Fact-checking https://www.morningsidecenter.org/ en Roleplay: Immigration Fiction and Fact https://www.morningsidecenter.org/teachable-moment/lessons/roleplay-immigration-fiction-and-fact <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--title--teachable-moment-lesson.html.twig x field--node--title.html.twig * field--node--teachable-moment-lesson.html.twig * field--title.html.twig * field--string.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'core/modules/node/templates/field--node--title.html.twig' --> <span>Roleplay: Immigration Fiction and Fact</span> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'core/modules/node/templates/field--node--title.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--body--teachable-moment-lesson.html.twig * field--node--body.html.twig * field--node--teachable-moment-lesson.html.twig * field--body.html.twig * field--text-with-summary.html.twig x field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap/templates/field/field.html.twig' --> <div class="field field--name-body field--type-text-with-summary field--label-hidden field--item"><h4>To the teacher:&nbsp;<br> &nbsp;</h4> <p>This activity includes two roleplays in which the players argue about immigration -and make a number of false or questionable claims along the way. After the roleplays, students read a fact sheet and reconsider the roleplay arguments in light of the new information.</p> <p>Please read <a href="http://www.morningsidecenter.org/teachable-moment/lessons/teaching-about-controversial-or-difficult-issues">these guidelines</a> for discussing controversial issues before taking on this sensitive issue in your classroom. Consider how students from immigrant families may be affected by the roleplay and discussion.</p> <p>To prepare for the activity, print out enough copies of this <a href="/sites/default/files/files/Immigration%20Fact%20Sheet.pdf" target="_blank">pdf fact sheet </a>for everyone in the class. (The fact sheet is also included at the bottom of this lesson.) Also print out the roleplays below for four student players.&nbsp;<br> &nbsp;</p> <hr> <h4><br> Roleplay Activity<br> &nbsp;</h4> <p>Tell students that today we’re going to watch two roleplays in which people will be arguing about immigration in the U.S. Then we’ll learn some facts about immigration and apply them to the arguments the players made in the roleplays.</p> <p>You might want to give all students a heads up that the opinions represented in the roleplays may be upsetting to some. These opinions are not necessarily those of the people acting in the play. Instead, the roleplay is intended for us all to learn more about immigration, and be better prepared to have conversations with people who might differ from us on important issues.&nbsp;</p> <p>Ask for four volunteers to roleplay the roles of Mike and Alicia in front of the class. (One pair will play Mike and Alicia in Roleplay 1, the other will play Mike and Alicia in Roleplay 2.)&nbsp; Give the players the appropriate roleplay script below, and give them time to read it in advance.</p> <p>Before beginning Roleplay 1, remind the class that these two students are going to be voicing the opinions of characters that they may or may not agree with.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p><strong>Roleplay 1</strong><br> &nbsp;</p> <p><strong>Mike:</strong> This country has got to get control of our borders.</p> <p><strong>Alicia</strong>:&nbsp; What do you mean? &nbsp;</p> <p><strong>Mike:</strong>&nbsp; I mean all these people pouring into the country - you know, immigrants.</p> <p><strong>Alicia</strong>:&nbsp; Most people in this country are immigrants - or descended from them. Didn’t your ancestors immigrate here at some point?</p> <p><strong>Mike</strong>: &nbsp;Well, my ancestors came a long time ago.&nbsp; Besides, it’s not totally a nation of immigrants. Lots of people have ancestors who were forced to come here as slaves. And then there are Native Americans...</p> <p><strong>Alicia:</strong>&nbsp; That's true. How about your ancestors? Where did they come from?</p> <p><strong>Mike</strong>: Umm, they were mostly Irish and Italian. They came over in the 1800s, I think. &nbsp;There was a famine in Ireland...</p> <p><strong>Alicia</strong>:&nbsp; Right, they were probably really desperate. Just like a lot of the immigrants who come here now. And just like now, a lot of Americans were probably telling them to go back where they came from. &nbsp;</p> <p><strong>Mike</strong>:&nbsp; I don’t think so. I mean, my ancestors came here to work. They helped build the country.</p> <p><strong>Alicia</strong>:&nbsp; And you think that’s not true of immigrants now?</p> <p><strong>Mike</strong>:&nbsp; Well, first of all, there are a lot more people coming into the country now. And I heard that most of the immigrants now are coming in illegally from Mexico.&nbsp; And that most of them have no education and a lot of them are involved in crime.</p> <p><strong>Alicia</strong>:&nbsp; I don’t think any of the things you just said are true.&nbsp;</p> <p><strong>Mike:</strong>&nbsp; Well, that’s what I heard.</p> <p><br> <br> STOP ACTION.&nbsp; Thank the first pair of players and ask them to rejoin the class.</p> <p>Ask:&nbsp; What claims did Mike and Alicia make that could be verified or refuted with facts?</p> <p>Work with students to develop a list of claims and write them down on the board under the title, "Assertions to verify or refute - Roleplay 1." The list might include:</p> <ul> <li>Past immigrants, including from European countries like Ireland and Italy, were often not welcomed by native born Americans.<br> &nbsp;</li> <li>There are more immigrants now than in past waves of immigration.<br> &nbsp;</li> <li>Many immigrants are undocumented.&nbsp;<br> &nbsp;</li> <li>Most immigrants come from Mexico.<br> &nbsp;</li> <li>Most immigrants have little or no education.<br> &nbsp;</li> <li>Many immigrants are involved in crime</li> </ul> <p>Next, invite the second pair of players to begin roleplay 2.&nbsp; Once again, remind the class that these two students are going to be voicing the opinions of characters that they may or may not agree with.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p><strong>Roleplay 2</strong></p> <p><br> <strong>Mike</strong>:&nbsp; The biggest reason we have to protect our borders is that all these immigrants are hurting the economy.</p> <p><strong>Alicia</strong>: I don’t know what you’re talking about!</p> <p><strong>Mike</strong>:&nbsp; I read that a lot of the people who immigrate here are coming to take advantage of all our benefits, like healthcare. And since they don’t pay taxes, everybody else has to pay the cost. &nbsp;&nbsp;</p> <p><strong>Alicia</strong>: &nbsp;Where did you read that? And why wouldn’t they be paying taxes?</p> <p><strong>Mike</strong>:&nbsp; And they’re taking jobs away from Americans who’ve been here forever. Plus, they take jobs for really low wages, and that drags down wages for everybody else.</p> <p><strong>Alicia</strong>:&nbsp; Well, if we increased the minimum wage, employers couldn’t do that. And if they could join unions, that would help bring their wages up too. &nbsp;</p> <p><strong>Mike</strong>: &nbsp;Yeah, but a lot of the people I’m talking about are here illegally. That makes it harder for them to fight for that stuff.</p> <p><strong>Alicia</strong>: Exactly! That’s one reason why we should let undocumented people become citizens.&nbsp;</p> <p><strong>Mike</strong>: Whoa! Don’t you think it’s wrong to let people who got here illegally to just stay here?&nbsp; That’s not fair to all the other people who followed the rules.</p> <p><strong>Alicia</strong>: Hmm. That depends on whether the rules are fair!&nbsp; A lot of undocumented people have been living in the U.S. for years. They’ve been working and contributing to the economy. And a lot of them have kids who were born here. Do you think that moms and dads should be forced to leave their kids?&nbsp; That’s just mean.</p> <p><strong>Mike</strong>: &nbsp;I didn’t say that! &nbsp;<br> &nbsp;</p> <p>STOP ACTION.&nbsp; Thank the players and ask them to rejoin the class.</p> <p>Ask:&nbsp; What claims did Mike and Alicia make that could be verified or refuted with facts?&nbsp; Once again, work with students to develop a list of claims and write them down on the board under the title, "Assertions to verify or refute - Roleplay 2." The list might include:</p> <ul> <li>Immigrants are taking jobs away from native-born Americans and causing rising unemployment.<br> &nbsp;</li> <li>Immigrants are driving down wages.<br> &nbsp;</li> <li>Immigrants use many benefits, yet often don’t pay taxes that help pay for those benefits.<br> &nbsp;</li> <li>Many undocumented workers have lived here for many years.<br> &nbsp;</li> <li>They’ve been working and contributing to the economy.<br> &nbsp;</li> <li>Many undocumented immigrants have family in the U.S.</li> </ul> <div> <p>&nbsp;</p> <hr> <p>&nbsp;</p> </div> <h4>Debrief</h4> <p>Ask both sets of students who played Mike and Alicia:</p> <ul> <li>What did it feel like to play your part?</li> <li>What feelings or thoughts came up for you?<br> &nbsp;</li> </ul> <p>Ask the rest of the class:</p> <ul> <li>What was it like to watch this roleplay?</li> <li>What feelings or thoughts came up for you?</li> <li>Did you want to intervene in the discussion at any point?&nbsp; When and why?</li> </ul> <div> <p>&nbsp;</p> <hr> <p>&nbsp;</p> </div> <h4>Checking the Facts</h4> <p>Next, give students copies of the fact sheet below, and ask them to form groups of four or five (by counting off, if necessary). Give students several minutes to read the fact sheets in their groups. &nbsp;</p> <p>Then ask students to look at the two lists of assertions you wrote on the board.&nbsp; Ask each group to go through each list point by point, and use information from the fact sheet to address any of the facts that they can.</p> <p>What arguments would they make for each assertion, if they had been in the discussion with Mike and Alicia?&nbsp; The group should make a list of these arguments to share with the class.&nbsp; As they move through the assertions, students should also keep a joint list of any questions that come up that the fact sheets don’t answer.</p> <p>Reconvene the full class and go through the disputed facts one by one. For each point, ask a student from each group to share responses their group came up with, giving priority to any response that has not already been mentioned by another group.</p> <p>Ask students:</p> <ul> <li>What facts stand out for you?&nbsp; What facts do you wish more people knew?<br> &nbsp;</li> <li>Did the discussion raise questions for you that weren’t addressed in the fact sheet? What were they? Compile a list of these for further research.<br> &nbsp;</li> <li>Do you question any of the facts on the fact sheet?&nbsp; If so, how might you answer your questions? Make a list of these for further research.<br> &nbsp;</li> <li>Facts are valuable, but sometimes people aren’t persuaded by facts.&nbsp; Do you think Mike or Alicia would be persuaded by the facts we discussed? Why or why not?</li> </ul> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <hr> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p><br> <strong>Immigration Facts: Roleplay 1 </strong><a href="/sites/default/files/files/Immigration%20Fact%20Sheet.pdf"><em>&nbsp;(also see this pdf version)</em></a><br> &nbsp;</p> <ul> <li>Irish immigrants, including the thousands who came to the U.S. to escape famine in the 1840s, were hated by many of the people who were already living in the U.S. They were ostracized and denied employment for being Catholic, and stereotyped as angry, illiterate, greedy alcoholics. (University of Virginia American Studies)</li> </ul> <ul> <li>Italian immigrants were once thought by some Americans to be so alien to American culture that they could never be assimilated. (<a href="https://www.pri.org/stories/2015-11-26/brief-history-america-s-hostility-previous-generation-mediterranean-migrants">Public Radio International</a>.) After 11 Italian immigrants were lynched in New Orleans in 1891, the New York Times defended this mass murder:</li> </ul> <div class="rteindent2">These sneaking and cowardly Sicilians, the descendants of bandits and assassins, who have transported to this country the lawless passions, the cut-throat practices, and the oath-bound societies of their native country, are to us a pest without mitigation. Our own rattlesnakes are as good citizens as they... &nbsp;Lynch law was the only course open to the people of New Orleans to stay the issue of a new license to the Mafia to continue its bloody practices."<br> &nbsp;</div> <ul> <li>In 2012, about 13 percent of the U.S. population were immigrants (that is, people born in another country). This percentage has increased over the past decade, but is less than it was in 1890, when 15 percent of the population was foreign born. &nbsp;(U.S. Census Bureau)</li> </ul> <ul> <li>Only about a quarter of immigrants in the U.S. are undocumented (meaning that they don’t have the permission of the federal government to be here). The number of undocumented people has stayed fairly stable, and has declined somewhat since 2007. (Pew Research Center)</li> </ul> <ul> <li>U.S. immigrants come from all over the world. Currently, about 28% came from&nbsp; Mexico (over 11 million people). Other top countries for immigrants include China (2 million), India (2 million), Philippines (2 million), and over 1 million each from Vietnam, El Salvador, Cuba, and Korea.&nbsp; (U.S. Census Bureau)</li> </ul> <ul> <li>Asians recently surpassed Latinos as the fastest-growing group of new immigrants to the U.S. (Pew Research Center)&nbsp;</li> </ul> <ul> <li>Immigrants have a wide range of education levels. Nearly 70 percent have a high school diploma or higher. Nearly 12 percent have an advanced degree (Masters degree, doctorate, etc.) - which is higher than the percentage of native-born Americans with an advanced degree.&nbsp; ("Statistical Portrait of the Foreign-Born Population in the United States," 2012)</li> </ul> <ul> <li>Less than one in five immigrants live in poverty. More than half of immigrants in the U.S. are homeowners, compared to 65 percent of all Americans. &nbsp;("Statistical Portrait of the Foreign-Born Population in the United States" and U.S. Census Bureau)</li> </ul> <ul> <li>The great majority of working age immigrants--including undocumented immigrants—work and pay taxes.&nbsp; Undocumented workers participate in the workforce more than the population at large. (Pew Research Center)</li> </ul> <ul> <li>Studies have consistently shown that documented immigrants use social programs such as Medicaid and Supplemental Security Income at similar rates to native households.&nbsp; (Center for American Progress)</li> </ul> <ul> <li>Undocumented workers pay billions of dollars in taxes annually - even though they are generally not able to receive the public services they are paying for with their taxes. (Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy)</li> </ul> <ul> <li>Immigrants are less likely to commit crimes or be incarcerated than native-born Americans.&nbsp; (Immigration Policy Center)&nbsp;</li> </ul> <p>&nbsp;<br> <strong>Immigration Facts: Roleplay 2</strong></p> <ul> <li>&nbsp;Immigrants do not generally compete with native-born American workers for jobs. Instead, immigrants tend to complement skill sets of American workers, according to research by leading economists.&nbsp; (Center for American Progress)</li> </ul> <ul> <li>Some economists have estimated that the annual income of undocumented workers would be 15% higher within five years if they were granted legal status, and that raising their wages would lead to a significant increase in the earnings of all Americans. (Center for American Progress) However, such findings are disputed by those who support stricter immigration laws.</li> </ul> <ul> <li>The Congressional Budget Office estimated that allowing undocumented immigrants a pathway to citizenship would reduce the U.S. budget deficit by billions of dollars. This is because they would be earning more and so would pay more taxes, including the payroll taxes that support Social Security and other important benefits.</li> </ul> <ul> <li>The majority of undocumented immigrants are long-term residents of the United States. The median length of residence is 13 years. "Median" means that half were here less than 13 years, and half were here more than 13 years. (Pew Research Center)</li> </ul> <ul> <li>Nearly half of the undocumented population has children under 18, many of them born in the United States.&nbsp; (Pew Research Center)</li> </ul> <ul> <li>3.8 million undocumented immigrants have children who are American citizens. (Pew Research Center)</li> </ul> <p>&nbsp;</p> </div> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap/templates/field/field.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--uid--teachable-moment-lesson.html.twig x field--node--uid.html.twig * field--node--teachable-moment-lesson.html.twig * field--uid.html.twig * field--entity-reference.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'core/modules/node/templates/field--node--uid.html.twig' --> <span> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'username' --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'core/modules/user/templates/username.html.twig' --> <span>fionta</span> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'core/modules/user/templates/username.html.twig' --> </span> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'core/modules/node/templates/field--node--uid.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--created--teachable-moment-lesson.html.twig x field--node--created.html.twig * field--node--teachable-moment-lesson.html.twig * field--created.