True or false: While in office, President Barack Obama met and shook hands with Iranian President Hassan Rouhani. Hint: Don’t let the picture fool you.
The answer is false. But it would have been easy to believe otherwise if you were one of the people who saw a doctored photo tweeted by U.S. Rep. Paul Gosar, R-Ariz. Whoever created the picture placed Rouhani’s image over that of now-former Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, with whom Obama did indeed shake hands when the two met in 2011.
The incident — which prompted the House Ethics Committee to warn lawmakers not to share doctored images or videos — is just one of the many reasons we welcome an effort to promote news literacy education in schools throughout the country.
The goal, News Literacy Project founder Alan Miller told The Associated Press, is to get news literacy programs incorporated into civics education. “The truth is we live at a time when people have more credible and valuable information at their fingertips than at any time in history,” he told AP. “Yet misinformation has turned that world against us in so many ways.”
The profound seriousness of this problem can’t be overstated. We must make every effort to prevent campaigns like the one waged by Russia leading into the 2016 presidential election from infecting future elections. Teaching our young people — and hopefully the older folks, too — to know how to distinguish between fact and fiction is essential to preservation of our democracy.
A study published in 2018 by the journal Science examined “rumor cascades” spread on Twitter from 2006 to 2017. It found 126,000 rumors were spread by about 3 million people. According to Science, “False news reached more people than the truth; the top 1 percent of false news cascades diffused to between 1,000 and 100,000 people, whereas the truth rarely diffused to more than 1,000 people. Falsehood also diffused faster than the truth.”
Although technology giants such as Facebook, Google, Twitter and others say they are taking the disinformation threat seriously, being savvy to the garbage circulating out there is essential.
We’d include in that those who label something “fake news” when it’s simply actual news that they don’t like. Case in point: Recently a Tennessee lawmaker introduced a resolution in that state’s General Assembly that would “recognize” CNN and The Washington Post as “fake news,” The Hill reported. Their offense, in his eyes, is they equated supporting Trump to being in a cult. Except they didn’t. The Post’s offending action was publishing a review of the book “The Cult of Trump: A Leading Cult Expert Explains How the President Uses Mind Control,” by Steven Hassan. According to The Hill, the reviewer, in fact, “dismissed the idea that there was ‘something downright cultlike about Trumpism.’ ” CNN’s offense was that it aired an interview with the book’s author.
Asking tough questions of our leaders is the news media’s job. People need to remember they are acting on behalf of everyone who doesn’t have the time or means to pursue such information on their own. Just because you don’t like what you see or hear doesn’t mean it isn’t true.
But determining what is an actual fact and not an “alternative fact” can be challenging, which is why the News Literacy Project is so important. “If we get to a point in society where we can’t agree on facts, we’re going to have a real problem,” Miller told AP.
Indeed. When it comes to protecting our democracy, ignorance is not bliss.
