What with the recent development in the supreme courts I’m feeling a necessity to do what I can with the time left, politically.
However, aside from the most rudimentary basic terms I am basically completely ignorant to all politics on a state and federal level, and while I’d love to sit here and self loathe for my idiocy of not learning before it was important I need to start catching up and figuring out what I should be voting on and why.
Of course I’m deathly afraid that indiscriminately googling will lead to me learning biased and compromised knowledge from sites that I don’t even know are biased, ending up with a skewed and inaccurate understanding.
While I know I could still be led astray by you guys, I figured it better to ask somewhere like here than to just wander off into the internet, so can anybody help me and people like me to start getting equipped?
The first step is to understand the media, which Media Bias/Fact Check and the Ad Fontes Media* are never going to teach you. The only people who are taught it are those who get degrees in marketing, public relations, political science, history, and journalism; and even then only some of them.
The new post-Trump/“post-truth” media literacy curricula won’t teach it to you either, because it was paid for and crafted by the US military-industrial complex: New Media Literacy Standards Aim to Combat ‘Truth Decay’.
This week, the RAND Corporation released a new set of media literacy standards designed to support schools in this task.
The standards are part of RAND’s ongoing project on “truth decay”: a phenomenon that RAND researchers describe as “the diminishing role that facts, data, and analysis play in our political and civic discourse.”
None of it is a secret, though, and it can be learned.
- Noam Chomsky - The 5 Filters of the Mass Media Machine
- Propaganda model
- Edward Bernays
- Walter Lippmann
- Council on Foreign Relations
- Powell Memorandum
- The Trilateral Commission’s report, The Crisis of Democracy
* I’ve criticized MBFC & Ad Fontes before:
If you want to do it the hard way it’s time to watch CSPAN, CSPAN2, and CSPAN3. It’s the only way to see what Congress is doing straight from the horse’s mouth.
I’d never heard of these networks. Thank you
Politics is always biased. That’s the point of it. There is no strictly objective reporting that has any meaning.