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'core/modules/node/templates/field--node--created.html.twig' --> <span> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'time' --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'core/modules/system/templates/time.html.twig' --> <time datetime="2017-02-01T09:25:49-05:00" title="Wednesday, February 1, 2017 - 09:25">February 1, 2017</time> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'core/modules/system/templates/time.html.twig' --> </span> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'core/modules/node/templates/field--node--created.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'links__node' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * links--node.html.twig x links.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap/templates/system/links.html.twig' --> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap/templates/system/links.html.twig' --> Wed, 01 Feb 2017 14:25:49 +0000 fionta 353 at https://www.morningsidecenter.org Alternative Facts: Tips for Telling Fake News from Real News https://www.morningsidecenter.org/teachable-moment/lessons/alternative-facts-tips-telling-fake-news-real-news <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--title--teachable-moment-lesson.html.twig x field--node--title.html.twig * field--node--teachable-moment-lesson.html.twig * field--title.html.twig * field--string.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'core/modules/node/templates/field--node--title.html.twig' --> <span>Alternative Facts: Tips for Telling Fake News from Real News</span> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'core/modules/node/templates/field--node--title.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--body--teachable-moment-lesson.html.twig * field--node--body.html.twig * field--node--teachable-moment-lesson.html.twig * field--body.html.twig * field--text-with-summary.html.twig x field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap/templates/field/field.html.twig' --> <div class="field field--name-body field--type-text-with-summary field--label-hidden field--item"><p><em>Ask students to read the following, or share the information with students.</em></p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <h4>Alternative Facts</h4> <p>Chuck Todd, host of NBC's Meet the Press:</p> <div class="rteindent1">"You did not answer the question of why the president asked the White House press secretary to come out in front of the podium for the first time, and utter a falsehood. Why did he do that? It undermines the credibility of the entire White House press office on day one."</div> <p>&nbsp;<br> Kellyanne Conway, counselor to President Trump:</p> <div class="rteindent1">"Don't be so overly dramatic about it, Chuck. You're saying it's a falsehood, and they're giving — our press secretary, Sean Spicer, gave alternative facts to that. But the point really is..."</div> <p>&nbsp;<br> With these words, Conway gave a name to a phenomenon that's not exactly new. Politicians have been known to lie. What is new, or new-ish, is the vast platform for lies to proliferate.<br> &nbsp;<br> In 2016, according to the Pew Research Center:</p> <ul> <li>38% of adults (and 50% of 18-29-year-olds) often got news via the internet</li> <li>62% of adult Americans (and 81% of 18-29-year-olds) got news from social media&nbsp;</li> </ul> <p>While the internet can be an excellent source of news, it is also an excellent source of lies. A "news source" you find on the internet may have been created by a group of friends who like to prank. It might have been created by a syndicate that gets paid by the click, by a racist group plotting a new civil war, or by almost anyone with a little time and money. Hyperlinks and the speed of computer networks allow for wide availability of anything with a catchy headline.<br> &nbsp;<br> All this provides fertile ground for fake news and "alternative facts."<br> &nbsp;<br> "News" not based on actual facts would not be a problem if everyone knew it was fake and was just a form of entertainment. Unfortunately, most people cannot distinguish between fake and real news:</p> <ul> <li>According to a survey commissioned by Buzzfeed, Americans were fooled by fake headlines about 75% of the time.</li> <li>A survey conducted by Stanford University showed that 82% of middle school students could not distinguish an ad labeled "sponsored content" from a real news story on a website.</li> </ul> <p>If we can't tell the difference between fake news and real news, what are the consequences for our country? Doesn't our political system depend on having an informed electorate?&nbsp;<br> &nbsp;</p> <hr> <p>&nbsp;</p> <h4>Quiz</h4> <p>Which of the following headlines are likely to be real? Which are fake?<br> &nbsp;<br> <strong>1. </strong>&nbsp;"Clinton Campaign Staffer Says Hillary Tried To ‘Sell Her Soul’ To Win, Turns Out She Doesn’t Have Soul"</p> <p><strong>2. &nbsp;</strong>"Pope Francis at White House: 'Koran and Holy Bible Are the Same'"</p> <p><strong>3. &nbsp;</strong>"DeQuincy Louisiana: First City Making It Illegal To Be Gay"<br> &nbsp;<br> <em>Answers: All are fake</em>&nbsp;<br> &nbsp;</p> <hr> <p>&nbsp;</p> <h4>6 Tips for Detecting Fake News</h4> <p><br> How can we know that a "news story" is real (even if it might be biased in some way)?&nbsp; Here are some strategies to use.</p> <p><br> <strong>1.</strong> <strong>Examine the website’s URL. </strong>Is the URL silly, an imitation of a well-known media outlet, a blog site, or some other suspicious name? Examples:</p> <ul> <li>abcnews.com.co</li> <li>thenewsnerd.com</li> </ul> <p><strong>&nbsp;<br> 2.</strong> <strong>Examine the website’s content with a critical eye.&nbsp;</strong><br> <br> What is website’s purpose? Does it have obviously satirical or outrageous stories on the home page? Examples from the NewsExaminer.com site:</p> <ul> <li>"Secret Service Agent Says Obama Is Muslim &amp; Gay In New Tell-All Book"</li> <li>"Donald Trump Introduces New Muslim/Refugee Badges; ‘Nazi-Like’ Plan Requires All Muslims &amp; Refugees To Wear Badges Like The Jews Did During The Holocaust"</li> <li>"Donald Trump Assaults Blind Man After Rally In Ohio"</li> </ul> <p>&nbsp;<br> <strong>3. Check the "About" tab on the website and the site’s writers and staff. </strong><br> <br> Do the staff and contact pages appear legitimate? Examples:&nbsp;</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <ul> <li>The empirenews.net site states on its About page "Empire News is intended for entertainment purposes only."</li> <li>On the realnewsrightnow.com site, the one staff person has apparently been nominated for 3 Nobel Prizes, 3 Pulitzer Prizes and the Oscar Mayer Award for Journalistic Excellence</li> <li>The writer of an abcnews.com.co story, "Jimmy Rustling" has won 14 Peabody Awards--and a handful of Pulitzer Prizes. "Jimmy Rustling" is also a slang expression for meeting emotional needs.</li> </ul> <p>&nbsp;<br> <strong>4. Read critically: Does the s</strong><strong>tory make sense?&nbsp;</strong><br> <br> Some fake news stories are hastily written, with typos, grammatical mistakes or obviously false statements. Is the sensational headline supported by the facts in the story? Example from nowtheendbegins.com:</p> <div class="rteindent1">"KELLYANNE CONWAY GETS SECRET SERVICE PROTECTION AS CRAZED LIBERALS THREATEN TO KILL HER"</div> <p>Nothing in the story related any threats to Conway from liberals.&nbsp;<br> &nbsp;</p> <p><strong>5. Google the main elements of the headline/story or check real news sites for it. &nbsp;</strong><br> <br> This is often one of the quickest ways to determine if a story is real or fake. If it's big news but has not been picked up by news organizations such as the New York Times, Washington Post, or major news networks, then there’s a reason to be suspicious.&nbsp;</p> <p><br> <strong>6. Google the website itself</strong>.<br> <br> You may discover that the website has been labeled by reputable sources as delivering fake news.&nbsp;</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>Facebook and Google have vowed to take some action against fake news sites. But the sheer number of fake news sites and the websites that mingle fake and ordinary news make it likely that we will have to cope with the confusion for the foreseeable future.<br> <br> And as President Trump's advisor has demonstrated, we'll also have to learn how to sort the "alternative facts" of our chosen leaders from actual facts. More than ever, we need critical eyes and ears.&nbsp;<br> &nbsp;<br> &nbsp;</p> <hr> <p>&nbsp;</p> <h4>Discussion<strong>&nbsp;</strong></h4> <p><strong>1.</strong> Is there such thing as objective reporting? How are fake news and "alternate facts" different or worse than the bias of any media?<br> &nbsp;<br> <strong>2. </strong>How important is media literacy to our democracy? Is it our responsibility as citizens to be informed?<br> &nbsp;<br> <strong>3. </strong>Are Facebook and Google engaging in censorship by taking action against fake news sites?<br> &nbsp;<br> <strong>4.</strong>&nbsp; Is there anything our class can do to make more people aware of fake news? (If students come up with good ideas, you might help them carry out a class project to raise awareness.)<br> &nbsp;<br> <strong>5.</strong> What steps can we as a society take to limit the damage done by fake news?</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <hr> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <h4>Sources</h4> <p><a href="http://www.cjr.org/innovations/librarians_journalism_lessons.php">http://www.cjr.org/innovations/librarians_journalism_lessons.php</a><br> &nbsp;<br> <a href="http://www.factcheck.org/2016/11/how-to-spot-fake-news/">http://www.factcheck.org/2016/11/how-to-spot-fake-news/</a><br> &nbsp;<br> <a href="https://www.skepticalscience.com/docs/Debunking_Handbook.pdf">https://www.skepticalscience.com/docs/Debunking_Handbook.pdf</a><br> &nbsp;<br> <a href="http://www.journalism.org/2016/05/26/news-use-across-social-media-platforms-2016/">http://www.journalism.org/2016/05/26/news-use-across-social-media-platforms-2016/</a><br> &nbsp;<br> <a href="http://www.journalism.org/2016/07/07/pathways-to-news/">http://www.journalism.org/2016/07/07/pathways-to-news/</a><br> &nbsp;<br> <a href="https://www.buzzfeed.com/craigsilverman/fake-news-survey?utm_term=.tggdJjV5Ym#.glGrmlbXxe">https://www.buzzfeed.com/craigsilverman/fake-news-survey?utm_term=.tggdJjV5Ym#.glGrmlbXxe</a><br> &nbsp;<br> <a href="http://www.wsj.com/articles/most-students-dont-know-when-news-is-fake-stanford-study-finds-1479752576">http://www.wsj.com/articles/most-students-dont-know-when-news-is-fake-stanford-study-finds-1479752576</a><br> &nbsp;<br> <a href="http://www.forbes.com/sites/emilywillingham/2016/11/28/a-scientific-approach-to-distinguishing-real-from-fake-news/2/#1a9241a177dd">http://www.forbes.com/sites/emilywillingham/2016/11/28/a-scientific-approach-to-distinguishing-real-from-fake-news/2/#1a9241a177dd</a><br> &nbsp;<br> <a href="https://docs.google.com/document/d/10eA5-mCZLSS4MQY5QGb5ewC3VAL6pLkT53V_81ZyitM/preview">https://docs.google.com/document/d/10eA5-mCZLSS4MQY5QGb5ewC3VAL6pLkT53V_81ZyitM/preview</a><br> &nbsp;</p> </div> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap/templates/field/field.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--uid--teachable-moment-lesson.html.twig x field--node--uid.html.twig * field--node--teachable-moment-lesson.html.twig * field--uid.html.twig * field--entity-reference.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'core/modules/node/templates/field--node--uid.html.twig' --> <span> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'username' --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'core/modules/user/templates/username.html.twig' --> <span>fionta</span> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'core/modules/user/templates/username.html.twig' --> </span> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'core/modules/node/templates/field--node--uid.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--created--teachable-moment-lesson.html.twig x field--node--created.html.twig * field--node--teachable-moment-lesson.html.twig * field--created.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'core/modules/node/templates/field--node--created.html.twig' --> <span> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'time' --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'core/modules/system/templates/time.html.twig' --> <time datetime="2017-01-31T10:39:34-05:00" title="Tuesday, January 31, 2017 - 10:39">January 31, 2017</time> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'core/modules/system/templates/time.html.twig' --> </span> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'core/modules/node/templates/field--node--created.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'links__node' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * links--node.html.twig x links.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap/templates/system/links.html.twig' --> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap/templates/system/links.html.twig' --> Tue, 31 Jan 2017 15:39:34 +0000 fionta 355 at https://www.morningsidecenter.org Fact-checking the 2016 Presidential Election https://www.morningsidecenter.org/teachable-moment/lessons/fact-checking-2016-presidential-election <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--title--teachable-moment-lesson.html.twig x field--node--title.html.twig * field--node--teachable-moment-lesson.html.twig * field--title.html.twig * field--string.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'core/modules/node/templates/field--node--title.html.twig' --> <span>Fact-checking the 2016 Presidential Election</span> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'core/modules/node/templates/field--node--title.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--body--teachable-moment-lesson.html.twig * field--node--body.html.twig * field--node--teachable-moment-lesson.html.twig * field--body.html.twig * field--text-with-summary.html.twig x field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap/templates/field/field.html.twig' --> <div class="field field--name-body field--type-text-with-summary field--label-hidden field--item"><p>&nbsp;</p> <h4>Introduction</h4> <p>Ask the the class:</p> <ul> <li>How many of you watched the most recent presidential debate?</li> <li>How many either viewed a fact-checked broadcast or read a fact-checker report afterward?</li> <li>How many independently researched one of the issues debated?</li> <li>If you did fact-checking or research, what did you learn? Were the candidates telling the truth?<br> &nbsp;</li> </ul> <hr> <h3><br> Student Reading:&nbsp;<br> The tricky work of checking the facts<br> &nbsp;</h3> <p class="rteindent1">"... Wherever the people are well informed they can be trusted with their own government; that whenever things get so far wrong as to attract their notice, they may be relied on to set them to rights." -&nbsp;Thomas Jefferson</p> <p>The fact-checking site Politifact has kept a running tally of Donald Trump's and Hillary Clinton's "truthiness" so far in the 2016 presidential campaign. Of the statements analyzed, Clinton's&nbsp; have been wholly true only 23% of the time and Trump's statements 4% of the time.</p> <p>Anticipating a need to check facts at the first presidential debate on September 26, 2016, dozens of news sites employed fact-checkers during and after the debate. These included the New York Times, Washington Post, National Public Radio, the Guardian, ABC News, CNN, Bloomberg.com, Wall Street Journal, CBS News, NY Daily News, BBC, AP, CNBC, and Politico, as well as Politifact and Factcheck.org. Visit any of these websites and you'll see why so many organizations joined the fact-check bandwagon.</p> <p>The ease with which politicians are sloppy (or worse) with the facts is troublesome for a democracy. Members of a democracy participate in the political process in a lot of ways. We petition, demonstrate, join and form organizations, donate money, work for candidates, write letters, and lobby our representatives to make our voices heard. And we vote. When our elected officials routinely lie or distort the truth, our civic responsibility is made more difficult. When a candidate claims that capital punishment reduces the murder rate and makes us safer or that our country is the only developed nation without national health insurance, how can we know if these statements are true?</p> <p>A just society depends on its people being both informed and thinking critically. Accepting politicians' words at face value, judging candidates on their looks or vibes, or relying on a few favorite websites for all our information ultimately undermines our democracy.</p> <p>Perhaps more than other presidential campaigns, the 2016 race illustrates what can happen when we the people don't take our responsibilities seriously.<br> &nbsp;</p> <h4>Case study: Checking Trump’s claims on crime</h4> <p>Let's take one issue that came up in the debate and throughout the campaign:&nbsp; crime. Donald Trump use the phrase "law and order" seven times during the debate and has repeatedly returned to the theme of an America that is no longer safe.</p> <p>Donald Trump&nbsp; says:</p> <ul> <li>"Our new administration ... will ... liberate our citizens from the <em>crime</em> and terrorism and lawlessness that threatens their communities."</li> <li>"Inner-city crime is reaching record levels."</li> <li>"I have a message for all of you: &nbsp;The crime and violence that today afflict our nation will soon come to an end. Beginning on January 20<sup>th</sup>, 2017, safety will be restored.</li> </ul> <p>So, is it true that violent crime is going up?</p> <p>From 2014 to 2015 violent crime in the U.S. went up 3.9% and murder was up 10.8%.