Eclipse Digital Imaging, Inc. – PresenterMedia.com
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“If I’ve learned anything from beliefs, it’s that I could be totally wrong. And so could you… We should never be sure of anything we think.”
~ Andrew Gold
I used to listen to the “6:00 News” on the main three channels, ABC, CBS, and NBC. I felt I could trust them to deliver the news of the day, albeit they were only half-hour shows. Walter Cronkite is the anchor I remember best.
I have given up watching TV news – preferring to find the news on my computer. It seems that the three main channels, plus many, many others on television, are too blatantly biased. I either find out that the coverage was slanted to the left or the right, or not covered at all. I find this very frustrating.
News agencies behave as if they have agendas. If the story doesn’t fit the narrative they are trying to present, they either cherry-pick things to air or completely ignore the event.
We contribute to this by listening or reading passively, too lazy to think about what we are seeing, hearing, or reading. We don’t know what the source is of the item that got our attention. We don’t take the time to find out and think about whether we are getting the whole story or not. We fail to look at other sources or find sources we find more trustworthy to give the facts with as little bias as possible.
The emergence of AI complicates things. It’s harder and harder to judge if the picture you are looking at is real or not. AI generated ‘verbiage’ may or may not be true. It has no integrity to try to protect. It simply spews out ‘information’ that a lot of people read and use without thinking further.
When I substitute taught in Greenwood, Arkansas, many times there were no lesson plans left by the teacher, or it was something like, “Read Chapter One. Be ready to discuss.” I asked the high school students what they thought about the assignment. Their answer was profound disinterest. They opened their books, propped their heads up with a hand, and pretended to read.
I stopped them, asking what it was they were supposed to be able to discuss when they finished reading. No one could give me an answer. I asked them what this class was about – what was it they were supposed to ‘get’ from it. No one knew.
I then decided to teach them to really look at their textbook. In this example, it was a history book. I asked them what they already knew about the subject. Hands went up and thoughts were aired. I asked them to read with the purpose of finding out if what they thought they knew was true or not, according to this textbook, and to find out why it agreed, or why it disagreed, and to decide what they thought about that.
Many were surprised to find there was an appendix in the back that defined terms. Many hadn’t bothered to read the book’s or the chapter’s titles. No one had looked at the questions at the end of the chapter to get an idea of what the chapter covered and what they were reading to find out….
I suggested that they get on their computers after they finished their assignments and see if there were other sources about the same thing they were reading, suggesting they compare each one with their textbook, making a list of questions to ask the teacher.
Were their ideas right or wrong? What facts had they read (and where, by whom) that got them to rethink their ideas?
Thinking has gone by the wayside in our world today. It’s too easy for our eyes to glide over a headline and absorb it. We need to make it a priority to judge the information we’re getting by who is writing it, researching their backgrounds to judge whether we think we might be reading biased views. We need to get off our duffs and use our brains for something other than being somewhere we can place a hat.
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