulent fight for privatization as a “civil rights” issue.
Into this fray came the Los Angeles Times, with its own evaluation of thousands of teachers in Los Angeles, created by an economist who employed the methods approved by the Gates Foundation. Teachers were rated on a scale from least effective to most effective. One of those teachers, a dedicated fifth grade teacher named Rigoberto Ruelas, jumped off a bridge and committed suicide after he was publicly labeled as one of the least effective teachers in math and average in reading. Who knew that becoming a teacher would be a hazardous profession?
Anthony Cody delves into the journalistic responsibility of the Los Angeles Times in this important post. The LA Times hired an economist who created VAM ratings and used test scores to rank teachers. Its reporters, Jason Felch and Jason Song, warned against using test scores as the only measure to rank teachers, then proceeded to use test scores as the only measure to rank teachers. The two Jasons, as they were known, hoped to win a Pulitzer Prize. They didn’t. They did come in second in the Education Writers Association choice of the best reporting of the year. Felch was subsequently fired for an ethical breach that involved inappropriate relations with a source.
Cody is concerned about the ethics of journalists who cloak their advocacy and partisanship behind the charade of journalistic independence.
Now, it turns out that the Hechinger Institute at Teachers College, Columbia University, funded the LA Times’ rating scheme. And who do you think funded the Hechinger Report: the Gates Foundation.
We know more about VAM now. We know that it has been rejected by numerous scholars and scholarly associations as invalid, unstable, and unreliable.
Who killed Rigoberto Ruelas?
Paul Thomas has been writing thoughtfully about the defects of education journalism for the past several months. He is obviously frustrated that there is so little investigative reporting, that so many writers rely on press releases, that they seem unable to interpret research, and that education writers all too often know so little about the history of education.
In his latest article on the subject, he offers as an example the misreporting of “grit,” which became a media sensation because of a bestseller (How Children Succeed) by Paul Tough, citing the research of Angela Duckworth. Suddenly, “grit” was everywhere, the secret of success. And now the National Assessment of Educational Progress (the nation’s report card) will be assessing grit, even though there is no common definition of what it is and a very thin research base for its importance. We don’t even know that “grit” can be taught. Angela Duckworth wrote an op-ed for The New York Times opposing the testing of grit, and Paul Tough says in his new book Helping Children Succeed that he doubts that grit can be taught. (I will review it in the next few weeks.) Thomas complains that journalists did not question “grit,” they simply reported on it, found examples of it, celebrated it, recycled claims without evidence.
Thomas lists 12 ways in which education journalism fails, but each of those criticisms contains a suggestion about how education journalism might succeed.
For example, Thomas warns against the common practice of finding “miracle schools,” which are feel-good stories that often turn out to be false.
He warns against the danger of presenting”education research and science in simplistic terms and failing to couch any one study in the context of the broader body of research or against unbiased reviews of that study. Especially since mainstream media are contracting, edujournalism is even more susceptible to press-release journalism—simply restating what aggressive researchers and think tanks send to the media without regard for whether or not that research is credible (thus, above, the overstating by both Duckworth and media coverage).”
He warns against the danger of “remaining trapped in rankings and state-to-state or international comparisons. Not only are rankings and comparisons mostly misleading, in many cases, the rankings are fabricated (seeking ways to force a ranking instead of admitting that the objects ranked are essentially the same), and comparisons are made at superficial levels that ignore significant differences in what is being compared.
He warns about “uncritically embracing crisis discourse about education that ignores historical patterns involving education, poverty, and racism. Current “crisis” education stories about “bad” schools, “bad” teachers, and “kids today” have been recycled in the U.S. since at least the mid-1800s. The “crisis” label allows edujournalists, politicians, and the public to ignore social and policy causes for the consequences being identified as the “crisis….”
Thinking without an ounce of imagination. Accountability, standardized testing, grades, grade levels—these and dozens of “normal” and “traditional” practices are never realistically challenged in edujournalism; no consideration is given to things could be otherwise. A failure of imagination is seeking out and believing in new tests and new standards; imagination allows us to rethink a better school system without tests and without standards.
Read on to see the other fallacies and errors into which journalists may slip if not wary. Each of them points the way to better, more thoughtful, more skeptical reporting.
Diane Ravitch's blog 