</p> <p>But what does that increase mean? Here is where you have to apply some critical thinking. Here are some additional questions which might make the statistic more meaningful.</p> <ul> <li>Is violent crime up over the course of one year, five years, ten years...thirty years? Is it a blip?</li> <li>Is violent crime up everywhere?</li> <li>Are some crimes being reported more often (e.g. rape), and others not?</li> <li>Where do the statistics originate?</li> <li>Are there one-time events that might contribute to higher numbers?</li> <li>In what context are the numbers cited? Are the numbers being cited to promote fear? To emphasize the need for structural solutions?</li> <li>Has there been any change in policing or elsewhere in the justice system that might account for the increase?</li> <li>What are the political implications of the crime increase, if it is happening?</li> </ul> <p>If you were to Google "violent crime increase" or "Trump crime" or "crime rate 2015" you would find that news sources vary in their presentation of the "facts." For example, the New York Post's story reported that Donald Trump was right about the crime rate. This generally right-wing newspaper cited the "Ferguson Effect" as a reason for rising crime rate. (The "Ferguson Effect" refers to the 2014 police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, MO; it posits that police are reluctant to make arrests for fear of being called racist).</p> <p>But the Washington Post, more centrist politically, handled Trump’s claim differently. It cited the long-term downward trend of violent crime, noting that even with the spike in 2015, violent crimes are half what they were 20 years ago. &nbsp;</p> <p>Not all statements examined by fact-checking sites are clearly true or not true. The sites try to indicate these gray areas with in-between categories like "mostly true." But these categorizations - and the very facts sites like Politifact choose to check - also contain biases.<br> &nbsp;</p> <h4>Checking our own facts: Googling tips</h4> <p>To more deeply understand whether a particular statement is true or not true requires us to do our own fact-checking (a.k.a. research), especially on topics that interest us or are important to the world. &nbsp;If you are among the nearly 80% of people in the world who use Google, there are probably some ways to focus your research more precisely.</p> <p>As with any Google search, you should consider what type of information you are looking for and construct your search accordingly.</p> <ul> <li>If you want only recent information, click on <em>Search Tools</em> and then select &nbsp;"a<em>ny time"</em> (and change it to <em>past week</em> or <em>month</em>, etc.)</li> <li>If you are looking for a specific document (e.g. Uniform Crime Report), or the source of a specific quote, enclose the title or quote in quotation marks.</li> <li>If you want only government sources, use <em>site:gov </em>as part of your search (e.g. <em>crime rate site:gov</em>).</li> <li>If you are looking for statistics, try using filetype:xls (Excel spreadsheet) as part of the search (crime rate site:gov filetype:xls).</li> </ul> <p>You can also conduct a more focused search by clicking on the gear icon in the upper right corner of the Google search page and selecting "advanced search." This enables more precision in your search.</p> <p>Those of us who are concerned about the problems that face us - from &nbsp;climate change to racial inequality - can make ourselves part of the solution by becoming informed. That means reading different viewpoints, doing some research and applying some critical thinking so that we recognize the spin, distortions, half-truths, and outright lies that inhabit the world of politics and the media.&nbsp; Then we’re ready to dive into the public discussion and find ways to act.<br> &nbsp;</p> <hr> <p>&nbsp;</p> <h3>Discussion<br> &nbsp;</h3> <ol> <li>Discuss the following quotation by Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks. What is Assange saying? Do you agree?&nbsp;"You can either be informed and your own rulers, or you can be ignorant and have someone else, who is not ignorant, rule over you."&nbsp;<br> &nbsp;</li> <li>Ruben Blades (a singer, actor and activist) said: "I think we risk becoming the best informed society that has ever died of ignorance." What does Blades mean? Is this a contradiction or not?<br> &nbsp;</li> <li>Do you think we all have a responsibility to participate in making our society’s decisions (if we can) - or is democratic participation simply a right that we claim but aren’t obliged to use?</li> </ol> <p>&nbsp;</p> <hr> <p>&nbsp;</p> <h3>Optional activity and assignment:<br> Create a personal plan of action<br> &nbsp;</h3> <h4>Brainstorm</h4> <p>Brainstorm some 2016 campaign issues. Write the words "2016 campaign issues" on the board and circle it. Then elicit from students some of the issues they know have surfaced in the campaign. Encourage specific issues (eg police killings) as well as general ones (U.S. justice system). Record students’ responses around the circle, and connect them to it with lines, creating a web.</p> <p>Help students develop a reasonable list.&nbsp; Issues might include:&nbsp; Immigration, "the wall," economic inequality, taxes, racial inequality, police violence, war in Syria, terrorism, civil liberties, relations with Russia, U.S. policy in the Middle East, nuclear weapons policy, prison policy, the justice system, climate change, fracking and pipelines, sexism, healthcare, Obamacare, &nbsp;guns and gun control...</p> <h4><br> Small Group Activity</h4> <p>Break students into small groups.&nbsp; Give participants in each group 3 minutes to pick an issue that has come up in the 2016 presidential campaign that they care a lot about - whether it was included in the class brainstorm or not. Write that issue down on a piece of paper.</p> <p>Ask students in each group to each speak in turn about the issue they’ve chosen and why it is important to them.&nbsp;</p> <p>Next, ask students in their groups to write down three things they would need to do or questions they would need to explore to become an expert on that issue.</p> <p>Ask students to consider:</p> <ul> <li>What &nbsp;facts can you state about this issue?</li> <li>Have you explored multiple points of view about this issue?&nbsp;</li> <li>What is your own view?</li> <li>Do you have facts to substantiate your opinions?<br> &nbsp;</li> </ul> <p>Ask students to write down the topic and three things they can do to become an informed speaker or writer about that issue.&nbsp;</p> <p>&nbsp;Again, give students a few minutes to share, in their groups, what they have written.</p> <p>Reconvene the whole class and ask for volunteers to share what issues they chose and why.<br> &nbsp;</p> <h4>Assignment</h4> <p>Give students a homework assignment. Ask them to conduct research about the issue they are concerned about, and then write a report on it.&nbsp; The report should include at least one paragraph on each of the following:</p> <ol> <li>What is the issue, and why do you care about it?<br> &nbsp;</li> <li>What have Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, Libertarian Party candidate Gary Johnson, and Green Party candidate Jill Stein said about this issue?&nbsp; Are there others whose views you find compelling?<br> &nbsp;</li> <li>What are three facts you’ve learned about this issue in the course of your research?<br> &nbsp;</li> <li>What is your own view about this issue?<br> &nbsp;</li> <li>List at least three ways you could make your views known on this issue or take action on it.<br> &nbsp;</li> </ol> <p>During the next class period, ask students to share their responses (and collect their papers).&nbsp;</p> <p>Ask students to share what next steps they will take to learn more about this issue or do something about it. If students share certain interests, encourage them to work together on them.&nbsp;<br> <br> &nbsp;</p> <hr> <p>&nbsp;</p> <h3>Sources</h3> <p><a href="http://nypost.com/2016/09/26/fbi-stats-back-up-trumps-warning-on-crime/">http://nypost.com/2016/09/26/fbi-stats-back-up-trumps-warning-on-crime/</a></p> <p><a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2016/07/21/what-trump-says-about-crime-in-america-and-what-is-really-going-on/?utm_term=.2f9304ad3635">https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2016/07/21/what-trump-says-about-crime-in-america-and-what-is-really-going-on/?utm_term=.2f9304ad3635</a></p> <p><a href="http://www.politifact.com/personalities/hillary-clinton/">http://www.politifact.com/personalities/hillary-clinton/</a></p> <p><a href="https://www.fbi.gov/news/stories/latest-crime-statistics-released">https://www.fbi.gov/news/stories/latest-crime-statistics-released</a></p> <p><a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2015/11/03/americans-think-crime-is-on-the-rise-arent-so-worried-about-being-the-victims-of-crime/?tid=a_inl&amp;utm_term=.e28ce58d9149">https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2015/11/03/americans-think-crime-is-on-the-rise-arent-so-worried-about-being-the-victims-of-crime/?tid=a_inl&amp;utm_term=.e28ce58d9149</a></p> </div> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap/templates/field/field.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--uid--teachable-moment-lesson.html.twig x field--node--uid.html.twig * field--node--teachable-moment-lesson.html.twig * field--uid.html.twig * field--entity-reference.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'core/modules/node/templates/field--node--uid.html.twig' --> <span> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'username' --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'core/modules/user/templates/username.html.twig' --> <span>fionta</span> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'core/modules/user/templates/username.html.twig' --> </span> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'core/modules/node/templates/field--node--uid.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--created--teachable-moment-lesson.html.twig x field--node--created.html.twig * field--node--teachable-moment-lesson.html.twig * field--created.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'core/modules/node/templates/field--node--created.html.twig' --> <span> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'time' --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'core/modules/system/templates/time.html.twig' --> <time datetime="2016-10-02T10:42:32-04:00" title="Sunday, October 2, 2016 - 10:42">October 2, 2016</time> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'core/modules/system/templates/time.html.twig' --> </span> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'core/modules/node/templates/field--node--created.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'links__node' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * links--node.html.twig x links.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap/templates/system/links.html.twig' --> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap/templates/system/links.html.twig' --> Sun, 02 Oct 2016 14:42:32 +0000 fionta 378 at https://www.morningsidecenter.org Teachable Instant: Fact, Fiction & the 2016 Election https://www.morningsidecenter.org/teachable-moment/lessons/teachable-instant-fact-fiction-2016-election <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--title--teachable-moment-lesson.html.twig x field--node--title.html.twig * field--node--teachable-moment-lesson.html.twig * field--title.html.twig * field--string.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'core/modules/node/templates/field--node--title.html.twig' --> <span>Teachable Instant: Fact, Fiction &amp; the 2016 Election</span> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'core/modules/node/templates/field--node--title.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--body--teachable-moment-lesson.html.twig * field--node--body.html.twig * field--node--teachable-moment-lesson.html.twig * field--body.html.twig * field--text-with-summary.html.twig x field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap/templates/field/field.html.twig' --> <div class="field field--name-body field--type-text-with-summary field--label-hidden field--item"><p>&nbsp;</p> <h4>Quiz: &nbsp;True or false?&nbsp;</h4> <p>Ask students to judge whether the following statements by politicians are true or false.</p> <ul> <li>"You’re more likely to get struck by lightning in Texas than to find any kind of voter fraud." &nbsp;— Senator Cory Booker (D-NJ)<br> &nbsp;</li> <li>"You see the top 25 hedge fund managers making more than all of America’s kindergarten teachers combined." &nbsp;— Hillary Clinton (Democratic presidential candidate)<br> &nbsp;</li> <li>"Today the Walton family of Walmart own more wealth than the bottom 40 percent of America." &nbsp;— Bernie Sanders (Democratic presidential candidate)<br> &nbsp;</li> <li>"We are in the sixth year of recovery, and median income is below what it was at the start of the recovery." &nbsp;— Jeb Bush (Republican presidential candidate)<br> &nbsp;</li> <li>"It cost us more to shut the government down than to keep it open." &nbsp;— Rand Paul (Republican presidential candidate)</li> </ul> <p><strong>Answer: </strong>They are all true, as determined by <a href="http://www.politifact.com/">Politifact</a>.</p> <p><br> How about these statements?</p> <ul> <li>Planned Parenthood is "not actually doing women’s health issues." &nbsp;— Jeb Bush<br> &nbsp;</li> <li>"I actually started criticizing the war in Iraq before (Obama) did." &nbsp;— Hillary Clinton</li> </ul> <p><strong>Answer: &nbsp;</strong>These statements are provably false.<br> &nbsp;</p> <p>Most often, politicians’ claims in speeches and ads aren’t totally true or false.&nbsp; Instead, politicians take shortcuts with the facts or don't tell the full story.</p> <p>Ask students to read the following - or share the information with the class.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <hr> <h4><br> Checking Our Facts</h4> <p><br> Sometimes the world of politics is very confusing. Politicians, political organizations, websites and political ads are all giving us conflicting information. Candidates running for office often simplify issues or use "talking points" to get their message to voters, skipping essential details.</p> <p>Should we trust politicians when they make sweeping statements to make a point?</p> <p>Media outlets like the <em>New York Times,</em> <em>Washington Post</em> and National Public Radio now regularly check the facts during electoral campaigns, like the 2016 presidential election campaign. Two other organizations - Politifact.com and Factcheck.org - fact-check the political sphere full-time.</p> <p>Politifact, the <em>Washington Post</em>, and others employ a rating system to show viewers at a glance how true a statement is. For example, Politifact judged a charge from Donald Trump that fellow GOP candidate Marco Rubio has "the worst voting record there is today" is "Mostly True." (Rubio missed a third of votes, according to Politifact.) &nbsp;Hillary Clinton's claim that "everyone knew" about her personal email server, earned her 2 "Pinocchios" (out of 4) from the <em>Washington Post</em>. &nbsp;</p> <p>As you might guess, the partial truths make it harder for voters to make judgments about the candidate in question. If you just look at the rating or reading the factcheck "headline," you will probably miss out on the important parts of the story:</p> <ul> <li>What is the context of the statement?</li> <li>Are there experts or studies that conflict?</li> <li>Is the statement true but only in a narrow sense, and therefore misleading?</li> <li>Is the statement literally false, but still make a valid larger point?</li> <li>Was the statement a slip of the tongue, later corrected by the candidate?</li> <li>Was a number cited almost correct?</li> <li>Does the truth of a claim depend on a definition?</li> </ul> <p>Take this example from Politifact (<a href="http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2015/sep/16/mike-huckabee/huckabee-us-giving-iran-equivalent-5-trillion/">http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2015/sep/16/mike-huckabee/huckabee-us-giving-iran-equivalent-5-trillion/</a>):</p> <p>Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee claims that under President Obama's plan to limit Iran's nuclear weapon program, the U.S. is giving Iran the equivalent of 5 trillion dollars. &nbsp;</p> <p>According to Politifact, there are some elements of truth to the seemingly wild statement:</p> <ul> <li>Estimates of Iran's gain do in fact range from $50 billion to $150 billion.</li> <li>Since Iran's economy is much smaller than the U.S. economy, the effect of $100 billion dollars on the Iranian economy would be similar to the effect of an additional $5 trillion on the U.S. economy.</li> </ul> <p>There are also some elements of Huckabee’s statement that are extremely misleading:</p> <ul> <li>Huckabee uses the word "giving" as if the U.S. is giving a gift to Iran. In fact, the money Iran will get already belongs to them: Huckabee is referring to the "unfreezing" of Iran’s foreign assets by the coalition of countries opposed to their nuclear program, which is part of the new agreement.</li> <li>Even using the $100 million figure would be misleading, because it omits a large amount of money that will be subtracted to pay Iranian debts.</li> </ul> <p>Politifact rates Huckabee's claim as "half-true." What do you think?</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <hr> <h4><br> For discussion</h4> <ul> <li>Whose responsibility is it to check the facts in political speech?<br> &nbsp;</li> <li>Should newspapers, broadcast journalists, and online media simply report what politicians have said, or do they have the responsibility to examine the statements for accuracy?<br> &nbsp;</li> <li>Super-PACs, which are supposed to be independent of candidates’ campaigns, are notorious for questionable negative ads. Should the content of political advertising be regulated?<br> &nbsp;</li> <li>When you are eligible to vote, how much research are you likely to do before casting your vote?<br> <br> &nbsp;</li> </ul> <hr> <h4><br> Class activities</h4> <ul> <li>Break into small groups and examine a fact-check at Politifact or Factcheck.org. Report the findings to the class as a whole.<br> &nbsp;</li> <li>As an ongoing project during the 2016 presidential election, consider assigning groups of students to track the accuracy of particular candidates’ statements. Have each group report back to the class regularly, and discuss the findings.</li> </ul> <p>&nbsp;</p> <hr> <p>&nbsp;</p> <h4>Sources</h4> <p><a href="http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2015/aug/18/cory-booker/lightning-strikes-more-common-person-voter-fraud-s/">http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2015/aug/18/cory-booker/lightning-strikes-more-common-person-voter-fraud-s/</a></p> <p><a href="http://www.factcheck.org/">http://www.factcheck.org/</a></p> <p><a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2015/06/13/hillary-clinton-you-see-the-top-25-hedge-fund-managers-making-more-than-all-of-americas-kindergarten-teachers-combined/">https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2015/06/13/hillary-clinton-you-see-the-top-25-hedge-fund-managers-making-more-than-all-of-americas-kindergarten-teachers-combined/</a></p> <p><a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/fact-checker/wp/2015/09/15/carly-fiorinas-claim-that-the-gop-is-the-party-of-womens-suffrage/">http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/fact-checker/wp/2015/09/15/carly-fiorinas-claim-that-the-gop-is-the-party-of-womens-suffrage/</a></p> <p><a href="http://www.denverpost.com/breakingnews/ci_28600527/fact-check-gop-candidates-veer-from-truth-1st">http://www.denverpost.com/breakingnews/ci_28600527/fact-check-gop-candidates-veer-from-truth-1st</a></p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> </div> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap/templates/field/field.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--uid--teachable-moment-lesson.html.twig x field--node--uid.html.twig * field--node--teachable-moment-lesson.html.twig * field--uid.html.twig * field--entity-reference.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'core/modules/node/templates/field--node--uid.html.twig' --> <span> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'username' --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'core/modules/user/templates/username.html.twig' --> <span>fionta</span> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'core/modules/user/templates/username.html.twig' --> </span> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'core/modules/node/templates/field--node--uid.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--created--teachable-moment-lesson.html.twig x field--node--created.html.twig * field--node--teachable-moment-lesson.html.twig * field--created.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'core/modules/node/templates/field--node--created.html.twig' --> <span> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'time' --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'core/modules/system/templates/time.html.twig' --> <time datetime="2015-09-20T11:27:19-04:00" title="Sunday, September 20, 2015 - 11:27">September 20, 2015</time> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'core/modules/system/templates/time.html.twig' --> </span> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'core/modules/node/templates/field--node--created.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'links__node' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * links--node.html.twig x links.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap/templates/system/links.html.twig' --> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap/templates/system/links.html.twig' --> Sun, 20 Sep 2015 15:27:19 +0000 fionta 440 at https://www.morningsidecenter.org Inaccurate Intelligence, Critical Thinking, the Bush Administration & Iraq https://www.morningsidecenter.org/teachable-moment/lessons/inaccurate-intelligence-critical-thinking-bush-administration-iraq <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--title--teachable-moment-lesson.html.twig x field--node--title.html.twig * field--node--teachable-moment-lesson.html.twig * field--title.html.twig * field--string.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'core/modules/node/templates/field--node--title.html.twig' --> <span>Inaccurate Intelligence, Critical Thinking, the Bush Administration &amp; Iraq</span> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'core/modules/node/templates/field--node--title.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--body--teachable-moment-lesson.html.twig * field--node--body.html.twig * field--node--teachable-moment-lesson.html.twig * field--body.html.twig * field--text-with-summary.html.twig x field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap/templates/field/field.html.twig' --> <div class="field field--name-body field--type-text-with-summary field--label-hidden field--item"><p><strong>To the Teacher:</strong></p> <div>&nbsp;</div> <div>Below are excerpts from the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee's critique of the performance of U.S. intelligence agencies during the period before the Iraq war. In the Senate committee's view, the intelligence community failed to think critically about the Iraq issue, and this contributed to the U.S. decision to invade. The committee report also raises the question of whether the country went to war on the basis of misinformation and false claims, and whether the Bush administration, having already decided to war on Iraq, created an environment that pressured the intelligence community into judgments to support that decision.</div> <div>&nbsp;</div> <div>Following the Senate Intelligence Committee report excerpts are assignments and more readings, all exploring the question of the role critical thinking did or didn't play in the lead-up to the Iraq War. The readings address such critical thinking skills as determining the reliability and accuracy of information, understanding the power of peer pressure in making judgments, gaining insight into assumptions and how they can lead to faulty judgments, and, especially, formulating and answering good questions. See also "Teaching Critical Thinking," which is available on this website, for additional materials.</div> <div>&nbsp;</div> <div>&nbsp;</div> <div> <hr> <h3>Reading 1:</h3> </div> <h2>How intelligent was US intelligence on Iraq?</h2> <div>What went wrong with intelligence agency thinking?</div> <div>&nbsp;</div> <div>At the request of Congress, the Central Intelligence Agency published in October 2002 a National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iraq's suspected weapons of mass destruction. On July 9, 2004, after a year-long review, the Senate Intelligence Committee issued a 511-page critique of the CIA's National Intelligence Estimate and of the entire intelligence community's assessments of Iraq's weapons programs. About 20% of the Senate committee's critique was censored by the Bush administration. The committee, which includes Republicans and Democrats, agreed unanimously on 110 overall conclusions, including the following six on weapons of mass destruction:</div> <div>&nbsp;</div> <div><strong>"1.</strong> Most of the major key judgments in the CIA's October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate, Iraq's Continuing Programs for Weapons of Mass Destruction, were either overstated, or were not supported by, the underlying intelligence reporting....</div> <div>&nbsp;</div> <div><strong>"2. </strong>The intelligence community did not accurately or adequately explain to policy makers the uncertainties behind the judgments in the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate. (Note: The US intelligence community includes the CIA and 14 other agencies.)</div> <div>&nbsp;</div> <div><strong>"3.</strong> The intelligence community suffered from a collective presumption that Iraq had an active and growing weapons of mass destruction [WMD] program. This groupthink dynamic led intelligence community analysts, collectors and managers to both interpret ambiguous evidence as conclusively indicative of a WMD program as well as ignore or minimize evidence that Iraq did not have active and expanding weapons of mass destruction programs. This presumption was so strong that formalized I.C. [Intelligence Community] mechanisms established to challenge assumptions and groupthink were not utilized.</div> <div>&nbsp;</div> <div><strong>"4. </strong>In a few significant instances, the analysis in the National Intelligence Estimate suffers from a 'layering' effect whereby assessments were built based on previous judgments without carrying forward the uncertainties of the underlying judgments.</div> <div>&nbsp;</div> <div><strong>"5. </strong>In each instance where the committee found an analytic or collection failure, it resulted in part from a failure of intelligence community managers [to] encourage analysts to challenge their assumptions, fully consider alternative arguments, accurately characterize the intelligence reporting, or counsel analysts who had lost their objectivity.</div> <div>&nbsp;</div> <div><strong>"6.</strong> ....Most, if not all, of these problems stem from a broken corporate culture and poor management, and will not be solved by additional funding and personnel...."</div> <div>&nbsp;</div> <div>In short, according to the Senate committee, the CIA suffered from multiple failures of critical thinking. They included overstating evidence; drawing inadequately supported conclusions; ignoring uncertainties; making unwarranted assumptions; engaging in uncritical "groupthink"; minimizing evidence that challenged its assumptions; making judgments based on questionable earlier judgments; and failing to encourage analysts to challenge assumptions or consider alternative arguments.</div> <div>&nbsp;</div> <div>These mistakes had major consequences, the committee reported, including the mistaken conclusion that Iraq had biological and chemical weapons programs and stockpiles and that Iraq was reconstituting its nuclear weapons program and actively seeking materials for it. However the committee also said that the CIA was correct in its conclusion "that there were likely several instances of contacts between Iraq and Al Qaeda throughout the 1990s, but that these contacts did not add up to an established formal relationship" and that "there was no evidence proving Iraqi complicity or assistance in an Al Qaeda attack."</div> <div>&nbsp;</div> <div>Was the Senate committee's criticism unfair?</div> <div>&nbsp;</div> <div>Michael O'Hanlon, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, argued that "Some of the committee's findings were useful and constructive. But over all, the report's scathing indictment of American intelligence is seriously unfair" because: 1) "it would have taken an overwhelming body of evidence for any reasonable person in 2002 to think that Saddam Hussein did not possess stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons." 2) the intelligence community rightly concluded that any collaboration between Hussein and Al Qaeda was insignificant. The intelligence community's only serious error, O'Hanlon says, was its judgment that Hussein was reconstituting his nuclear weapons program.</div> <div>&nbsp;</div> <div>"But even on the nuclear issue, enough information was available for others to reach their own assessments," said O'Hanlon. "That the Bush administration had a clear agenda and interpreted all intelligence on Iraq in the most inflammatory way possible was its failing. But members of Congress, including those on the Senate Intelligence Committee, had enough information to reach their own conclusions, and yet the unnecessarily hasty march to war went ahead." (<em>New York Times</em>, 7/13/04)</div> <div>&nbsp;</div> <div>In October 2002 the Senate by a vote of 77-23 authorized the President to use armed force to (1) "defend the national security interests of the United States against the threat posed by Iraq" and 2) enforce United Nations Security Council resolutions aimed at disarming Iraq. Most members of the Senate Intelligence Committee voted for this authorization. But the committee's Republican chairman, Pat Roberts of Kansas, who had been a strong supporter, now says he is not at all sure Congress would have authorized war if members had known of the weaknesses of the pre-war intelligence assessments. The committee's Democratic vice chairman, Senator John Rockefeller of Virginia, who also voted to authorize war, says, "we went to war on false claims" and that he would not have voted for it had he known what he knows now.</div> <div>&nbsp;</div> <div><em>A Los Angeles Times</em> report revealed that before this vote all members of the Senate, as well as the House of Representatives, received a classified version of the National Intelligence Estimate. But the public learned about the NIE in an unclassified version. The versions are quite different. For example:</div> <div>&nbsp;</div> <div><em>Classified version:</em> "Although we have little specific information on Iraq's CW [chemical weapons] stockpile, Saddam probably has stocked a few hundred metric tons of CW agents."</div> <div>&nbsp;</div> <div><em>Unclassified version:</em> "Saddam probably has stocked a few hundred metric tons of CW agents."</div> <div>&nbsp;</div> <div><em>Classified version: </em>Iraq is developing unmanned aerial vehicles, or UAVs, "probably intended to deliver biological warfare agents." In a footnote, the US Air Force's director for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, an agency with "primary responsibility for technological analysis of UAV programs," disagreed with the conclusion about UAVs.</div> <div>&nbsp;</div> <div><em>Unclassified version:</em> Iraq is developing unmanned aerial vehicles, or UAVs, "probably intended to deliver biological warfare agents."[This version omits the Air Force director's disagreement.]</div> <div>&nbsp;</div> <div>During his nationally televised speech on October 7, 2002, President Bush said: "We've also discovered...that Iraq has a growing fleet of manned and unmanned aerial vehicles that could be used to disperse chemical and biological weapons across broad areas. We are concerned that Iraq is exploring ways of using these UAVs for missions targeting the United States." Secretary of State Colin Powell made a similar claim in his address to the United Nations Security Council on February 5, 2003.</div> <div>&nbsp;</div> <div>The Los Angeles Times story also noted that the Senate Intelligence Committee reports that "the classified version presented intelligence findings as assessments, usually beginning with the words 'we assess that,' whereas the white paper [the unclassified version] omitted those words and stated the assessments as facts." (7/10/04)</div> <div>&nbsp;</div> <div>Richard Kerr, a former director of central intelligence, said that the Senate report "understated the difficulty of the CIA's task in assessing the status of Iraq's illicit weapons program." In his view, the intelligence agency did not have enough information to challenge assumptions about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. "It was a case of an ounce of information and a ton of analysis." (<em>New York Times</em>, 7/13/04)</div> <div>&nbsp;</div> <div>Other critics said that the report did not go far enough:</div> <div>&nbsp;</div> <ul> <li>Andrew Rosenthal, <em>New York Times</em> (7/18/04): The Senate report "does not tell us what the CIA and other agencies told Mr. Bush before he concluded that Iraq had dangerous weapons and that Saddam Hussein had to go.</li> <li>Senator John Rockefeller (7/9/04): The report "fails to explain the environment of intense pressure in which the intelligence community officials were asked to render judgments on matters relating to Iraq when the most senior officials in the Bush administration had already forcefully and repeatedly stated their conclusions publicly."</li> </ul> <div>Here is what Bush administration officials had to say weeks before the CIA published its National Intelligence Estimate:</div> <div>&nbsp;</div> <ul> <li>On August 26, 2002, Vice President Dick Cheney told a national convention of the Veterans of Foreign Wars: "[We] now know that Saddam has resumed his efforts to acquire nuclear weapons...Many of us are convinced that Saddam will acquire nuclear weapons fairly soon." And, "Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction. There is no doubt that he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies and against us."</li> <li>On September 8, 2002, Secretary of State Colin Powell told Fox "News Sunday": "There is no doubt that he [Saddam Hussein] has chemical weapons stocks."</li> <li>On September 12, 2002, President Bush told the United Nations General Assembly: "Right now, Iraq is expanding and improving facilities that were used for the production of biological weapons."</li> <li>On September 25, 2002, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice told the PBS "News Hour with Jim Lehrer": There "clearly are contacts between Al Qaeda and Iraq...there clearly is testimony that some of the contacts have been important contacts and that there's a relationship here."</li> </ul> <div>&nbsp;</div> <div>&nbsp;</div> <div> <hr> <h4>For Discussion</h4> </div> <div>&nbsp;</div> <ul> <li>What is your understanding of each of the Senate committee criticisms of the CIA and other intelligence agencies? For instance, what is does it mean when it says judgments were "overstated," that "assumptions" were not challenged? What does it mean by the term "layering effect?</li> <li>The Senate committee concludes that "a broken corporate culture and poor management" were responsible for "most, if not all" of the CIA's problems. What does this conclusion mean to you?</li> <li>What other possible reasons might there have been for CIA failures?</li> <li>O'Hanlon and Kerr think the Senate report, to some degree, criticizes the CIA unfairly. Do you agree? Why or why not?</li> <li>Do you agree with O'Hanlon's comments that the Bush administration "interpreted all intelligence on Iraq in the most inflammatory way possible"? Why or why not? That members of Congress "had enough information to reach their own conclusions"? Why or why not? Consider, in this connection, the different versions of the National Intelligence Estimate.</li> <li>The Los Angeles Times reported that staff members of the Senate Intelligence Committee "after a year of investigating...were still trying to get to the bottom of how the key differences between the classified and unclassified versions [of the National Intelligence Estimate] came about." The government routinely classifies information that it regards as too sensitive on national security grounds to be released publicly. Based on what you know of the contents of the two versions of the NIE: If you were a government official who had the appropriate authority, would you have provided the public with a different version than the one provided to members of Congress? If so, why? If not, why do you suppose the government released an unclassified version to the public?</li> <li>What conclusions do Bush administration officials appear to have reached well before the National Intelligence Estimate classified and unclassified reports were issued? Do they support Senator Rockefeller's view that administration comments helped to create an "environment of intense pressure" in which "intelligence community officials were asked to render judgments on matters relating to Iraq"? How? or Why not?</li> </ul> <div>&nbsp;</div> <h4>Assignment:</h4> <div>You are a CIA official in 2002. Imagine that your latest reports from field agents on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction are the following:</div> <div>&nbsp;</div> <div><strong>1. </strong>A scientist who lived in Iraq until 1985 but now is an Egyptian citizen has kept in touch with fellow scientists in Iraq. One of your agents interviewed this Egyptian scientist yesterday. The scientist told the agent that he had recently received a letter from one of his scientist friends in Iraq that described an unusual amount of activity at a chemical plant near his home in Baghdad.</div> <div>&nbsp;</div> <div><strong>2. </strong>The son-in-law of Saddam Hussein who was in charge of Iraqi WMD programs and who defected to Jordan in 1995 has been interrogated at length by your agents. They report that in repeated questioning the son-in-law insisted that Iraq destroyed all of its WMD after the Gulf War of 1991.</div> <div>&nbsp;</div> <div><strong>3. </strong>A member of the Iraqi National Congress, an exile group opposed to Saddam Hussein, reports that he met in London the son of an old Iraqi friend. The son says his father works on a mobile biological lab and that he and other technicians are producing weaponized anthrax (a deadly poison).</div> <div>&nbsp;</div> <div><strong>4. </strong>German intelligence sources report they have evidence that Iraq has been importing aluminum tubes which might be used either for short-range rockets or for enriching uranium that could be used for nuclear weapons.</div> <div>&nbsp;</div> <div>Ask each student-CIA official to write a concise summary of current intelligence on the status of Iraq's WMD program for the President's daily briefing. Student-CIA officials should try to avoid falling into such critical thinking errors as those summarized after item #6 of the Senate report above. Students might consider including the following in their summary:</div> <div>&nbsp;</div> <ul> <li>questions that should be raised about an agent's report</li> <li>an assessment of the reliability of each agent's source(s) of information</li> <li>conclusions about the significance of the information being provided to the President.</li> </ul> <div><strong>Discussion</strong></div> <div>&nbsp;</div> <div>After students have completed this assignment, divide the class into groups of four to six students to share their papers. Then ask each group to select the one they regard as the best. Then have students read each of the selected papers to the whole class for discussion.</div> <div>&nbsp;</div> <div>&nbsp;</div> <h4>Activity: Opinions and Social Pressures</h4> <div><strong>To the Teacher:</strong></div> <div>&nbsp;</div> <div>According to the Senate Intelligence Committee, intelligence community members suffered from a "groupthink dynamic" that made it very difficult for dissenting views to penetrate the established presumption that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. Students should be familiar with the groupthink dynamic because, whether they realize it or not, they experience it every day. But they probably have not thought much about it as a "dynamic" that affects their daily lives. This exercise is intended to have students not only think about it but also to experience its effects.</div> <div>&nbsp;</div> <div>In 1955 Solomon Asch wrote "Opinions and Social Pressures" for Scientific American. His article described an experiment which was first used in the Laboratory of Social Relations at Harvard University:</div> <div>&nbsp;</div> <div>"A group of seven to nine young men, all college students, are assembled in a classroom for a 'psychological experiment' in visual judgment. The experimenter informs them that they will be comparing the lengths of lines. He shows two large white cards. On one is a single vertical black lineóthe standard whose length is to be matched. On the other card are three vertical lines of various lengths. The subjects are to choose the one that is of the same length as the line on the other card. One of the three actually is of the same length; the other two are substantially different, the difference ranging from three quarters of an inch to an inch and three quarters.</div> <div>&nbsp;</div> <div>"The experiment opens uneventfully. The subjects announce their answers in the order in which they have been seated in the room, and on the first round every person chooses the same matching line. Then a second set of cards is exposed; again the group is unanimous. The members appear ready to endure politely another boring experiment. On the third trial there is an unexpected disturbance. One person near the end of the group disagrees with all the others in his selection of the matching line. He looks surprised, indeed incredulous, about the disagreement. On the following trial he disagrees again, while the others remain unanimous in their choice. The dissenter becomes more and more worried and hesitant as the disagreement continues in succeeding trials; he may pause before announcing his answer and speak in a low voice, or he may smile in an embarrassed way.</div> <div>&nbsp;</div> <div>"What the dissenter does not know is that all the other members of the group were instructed by the experimenter beforehand to give incorrect answers in unanimity at certain points. The single individual who is not a party to this prearrangement is the focal subject of our experiment. He is placed in a position in which, while he is actually giving the correct answers, he finds himself unexpectedly in a minority of one, opposed by a unanimous and arbitrary majority with respect to a clear and simple fact. Upon him we brought to bear two opposing forces: the evidence of his senses and the unanimous opinion of a group of his peers. Also, he must declare his judgments in public, before a majority which has also stated its position publicly.</div> <div>&nbsp;</div> <div>"The instructed majority occasionally reports correctly in order to reduce the possibility that the naive subject will suspect collusion against him. (In only a few cases did the subject actually show suspicion; when this happened, the experiment was stopped and the results were not counted.) There are 18 trials in each series, and on 12 of these the majority responds erroneously."</div> <div>&nbsp;</div> <div>Asch reports further that "whereas in ordinary circumstances individuals matching the lines will make mistakes less than 1 per cent of the time, under group pressure the minority subjects swung to acceptance of the misleading majority's wrong judgments in 36.8 per cent of the selections."</div> <div>&nbsp;</div> <h4><strong>Groupthink Experiment:</strong></h4> <div>To perform this experiment in class, the teacher needs to meet outside of class with at least five or six students to explain the process and its purpose. The easiest way to ensure that on 12 of the 18 trials these students will answer in the same way each time is to have them follow automatically the lead of the first student to answer. The teacher can show the students the set of cards he or she will use in class. These students must not speak to any other students about the experiment and play their role in class seriously.</div> <div>&nbsp;</div> <div>In class, publicly select the prepared students and one unprepared student to take part in the experiment. (The experiment will take place in front of other students who, like the unprepared student, are learning about it for the first time.) The unprepared student should be placed either last or next-to-last in the lineup of those participating.</div> <div>&nbsp;</div> <div>Then have the participating students state their judgments about the lines on the cards (following the same process as did the students in the Harvard study).</div> <div>&nbsp;</div> <div>When the experiment is concluded, explain to the class what really happened and discuss the results.</div> <div>&nbsp;</div> <div><strong>Discussion</strong></div> <div>&nbsp;</div> <ul> <li>How would you describe the behavior of the unprepared student during the progress of the experiment? How did he or she look? What did he or she say?</li> <li>How do you explain this behavior?</li> <li>How did the unprepared student feel? What was he or she thinking during the experiment?</li> <li>If the unprepared student went along with the incorrect majority, why?</li> <li>What generalizations about opinions and social pressure can you draw from the results of this experiment?</li> <li>Do your generalizations also apply to the members of the intelligence community who, according to the Senate Intelligence Committee, behaved the way they did because of a "groupthink dynamic"?</li> <li>Do they also apply to the 77 Senators out of 100 who voted to authorize war on Iraq? Whatever you conclude, what makes you think so?</li> <li>What examples can you cite from your personal experience of this dynamic?</li> </ul> <p>Perhaps a reading of "The Emperor's New Clothes" would be an appropriate conclusion for the session.</p> <div>&nbsp;</div> <div>&nbsp;</div> <div> <hr><strong>To the Teacher:</strong></div> <div>&nbsp;</div> <div>Parson Weems' cherry tree story about George Washington provides an opportunity for students to consider the reliability and accuracy of printed information.</div> <div>&nbsp;</div> <div>&nbsp;</div> <div> <hr> <h3>Reading 2:</h3> </div> <h2>Did the boy who became our first president refuse to lie about chopping down a cherry tree?</h2> <div>&nbsp;</div> <div>A year after George Washington's death in 1799, Parson Mason Locke Weems published The Life of Washington. The book was so popular that Weems published new editions in the following years. In the fifth edition of 1806 he included for the first time the cherry tree story, which Weems said was told to him by an "excellent lady."</div> <div>&nbsp;</div> <div>Weems wrote that when young George was about six years old his father gave him a hatchet for a present. Delighted with this gift, George was soon chopping at everything in his way. One day in the family garden he chopped at the "body of a beautiful young English cherry tree." The next morning George's father saw the tree lying on the ground. Weems then tells the rest of the story as follows:</div> <div>&nbsp;</div> <div>"George," said his father, "do you know who killed the beautiful little cherry tree yonder in the garden?"</div> <div>&nbsp;</div> <div>This was a tough question and George staggered under it for a moment, but quickly recovered himself, and looking at his father, with the sweet face of a youth brightened with the inexpressible charm of all-conquering truth, he bravely cried out, "I can't tell a lie, you know I can't tell a lie. I did cut it up with my hatchet."</div> <div>&nbsp;</div> <div>"Run to my arms, you dearest boy," cried his father in transport, "run to my arms; glad am I, George, that you killed my tree, for you have paid me for it a thousand fold. Such an act of heroism in my son is worth more than a thousand trees, though blossomed with silver and their fruits of purest gold."</div> <div>&nbsp;</div> <div>&nbsp;</div> <div> <hr> <h4>Assignment: Reliability and accuracy</h4> </div> <div>&nbsp;</div> <div>After students have read The Cherry Tree Story, ask them to prepare three questions that if answered well would help them come to a judgment about the reliability and accuracy of the Weems account. Students do not have to be able to answer their questions.</div> <div>&nbsp;</div> <div>Next, divide the class into groups of four. Ask students to read their questions to each other, discuss them briefly, then decide on the two best questions for consideration by the whole class.</div> <div>&nbsp;</div> <div>When each group reports, write its questions on the chalkboard without comment. Then have the class analyze each of the questions in the manner described in "the doubting game" section of "Teaching Critical Thinking," which is available on this website.</div> <div>&nbsp;</div> <div>Issues that might be addressed include:</div> <div>&nbsp;</div> <ul> <li>the source of the story</li> <li>where the "excellent lady" got it from since she was apparently not present</li> <li>the likely accuracy of the dialogue between George and his father and the descriptions of their emotions</li> <li>the overall likelihood of the event itself</li> <li>why Weems did not include this story in his first edition</li> </ul> <div>Each issue should evoke a number of questions. For example, it is unlikely that students can find out the identity of the "excellent lady." What should a reader's reaction be to an historical/biographical account whose source is not named specifically? Why? What problems are there about an unnamed source? Why?</div> <div>&nbsp;</div> <div>However, students should be able to locate information about Parson Weems from a number of sources. What assessments of his biography of Washington can they find? How is Weems rated as a biographer? Why? Are there differences of opinion about Weems' work? Why or why not? If there are differences of opinion, how would students determine which assessments are the most credible?</div> <div>&nbsp;</div> <div>&nbsp;</div> <div> <hr><strong>To the Teacher:</strong></div> <div>&nbsp;</div> <div>The Senate Intelligence Committee concluded that "the intelligence community suffered from a collective presumption that Iraq had an active and growing weapons of mass destruction program." The committee found that the intelligence community had a strong tendency to ignore evidence that suggested otherwiseóand tended to interpret ambiguous evidence as supporting its presumption that Iraq had WMD. All this, the committee said, contributed greatly to inaccurate intelligence findings.</div> <div>&nbsp;</div> <div>In our everyday lives it is impossible to avoid making or accepting unstated assumptions that may not be correct. If we want to be critical thinkers, we must be awareness of this tendency and learn how detect and analyze assumptions. The following reading focuses on one well-known example from American history of people making unwarranted assumptions. In Salem, Massachusetts unwarranted assumptions led directly to a frenzy over witchcraft and the execution of a number of citizens.</div> <div>&nbsp;</div> <div> <hr> <h3>Reading 3:</h3> </div> <h2>Possessed by witchcraft or assumptions?</h2> <div>Cotton Mather was a preacher and a scientist in Massachusetts during colonial days. In 1688, he was told that there was a family in his parish whose children suffered from the effects of witchcraft. He took one of the children into his home for observation. Below are some excerpts from Mather's written record of this experience.</div> <div>&nbsp;</div> <div>"It was the eldest of these children that fell chiefly under my own observation; for I took her home to my own family, partly out of compassion to her parents, but chiefly that I might be a critical eyewitness of things that would enable me to confute the Sadducism* of this debauched age....On November 20, 1688, she cried out, 'Ah they have found me out!' and immediately she fell into her fits; wherein we often observed that she would cough up a ball as big as a small egg, into the side of her windpipe, that would near choke her till by stroking and by drinking it was again carried down.</div> <div>&nbsp;</div> <div>"When I prayed in the room, first her hands were with a strong, though not even force, clapt upon her ears; and when her hands were by our force pulled away, she cried out, 'They make such a noise, I cannot hear a word!' She complained that Glover's Chain** was upon her leg....When her tortures passed over, still frolics would succeed, wherein she would continue hours, yea, days together, talking perhaps never wickedly but always wittily beyond her self....she frequently told us in these frolics, that if she might but steal or be drunk, she would be well immediately. She told us that she must go down to the bottom of our well (and we had much ado to hinder it) for they said there was plate there, and they would bring her up safely again.</div> <div>&nbsp;</div> <div>"We wondered at this, for she had never heard of any plate there; and we ourselves, who had newly bought the house, were ignorant of it; but the former owner of the house, just then coming in, told there had been plate for many years lost at the bottom of the well. Moreover, one singular passion that frequently attended her was this:</div> <div>&nbsp;</div> <div>"An invisible chain would be clapt about her, and she in much pain and fear, cry out when they began to put it on. Sometimes we could with our hands knock it off, as it began to be fastened; but ordinarily, when it was on, she would be pulled out of her seat with such violence, towards the fire, that it was as much as one or two of us could do to keep her out...but she was dragged wholely by other hands. And if we stamped on the hearth just between her and the fire, she screamed out that by jarring the chain we hurt her.</div> <div>&nbsp;</div> <div>"I may add that they put on an unseen rope, with a cruel noose, about her neck, whereby she was choked until she was black in the face, and though it was got off before it had killed her, yet there were the red marks of it, and of a finger and a thumb near it, remaining to be seen for some while afterwards."</div> <div>&nbsp;</div> <div>*Mather's term for people who refuse to believe in witches</div> <div>**Glover was a famous witch</div> <div>&nbsp;</div> <div>Reprinted in Neil Postman and Howard C. Damon, The Uses of Language</div> <div>&nbsp;</div> <div>&nbsp;</div> <div><strong>For Discussion</strong></div> <div>&nbsp;</div> <div>In previous readings students have considered the reliability of a source, the accuracy of information, and the effects of "groupthink." Mather's report raises another pitfall for critical thinkers to avoid: unwarranted assumptions. The Senate committee report also cited unwarranted assumptions as a problem (specifically the assumption that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction).</div> <div>&nbsp;</div> <ul> <li>Which of Mather's statements do you accept as fact? Why?</li> <li>What assumptions does Mather make as he observes the girl?</li> <li>Are any of the assumptions Mather makes supported by facts? If so, which ones and what makes you think they are supported?</li> <li>What do you think caused Mather to confuse fact and assumption?</li> <li>Did the CIA confuse fact and assumption in the case of Iraq? If so what do you think caused the CIA to do this?</li> <li>Does Mather write anything that suggests his observations and comments might be tainted by bias?</li> <li>How do you think the girl's behavior would be classified or explained today? Why?</li> </ul> <div>&nbsp;</div> <div>&nbsp;</div> <div> <hr><strong>To the Teacher</strong></div> <div>&nbsp;</div> <div>This final reading focuses on question-asking and answering as a key element in reaching sound judgments.</div> <div>&nbsp;</div> <div>&nbsp;</div> <div> <hr> <h3>Reading 4:</h3> </div> <h2>If you don't ask good questions, how can you get good answers?</h2> <div>&nbsp;</div> <div>Making sound judgments can be difficult. The CIA had a great deal of information from many sources but apparently few, if any, of its own agents as first-hand sources inside Iraq. The agency was working on a very controversial issue in a highly charged political atmosphere within the United States as well as within the United Nations. There were technical considerations, national security considerations, disagreements within the wider intelligence community, and, in the view of many critics, pressure on the CIA to reach conclusions that would support a decision to go to war on Iraq that the Bush administration had made months before the National Intelligence Estimate of October 2002.</div> <div>&nbsp;</div> <div>Nor is making a sound judgment easy when, as in the lines experiment, one is confronted with opposing views from colleagues and friends. Peer pressure can be powerful. And making a sound judgment on the reliability of a biography or an apparently scientific report of observations can be difficult, too. How can we be sure that the biographer is reporting accurately? How can we know whether the scientist's observations are affected by personal beliefs or desires?</div> <div>&nbsp;</div> <div>On complex public issues like whether or not the US should go to war, many people are inclined to leave the decision-making to public officials and experts. But public officials and experts, though they may have more information than the rest of us, are human beings, and, like all human beings, often wrong. A substantial majority were wrongóand not just in the USóon one or more of three key issues during the lead-up to the US attack on Iraq: they were wrong in their judgment that Iraq had stockpiles of biological and chemical weapons; that Iraq was reconstituting its nuclear weapons program; and that a working partnership existed between Iraq and Al Qaeda.</div> <div>&nbsp;</div> <div>All of this suggests that we need to cultivate within ourselves a high degree of informed skepticism about "authoritative" statements made by experts and public officials, especially when they seem to be absolutely certain in their judgments. But this skepticism needs to be informed by critical thinking skills that enable us to test what we are hearing, seeing, and reading. One such key skill is questioning.</div> <div>&nbsp;</div> <div>We often need an expert judgment on an issue but should not accept it automatically. What are the expert's qualifications? Are there any reasons to suspect bias? For example, is there anything in the expert's political, economic, social, or religious background that suggests a reason for bias? What might he or she gain by taking a certain position?</div> <div>&nbsp;</div> <div>We can raise the same questions about a public official's position on an issue. Most elected public officials want to be reelected. Is the official's judgment tainted to some degree by the need to win the support of certain voters? Or to win the essential contributions for an election campaign from special interests? Politicians are also usually members of a political party. Is a judgment or a vote prejudiced by a trade-off? For instance, perhaps if the official doesn't support a bill, others won't support a bill the official wants passed. Or maybe if the official doesn't support the bill, she can forget about getting construction money for a road that will win her votes in her district.</div> <div>&nbsp;</div> <div>Other key skills include:</div> <div>&nbsp;</div> <div><strong>1) </strong>knowing how to find answers to our questions</div> <div>&nbsp;</div> <div><strong>2)</strong> knowing how to test the answers we get by asking and answering yet other questions, such as:</div> <div>&nbsp;</div> <ul> <li>How reliable is this source, whether it be a website, a newspaper article, a biography, a chapter in a book, a TV commentator?</li> <li>Whose viewpoint are we reading, hearing, or seeing?</li> <li>Is there reason to believe that this website or that author come to an issue with a partisan agenda?</li> <li>How convincing and how objectively stated is the information for support of any opinions?</li> <li>Are viewpoints opinionated and expressed in sweeping generalizations that don't stand up to scrutiny?</li> <li>Are information and opinion presented logically? in a balanced manner? fairly?</li> <li>Do we suspect the omission of important information?</li> <li>Of course, even the detection of some reason for bias does not mean that the expert's or the official's views are worthless. But it does mean that we should keep them in mind as we form our own views.</li> </ul> <div>&nbsp;</div> <div>It may be harder to discover reasons for bias in ourselves, but it is at least as necessary. Ask yourself the same kinds of questions you might ask of another, then answer those questions.</div> <div>&nbsp;</div> <div>&nbsp;</div> <div><strong>Assignment:</strong></div> <div>&nbsp;</div> <div>Read the following judgments by two well-known public officials who are also politicians. Then:</div> <div>&nbsp;</div> <div><strong>1) </strong>Write one good question about each. A "good question," in this context, is one which, if answered well, would lead you to a more informed judgment about the soundness of the opinion stated in it.</div> <div>&nbsp;</div> <div><strong>2) </strong>Explain how you would go about answering your questions and why you think the process you outline makes sense.</div> <div>&nbsp;</div> <div>"Although we have not found stockpiles of weapons, I believe we were right to go into Iraq. America is safer today because we did. We removed a declared enemy of America, who had the capability of producing weapons of mass destruction, and could have passed that capability to terrorists bent on acquiring them. In the world after September 11, that was a risk we could not afford to take."</div> <div><em>—President George W. Bush, 7/9/04</em></div> <div>&nbsp;</div> <div>"...The committee's report fails to fully explain the environment of intense pressure in which the intelligence community officials were asked to render judgments on matters relating to Iraq when the most senior officials in the Bush administration had already...made up their mind that they were going to go to war...[Their] relentless public campaign prior to the war... repeatedly characterized the Iraqi weapons programs in more ominous and threatening terms than any intelligence would have allowed. In short, we went to war based on false claims."</div> <div><em>—Senator John D. Rockefeller IV (Democrat), vice chairman of the Senate&nbsp;</em><em>Intelligence Committee, 7/9/04</em></div> <div>&nbsp;</div> <div>&nbsp;</div> <div><em>This lesson was written for TeachableMoment.Org, a project of Morningside Center for Teaching Social Responsibility. We welcome your comments. Please email them to: lmcclure@morningsidecenter.org.</em></div> </div> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap/templates/field/field.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--uid--teachable-moment-lesson.html.twig x field--node--uid.html.twig * field--node--teachable-moment-lesson.html.twig * field--uid.html.twig * field--entity-reference.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'core/modules/node/templates/field--node--uid.html.twig' --> <span> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'username' --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'core/modules/user/templates/username.html.twig' --> <span>fionta</span> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'core/modules/user/templates/username.html.twig' --> </span> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'core/modules/node/templates/field--node--uid.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--created--teachable-moment-lesson.html.twig x field--node--created.html.twig * field--node--teachable-moment-lesson.html.twig * field--created.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'core/modules/node/templates/field--node--created.html.twig' --> <span> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'time' --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'core/modules/system/templates/time.html.twig' --> <time datetime="2011-07-23T14:39:24-04:00" title="Saturday, July 23, 2011 - 14:39">July 23, 2011</time> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'core/modules/system/templates/time.html.twig' --> </span> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'core/modules/node/templates/field--node--created.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'links__node' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * links--node.html.twig x links.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap/templates/system/links.html.twig' --> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap/templates/system/links.html.twig' --> Sat, 23 Jul 2011 18:39:24 +0000 fionta 672 at https://www.morningsidecenter.org INTERPRETING & VERIFYING THE NEWS in an Era of Info Overload https://www.morningsidecenter.org/teachable-moment/lessons/interpreting-verifying-news-era-info-overload <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--title--teachable-moment-lesson.html.twig x field--node--title.html.twig * field--node--teachable-moment-lesson.html.twig * field--title.html.twig * field--string.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'core/modules/node/templates/field--node--title.html.twig' --> <span>INTERPRETING &amp; VERIFYING THE NEWS in an Era of Info Overload</span> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'core/modules/node/templates/field--node--title.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--body--teachable-moment-lesson.html.twig * field--node--body.html.twig * field--node--teachable-moment-lesson.html.twig * field--body.html.twig * field--text-with-summary.html.twig x field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap/templates/field/field.html.twig' --> <div class="field field--name-body field--type-text-with-summary field--label-hidden field--item"><p><strong>To the Teacher</strong></p> <div>&nbsp;</div> <div>The student readings, discussion questions, and inquiry suggestions below focus on the need to critically interpret and verify what one sees, hears, and reads to avoid being swamped by information overload.</div> <div>&nbsp;</div> <div>The first reading provides an overview of the media explosion, quoting first from Charles Weingartner's "The Interpretation of News," and then from The Elements of Journalism by Tom Rosenstiel and Bill Kovach. The second deals with some basic issues, including the understanding that "news is made, not collected," the need for good navigation skills. The third suggests a student inquiry into two conflicting reports on the death of a Palestinian woman in the West Bank.</div> <div>&nbsp;</div> <div>See "Thinking Is Questioning" for exercises to help students with a question-asking, question-analyzing process that aims to help them learn how to ask good questions as the first step in making productive inquiries.</div> <div>&nbsp;</div> <div>This is the seventh in a continuing series of readings at Teachable on the media and the news that includes:&nbsp;</div> <ul> <li>War and the Media: A Resource Unit (war reporting from Lexington to Iraq, analyzing a news story, the media business)</li> <li>News, National Security &amp; Democracy (secret prisons and eavesdropping on Americans)</li> <li>What is 'news' and how important is it? (defining "news" and the importance of the press)</li> <li>News Sources: Questions and Issues (defectors and government officials as sources)</li> <li>The News &amp; the Bottom Line (the news business and pressures for profits and the consequences)</li> <li>Bush, Secrecy &amp; the Press (the workings of the government's classification system and samples of presidential secrecy)</li> </ul> <div>&nbsp;</div> <div> <hr> <h3>Student Reading 1:</h3> <h2>Information Overload</h2> </div> <div>In 1789, when George Washington was inaugurated in New York City as the first president of the United States, the news would not reach Boston for nearly a week—though it was only about 220 miles away. Americans in the state of Georgia would have to wait for about a month, the British twice as long.</div> <div>&nbsp;</div> <div>Two hundred and nineteen years later, live video of Barack Obama's 2008 inauguration was instantly available worldwide.</div> <div>&nbsp;</div> <div>The immediacy, diversity and volume of news sources and information of all kinds now available to anyone with an internet connection is impressive. Every day, an average of 247 billion e-mails are sent worldwide. The world had 234 million websites, as of December 2009, according to Pingdom, a website monitoring group. (<a href="https://royal.pingdom.com/">royal.pingdom.com/</a>)</div> <div>&nbsp;</div> <div>Some examples of popular Internet, mobile phone and cable media:</div> <div>&nbsp;</div> <div>YouTube, a video-sharing website, had 14 billion viewers in May 2010. YouTube, like many other websites, can make anyone anywhere a potential news provider. For instance, Marie Corfield, an art teacher, gained instant fame last fall when a video was posted of her criticizing New Jersey Governor Chris Christie</div> <div>Facebook at last count had 500 million members globally; Twitter, My Space, and other social networking media attract many millions more.</div> <div>Smartphones and other mobile phones allow texting and nonstop connectivity</div> <div>Internet media sites compete with old print media outlets for dominance. Al Jazeera English, based in Qatar, broadcasts news to more than 100 countries 24/7, continuously live streams programs, and provides written news reports on its website at <a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/">/www.aljazeera.com/</a>. Huffington Post, an Internet newspaper, reaches millions with its articles, blogs, and news videos.</div> <div>An array of cable channels, to name but a few, focus on sports (ESPN), learning (TLC), food (FN), and travel (TC), to news channels (Fox, CNN, MSNBC) and news satire (Comedy Central's "The Daily Show" and "The Colbert Report")</div> <div>Some "old media" newspapers, like the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, are under such financial stress that they have abandoned print for online editions only. The Christian Science Monitor has become an online daily with a print edition weekly. Such major newspapers as the Washington Post, the New York Times, and the Los Angeles Times publish print editions daily as well as online editions. Printed news magazines like Time and Newsweek, still survive. AM and FM radio is still popular, especially for people in cars.</div> <div>&nbsp;</div> <div>The media glut poses a challenge to everyone: What is really going on out there? Which sources of news are reliable and which aren't? What is important and what's not?</div> <div>&nbsp;</div> <div>&nbsp;</div> <div><strong>For discussion and writing</strong></div> <div>&nbsp;</div> <div><strong>1.</strong> What questions do students have about the reading? How might they be answered?</div> <div>&nbsp;</div> <div><strong>2.</strong> What are students' major sources of news and other kinds of information? Why are these sources important to them?</div> <div>&nbsp;</div> <div><strong>3.</strong> How aware are students of the possibility for conflicting, partially inaccurate, or false reports? What do they do when they become aware of such problems?</div> <div>&nbsp;</div> <div>&nbsp;</div> <div> <hr> <h3>Student Reading 2:</h3> <h2>Interpreting and verifying the news</h2> </div> <div><strong>Interpreting the news</strong></div> <div>&nbsp;</div> <div>In an essay called "The Interpretation of News," Charles Weingartner makes some observations about "news" that are just as relevant now as when the essay was published, in 1966. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, he notes, had a very simple, and straightforward definition of the law: "The law is what the courts say it is. Nothing more. Nothing less. Similarly, news is nothing more or less than what reporters—with the encouragement or sufferance of their editors and publishers—say and write."</div> <div>&nbsp;</div> <div>In short, Weingartner's definition of news is a combination of a particular reporter's "imagination... prejudices... courage...timidity...perceptual limitations. This definition implies, too, that news is not something 'out there' to be gathered or collected, as so many newsmen would like us to think. News is made, not collected. 'All the news that's fit to print,' if it means anything at all, means only the publicly asserted biases of the reporters and editors of the New York Times-which biases, I am sure you have noticed, frequently differ from those of the Chicago Tribune or the New York Daily News or the Columbia Broadcasting System.</div> <div>&nbsp;</div> <div>"On the day Marilyn Monroe committed suicide, so did a hundred other people," notes Weingartner. "Yet we shall never know about these people or their reasons," since the newspapers and other media took no notice of those deaths. "An event in itself is not news. An event becomes news. And it becomes news because a reporter or editor has selected it for notice out of the buzzing, booming confusion around him. Of course, once he has chosen an event to be news, he must also choose what he wants to see, what he wants to neglect, and what he wishes to remember or forget. This is simply another way of saying that every news story—even though it be written in descriptive language—is an editorial.</div> <div>&nbsp;</div> <div>Weingartner gives this example to illustrate his point.</div> <div>&nbsp;</div> <div>1. "The streets of central Moscow are, as the guidebooks say, clean and neat; so is the famed subway. They are so because of an army of women with brooms, pans, and carts who thus earn their 35 rubles a month in lieu of 'relief'; in all Moscow we never saw a mechanical streetsweeper." (Wall Street Journal, July 31, 1962)</div> <div>&nbsp;</div> <div>2. "Four years ago [in Moscow] women by the hundreds swept big city streets. Now you rarely see more than a dozen. The streets are kept clean with giant brushing and sprinkling machines." (World Telegram &amp; Sun, July 31, 1962)</div> <div>&nbsp;</div> <div>(Weingartner's essay appears in Neil Postman's book Language and Reality.)</div> <div>&nbsp;</div> <div>&nbsp;</div> <div><strong>Verifying the news</strong></div> <div>&nbsp;</div> <div>Decades after Weingartner wrote his essay, we still need to verify "the news"—even though the nature of media has changed dramatically.</div> <div>&nbsp;</div> <div>Tom Rosenstiel and Bill Kovach write in their book The Elements of Journalism: "We now live in a user controlled media world. People are their own editors, and the ability of the press to function as a gatekeeper over what the public sees, or to force-feed the public what it should know, is over."</div> <div>&nbsp;</div> <div>A stunning example has been WikiLeaks' release of confidential and secret U.S. government documents. Among the revelations: The US military failed to investigate torture, rape, even murder by Iraqi police and other security forces; and the Obama administration successfully pressured German and Spanish officials not to investigate Bush administration officials accused of responsibility for prisoner torture.</div> <div>&nbsp;</div> <div>"Our public discourse," Rosenstiel and Kovach maintain, "is now going to be a collaboration between citizens and consumers of information, and the sources from which they get that information. The real gap in the twenty-first century is not between those who have access to the Internet and those who don't; it's between those who have skills to navigate the information, and those who are overwhelmed by it and escape that sense of overwhelming by just going to the sources that make them feel comfortable, or to points of view that are comforting and familiar...</div> <div>&nbsp;</div> <div>"The conventional press has historically always been too reliant on authority, on taking peoples' word for things just because they were officials, and being a conduit for those powerful voices." But digital technology is changing that, they argue. "Everyone is now in the breaking news business and they [government authorities] have to actively push against that.</div> <div>&nbsp;</div> <div>"The ability to question, to be skeptical, now logically includes using the audience as a skeptical sounding board for the press. But it also means the audience themselves need to keep an open mind and not say, 'Well I like this guy, I like President Obama, and therefore I believe him' ...</div> <div>&nbsp;</div> <div>"It's incumbent on all of us to say, 'Okay I like you—now show me the evidence behind what you are saying...The people we like and the people we dislike in public life are capable of spin and shading the truth and exploiting statistics, and engaging in argument rather than explanation of things."</div> <div>&nbsp;</div> <div>The transmission of information inevitably means the transmission of misinformation whether it is conveyed by the New York Times or via Huffington Post. Even young children playing "Telephone" discover this truth.</div> <div>&nbsp;</div> <div>This means that it's not enough to be a passive, uncritical receiver of "the news" provided by media sources—or even of "information" passed on by parents, friends, acquaintances, and teachers. What we need, say Rosensteil and Kovach, is "a discipline of verification."</div> <div>&nbsp;</div> <div><strong>A short quiz</strong></div> <div>&nbsp;</div> <div>Below are, first, five statements about the Weingartner essay, then five statements about Rosenstiel and Kovach's arguement. In your notebook, mark each statement either "True" or "False." "True" means either that statement is made directly in the reading, or that there is enough evidence in the article to support it. "False" means that the statement is neither made directly, nor is there enough evidence in the reading to support it. Be prepared to support your choices by pointing to the evidence in the reading that helped you to make them.</div> <div>&nbsp;</div> <div><strong>Weingartner</strong></div> <div>&nbsp;</div> <div>1. The author says that news reporters gather all the news available to them.</div> <div>2. The author says that the personal life of a movie star is not news.</div> <div>3. The author says that important events determine what is news.</div> <div>4. The author says that news reporters can be completely objective if they do their jobs properly.</div> <div>5. The author believes that absolute objectivity is essential for all news reporters.</div> <div>&nbsp;</div> <div><strong>Rosenstiel and Kovach</strong></div> <div>&nbsp;</div> <div>1. The authors say that in the new media environment the press can no longer determine what people see and know.</div> <div>2. The authors say that an important difference today is between people who have the skills to examine information critically and those who accept what they hear or read from familiar sources.</div> <div>3. The authors say that new technology makes it easier for people to question official statements.</div> <div>4. That authors say that the audience for news should avoid simply trusting government officials who are popular.</div> <div>5. The authors say that everyone in public life, whether we like them or not, may avoid direct and honest explanations.</div> <div>&nbsp;</div> <div>To the Teacher: The statements above offer a test of your students' ability to comprehend what they read. All the statements attributable to Weingartner are false. All those attributable to Rosenstiel and Kovach are true. However, students' reasoning is more important than the correctness of their responses.</div> <div>&nbsp;</div> <div>&nbsp;</div> <div><strong>For discussion</strong></div> <div>&nbsp;</div> <div><strong>1. </strong>What questions do students have about the reading? How might they be answered?</div> <div>&nbsp;</div> <div><strong>2.</strong> The Supreme Court in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) upheld a Louisiana law requiring racial segregation under the doctrine of "separate but equal." In doing so, it ruled against an African-American, Homer Ferguson, who took a seat in a "whites only car," would not leave, and was arrested. A later Supreme Court, in Brown v. Board of Education, overturned and declared unconstitutional the court's 1896 ruling because "separate but equal" "is inherently unequal." Do these contradictory rulings prove that, as Justice Holmes said, the law is what the courts say it is? If so, why? If not, why not?</div> <div>&nbsp;</div> <div><strong>3. </strong>Weingartner writes: "An event in itself is not news. An event becomes news." What do you understand him to mean? Do you agree? Why or why not? He also declares every news story to be an editorial. What do you think he means? Weingartner makes it clear that he thinks all news reporting is biased. What do you think he means by "biased"? Can news reporters avoid "bias"? If so, how? If not, why not?</div> <div>&nbsp;</div> <div><strong>4.</strong> Do you think the two news reports of street cleaning in Moscow support Weingartner's view that every news story "is an editorial." Why? or Why not? How would you define what he means by "an editorial"?&nbsp;</div> <div>&nbsp;</div> <div><strong>5. </strong>What significant differences do you find in the two newspaper reports? How do you explain them? Do you find one of the accounts more believable than the other? If so, why? If not, why not?</div> <div>&nbsp;</div> <div><strong>6.</strong> If you wanted to investigate further the nature of street cleaning in Moscow in July 1962, how would you go about it? Where do you think you might find reliable information? How would you decide if it was reliable?</div> <div>&nbsp;</div> <div><strong>7. </strong>Rosenstiel and Kovach emphasize "a discipline of verification" as the essence of good journalism. What do you think they mean by this phrase? Why do you think they regard it so highly?&nbsp;</div> <div>&nbsp;</div> <div><strong>8.</strong> They also emphasize the importance of "skills to navigate" the huge amount of available information. What skills do they see as essential? Why?</div> <div>&nbsp;</div> <div><strong>9. </strong>Among "essential skills," write Rosenstiel and Kovach, is "the ability to question." What questions do you think a critically thinking receiver of news and other kinds of information should always have in mind? Why is each of these questions important?</div> <div>&nbsp;</div> <div><strong>10. </strong>What do they mean by "a user controlled media world"? What evidence is there for such a world? What do you understand them to mean by "the ability of the press to function as a gatekeeper...is over"? Do you agree? What evidence do you know of to support your opinion?</div> <div>&nbsp;</div> <div><strong>11. </strong>Do you agree that "The conventional press has historically always been too reliant on authority..."? What evidence do you have to support your conclusion? If you think you need more information, how might you find it?</div> <div>&nbsp;</div> <div>&nbsp;</div> <div> <hr> <h3>Student Reading 3:</h3> <h2>Questioning news reports</h2> </div> <div>&nbsp;</div> <div>Technology has given us access to a huge volume of information. But some individual or some group still must decide what information it wants to make available and what is news and how to report it—and what is not news and should be ignored. Sources of news continue to differ in reliability. Though 219 years have passed between the Washington and Obama inaugurations, facts are still facts; so are statements that look like facts. Which facts are chosen and which omitted make a difference, at times a vital one.</div> <div>&nbsp;</div> <div>Educated receivers of news and other information have open, but not empty, minds, media navigating skills, questioning and other verification skills. They have a "built-in, shock-proof, crap detector" —that was Ernest Hemingway's response to a question about what a good writer needs most, but it also applies to a good reader.</div> <div>&nbsp;</div> <div><strong>Classroom Discussion</strong></div> <div><br> New Health Law</div> <div>Consider these two quotes about an issue in the news, the new US health insurance law:</div> <div>&nbsp;</div> <div>1. The new health care plan is a "government takeover of nearly 20 percent of our economy." (Republican Party of Florida, March 19, 2010)</div> <div>&nbsp;</div> <div>2. "Employers will continue to provide health insurance to the majority of Americans through private insurance companies." The new law "relies largely on the existing system of health coverage provided by employers." (<a href="http://www.politifact.com">www.politifact.com</a>, December 16, 2010)</div> <div>&nbsp;</div> <div>Ask students: What question or questions might help you determine which of the above statements, if either, is accurate?</div> <div>&nbsp;</div> <div>Write 10 or so questions on the chalkboard for analysis. For question-analysis and continued inquiry, see "For discussion and inquiry" at the conclusion of this reading.</div> <div>&nbsp;</div> <div>&nbsp;</div> <div><strong>Barack Obama's citizenship</strong></div> <div>&nbsp;</div> <div><strong>1. </strong>A CNN poll from July 16-21 found that 27 percent of Americans doubt Obama's citizenship. Eleven percent say Obama was definitely not born in the United States, while 16 percent say he was "probably" not born here.</div> <div>&nbsp;</div> <div><strong>2.</strong> Hawaii's Republican governor, Linda] Lingle, said, "...I had my health director, who is a physician by background, go personally view the birth certificate in the birth records of the Department of Health.... The president was in fact born at Kapi'olani Hospital in Honolulu, Hawaii. And that's just a fact." (<a href="http://www.thehill.com">www.thehill.com</a>, 8/4/10)</div> <div>&nbsp;</div> <div>Ask students: What question or questions would you put to one of the Americans who doubts Obama's citizenship? How would you verify that Gov. Lingle is quoted accurately and that the statement itself is accurate?</div> <div>&nbsp;</div> <div><strong>A death in the Palestinian West Bank village of Bil'in</strong></div> <div>&nbsp;</div> <div><strong>1. </strong>From a story by Isabel Kershner, "Tear Gas Kills a Palestinian Protester," in the New York Times (<a href="http://www.nytimes.com">www.nytimes.com</a>, 1/2/11)</div> <div>&nbsp;</div> <div>"JERUSALEM - A Palestinian woman died Saturday after inhaling tear gas fired by Israeli forces a day earlier at a protest against Israel's separation barrier in a West Bank village. A hospital director, Dr. Muhammad Aideh, said the woman had arrived on Friday suffering from tear-gas asphyxiation and died despite hours of treatment.</div> <div>&nbsp;</div> <div>The Israeli military described the protest as a 'violent and illegal riot,' and said it had received a report from the Palestinians that a woman who was hospitalized after inhaling tear gas had been released and died later at her home. Dr. Aideh denied that the woman had left the hospital...</div> <div>&nbsp;</div> <div>Local Palestinians, bolstered by international and Israeli supporters, have held weekly protests against Israel's separation barrier in Bilin for the past five years, turning the village into a symbol of Palestinian defiance. Other villages along the barrier route have since joined the protest movement.</div> <div>&nbsp;</div> <div>Friday's demonstration was billed as a particularly large one to mark the end of 2010. Hundreds of protesters converged near the barrier, although the Israeli military had declared it a closed military zone, and activists said they managed to cut through the wire fence that makes up the barrier in this area in three places.</div> <div>&nbsp;</div> <div>The Palestinians say the protests are meant to be nonviolent, but they inevitably end in clashes, with young Palestinians hurling stones and the Israeli security forces firing tear gas, stun grenades and rubber bullets.</div> <div>&nbsp;</div> <div>Palestinian leaders have held Bilin up as a model of legitimate resistance against Israeli occupation."</div> <div>&nbsp;</div> <div>&nbsp;</div> <div><strong>2. </strong>Felice Gelman, in a post called "What Really Happened at Bil'in," on the blog Mondoweiss.net (<a href="http://www.mondoweiss.net/2011/01/what-really-happened-in-bilin.html">www.mondoweiss.net/2011/01/what-really-happened-in-bilin.html</a>, 1/2/11). Mondoweiss calls itself a "progressive Jewish blog" seeking "greater fairness and justice for Palestinians in American foreign policy."</div> <div>&nbsp;</div> <div>"I was at the demo on Friday and at the funeral on Saturday... The IOF [Israeli army] commenced firing heavy tear gas before demonstrators were within five hundred yards of them. A small number of people managed to penetrate the gas and get to within 15 feet of the soldiers. Obviously, this was a non-violent demonstration because they simply remained there, talking to the soldiers for at least an hour...</div> <div>&nbsp;</div> <div>I can say that Isabel Kershner's comment in the <em>New York Times</em>, that these demonstrations 'inevitably end in clashes, with young Palestinians hurling stones and the Israeli security forces firing tear gas, stun grenades and rubber bullets' completely reverses the course of events. The IOF commenced firing tear gas long before any demonstrators neared them. There was little stone throwing during the demonstration and it did not commence until long after the tear gas.</div> <div>&nbsp;</div> <div>For a group of demonstrators that got closer than I did (maybe 100 yards or so from the IOF), the soldiers fired a tear gas barrage in front of them, then behind them — trapping them. Then numerous tear gas canisters were fired into the center of the group — clearly a punitive, not defensive, action.</div> <div>&nbsp;</div> <div>In addition, the IDF spokesman is claiming that Jawaher Abu Rahme was released from the Ramallah hospital and died at home. This is just an effort to complicate the chain of evidence that she was asphyxiated by tear gas. She died at 9 am in the morning at the hospital and many people, including Andrew el Kadi, waited there until her body was brought out to be taken to Bil'in for burial.</div> <div>&nbsp;</div> <div><em>New York Times</em> — all the news that's fit to print!"</div> <div>&nbsp;</div> <div>&nbsp;</div> <div>Ask students: What questions do you think need to be asked that would lead to the verification of the accuracy of each report? How might you determine which of the two reports is the more reliable?&nbsp;</div> <div>&nbsp;</div> <div>&nbsp;</div> <hr> <h4>For further inquiry</h4> <div>For any or all of the contradictory reports above, conduct this class inquiry.</div> <div>&nbsp;</div> <div>List ten or so questions about the contradictory reports on the chalkboard without comment, then analyze each question in terms of the following questions:</div> <div>&nbsp;</div> <div><strong>1.</strong> Is the question clear? If not, how might it be clarified?</div> <div>&nbsp;</div> <div><strong>2. </strong>Might the question be useful in the verification process? If so, how? If not, why not?</div> <div>&nbsp;</div> <div><strong>3. </strong>Do any words in the question require defining? Which one or ones? Why? How?</div> <div>&nbsp;</div> <div><strong>4.</strong> Does the question contain any assumptions? If so, are they reasonable? If not, how might the question be reworded?</div> <div>&nbsp;</div> <div><strong>5.</strong> What kinds of information would satisfy the question? Facts? From what sources? Whose? Why? Judgments? Whose? Why?</div> <div>&nbsp;</div> <div>When analyses are completed, the class might decide on what it regards as the three best questions and why, then discuss who will answer each and how.</div> <div>&nbsp;</div> <div>Another approach might be to assign questions for inquiry to individuals or small groups of students.</div> <div>&nbsp;</div> <div>&nbsp;</div> <div>&nbsp;</div> <div><em>This lesson was written for TeachableMoment.Org, a project of Morningside Center for Teaching Social Responsibility. We welcome your comments. Please email them to: <a href="mailto:lmcclure@morningsidecenter.org">lmcclure@morningsidecenter.org</a></em></div> </div> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap/templates/field/field.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--uid--teachable-moment-lesson.html.twig x field--node--uid.html.twig * field--node--teachable-moment-lesson.html.twig * field--uid.html.twig * field--entity-reference.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'core/modules/node/templates/field--node--uid.html.twig' --> <span> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'username' --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'core/modules/user/templates/username.html.twig' --> <span>fionta</span> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'core/modules/user/templates/username.html.twig' --> </span> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'core/modules/node/templates/field--node--uid.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--created--teachable-moment-lesson.html.twig x field--node--created.html.twig * field--node--teachable-moment-lesson.html.twig * field--created.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'core/modules/node/templates/field--node--created.html.twig' --> <span> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'time' --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'core/modules/system/templates/time.html.twig' --> <time datetime="2011-01-14T13:39:17-05:00" title="Friday, January 14, 2011 - 13:39">January 14, 2011</time> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'core/modules/system/templates/time.html.twig' --> </span> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'core/modules/node/templates/field--node--created.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'links__node' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * links--node.html.twig x links.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap/templates/system/links.html.twig' --> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap/templates/system/links.html.twig' --> Fri, 14 Jan 2011 18:39:17 +0000 fionta 818 at https://www.morningsidecenter.org Presidential Election 2008: Misleading Facts & Vague Opinions https://www.morningsidecenter.org/teachable-moment/lessons/presidential-election-2008-misleading-facts-vague-opinions <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--title--teachable-moment-lesson.html.twig x field--node--title.html.twig * field--node--teachable-moment-lesson.html.twig * field--title.html.twig * field--string.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'core/modules/node/templates/field--node--title.html.twig' --> <span>Presidential Election 2008: Misleading Facts &amp; Vague Opinions</span> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'core/modules/node/templates/field--node--title.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--body--teachable-moment-lesson.html.twig * field--node--body.html.twig * field--node--teachable-moment-lesson.html.twig * field--body.html.twig * field--text-with-summary.html.twig x field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap/templates/field/field.html.twig' --> <div class="field field--name-body field--type-text-with-summary field--label-hidden field--item"><p class="byline"><strong>To the Teacher:</strong></p> <p>At some point in the presidential campaign most Americans choose a candidate to support. Ideally, their choice is based, at least in part, on the candidate's positions on issues, gleaned from speeches, website statements, and answers to questions. It's worthwhile to consider how factual, reasoned, and clear a candidate's opinions are.</p> <p>The student reading below offers specifics from statements from four candidates on major campaign issues. Discussions questions, an exercise on recognizing factual statements and opinions, and suggestions for student inquiry follow.</p> <hr> <h3>Student Reading</h3> <p>"As governor, I cut spending in my first year, our budget actually went down," claimed <b>Mitt Romney</b>, a former governor of Massachusetts, in a debate among Republican presidential candidates just before the New Hampshire primary.</p> <p>This is a statement of fact. It does not include opinion words and can be verified. A nonpartisan group called <a href="http://www.factcheck.org">FactCheck.Org</a> did some checking and found that Romney is correct. But note that he spoke about his first year. He was governor for four years. Over that period, FactCheck found, Romney proposed spending increases of 7.5 percent, so he was factually accurate but selective in his choice of facts and left a misleading impression.</p> <p>Government spending and taxes are important issues for many voters. So it is not surprising that presidential candidates frequently attempt to emphasize that they are very stingy with and very responsible about spending taxpayer money. In that same New Hampshire debate, former Arkansas Governor <b>Mike Huckabee</b>, winner of the Iowa Republican caucus, said, "I know that I cut taxes 94 times, and the taxes we cut helped families."</p> <p>The first part of his statement is factual and verifiable. But FactCheck said that while as governor Huckabee did lower some taxes, he also signed bills resulting in a net increase in taxes of $500 million. Did that also help families? Like Romney, he did not mention this fact. Once again, omission of facts and a misleading impression.</p> <p>Candidates also use facts selectively and at times misleadingly in print and TV ads. Just before the Iowa caucus, <b>Barack Obama</b>'s campaign ran an ad quoting the <em>Washington Post</em> as declaring that Obama's health plan would save families $2,500. The ad asserted that "experts" say his plan is "the best" and "guarantees coverage for all Americans."</p> <p>FactCheck pointed out that the <em>Post</em> was citing an Obama campaign statement about saving families money and did not analyze it independently. The "experts" were the editorial writers at the <em>Iowa City Press-Citizen</em> . The guarantee of "coverage for all Americans" was asserted in the <em>St. Paul Pioneer Press</em> and, like the ad, omitted mention that while the Clinton and Edwards health plans require coverage for all Americans, the Obama plan allows individuals to buy into coverage if they want to. (<a href="http://www.factcheck.org">www.factcheck.org</a>)</p> <p>These examples demonstrate, among other things, that a factual statement can be accurate—if cherry-picked—but may come from a tree of sour cherries.</p> <p>Many Americans want the troops to come home from Iraq. On Iraq policy, <b>Hillary Clinton</b> offered her opinion: "So it's time to bring our troops home and to bring them home as quickly and responsibly as possible and I don't see any reason why they should remain beyond, you know, today. I think George Bush doesn't intend to bring them home, but certainly I have said when I'm president I will. Within 60 days, I'll start that withdrawal." (1/5/08)</p> <p>This response is sprinkled with opinions: "time to bring our troops home"; "bring them home as quickly and responsibly as possible"; and "I don't see any reason why they should remain beyond, you know, today" all contain opinions. Opinion words represent a judgment that may or may not be supported with factual evidence and may also be vague. What does Clinton mean by "quickly"? What would bringing the troops home "responsibly" look like?</p> <p>Questions:</p> <ul> <li>If Clinton becomes president, how soon will she bring the troops home from Iraq? (a) As quickly and responsibly as possible? (b) Today? (c) Beginning within 60 days?<br> &nbsp;</li> <li>If the withdrawal starts within 60 days, how many more days will it take?<br> &nbsp;</li> <li>Is she talking about withdrawing (a) all troops? (b) most troops? (c) some troops?</li> </ul> <p>Clinton has said in the recent past that some (how many?) troops will need to stay to train Iraqi troops, to protect the American embassy, to prevent terrorist attacks, to prevent Iranian infiltration, to help the Kurds in northern Iraq.</p> <p>[Note to the teacher: You might consider assigning students an essay question: If Hillary Clinton becomes president, how soon will how many troops come home and what makes you think so?]</p> <p>Presidential candidates must answer many questions daily. Usually, and even in debates, they don't have enough time to discuss them in detail—assuming they could if they had the time. One result is a swift recitation of unsupported opinions from "talking points"—that is, a collection of brief statements of views on many issues they know they will be asked about. Because some of these issues are complicated, candidates often make fuzzy utterances, like Clinton's on Iraq.</p> <p>In developing your own opinion about a candidate's remark, consider its factuality. Several websites offer help. <a href="http://www.factcheck.org">FactCheck Org</a> describes itself as "a nonpartisan, nonprofit 'consumer advocate' for voters that aims to reduce the level of deception and confusion in U.S. politics. We monitor the factual accuracy of what is said by major U.S. political players in the form of TV ads, debates, speeches, interviews, and news releases." The website is a project of the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania</p> <p>Other, similar efforts include a project of the St. Petersburg Times and the Congressional Quarterly (<a href="http://www.politifact.com">www.politifact.com</a>) and a Washington Post blog (<a href="http://blog.washingtonpost.com/fact-checker/">http://blog.washingtonpost.com/fact-checker/</a>). All three sites are updated regularly.</p> <p>Consider also the candidates' opinions. How clearly does a candidate state his or her opinion? Is the opinion supported with facts-at least on the candidate's websites, if not in brief public remarks? Does the candidate present facts selectively, omitting those that are inconvenient?</p> <p><b>For discussion</b></p> <p><b>1.</b> What questions do students have about the reading? How might they be answered?</p> <p><b>2.</b> How does the reading demonstrate that statements of fact may not necessarily be accurate?</p> <p><b>3.</b> What differences are there between a factual statement and a statement of opinion?</p> <p><b>4.</b> Why do you suppose that a candidate's comment on an issue may be vague?</p> <hr> <h4>Exercise<br> &nbsp;</h4> <p><strong>Mark each of the following statements either F for fact or O for opinion.</strong></p> <p><b>1.</b> There are 12 million undocumented immigrants in the United States.</p> <p><b>2.</b> The U.S. economy is sinking into recession.</p> <p><b>3.</b> The "surge" in Iraq is working.</p> <p><b>4.</b> The "surge" in Iraq is not working.</p> <p><b>5.</b> The U.S. needs a national health care program.</p> <p><b>6.</b> The U.S. currently spends more money on health care than any other nation.</p> <p><b>7.</b> Americans get better health care than people in other countries.</p> <p><b>8.</b> The richest Americans profited most from the Bush tax cuts.</p> <p><b>9.</b> Middle class Americans profited most from the Bush tax cuts.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <h4>For inquiry and writing</h4> <p><b>1.</b> Have students access one of the websites monitoring the factual accuracy of candidate statements, take notes on three items, and write a report on their findings, taking into consideration the accuracy and clarity of factual and opinion statements.</p> <p><b>2.</b> Have students select a presidential campaign issue of particular interest to them, investigate how, in terms of factual and opinion statements, one candidate discusses this issue, and write a report of findings.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p><em>This lesson was written for TeachableMoment.Org, a project of Morningside Center for Teaching Social Responsibility. We</em> <em>welcome your comments. Please email them to: <a href="mailto:lmcclure@morningsidecenter.org">lmcclure@morningsidecenter.org</a></em></p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <h4>&nbsp;</h4> <p>&nbsp;</p> </div> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap/templates/field/field.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--uid--teachable-moment-lesson.html.twig x field--node--uid.html.twig * field--node--teachable-moment-lesson.html.twig * field--uid.html.twig * field--entity-reference.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'core/modules/node/templates/field--node--uid.html.twig' --> <span> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'username' --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'core/modules/user/templates/username.html.twig' --> <span>fionta</span> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'core/modules/user/templates/username.html.twig' --> </span> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'core/modules/node/templates/field--node--uid.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--created--teachable-moment-lesson.html.twig x field--node--created.html.twig * field--node--teachable-moment-lesson.html.twig * field--created.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'core/modules/node/templates/field--node--created.html.twig' --> <span> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'time' --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'core/modules/system/templates/time.html.twig' --> <time datetime="2008-01-23T13:39:05-05:00" title="Wednesday, January 23, 2008 - 13:39">January 23, 2008</time> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'core/modules/system/templates/time.html.twig' --> </span> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'core/modules/node/templates/field--node--created.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'links__node' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * links--node.html.twig x links.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap/templates/system/links.html.twig' --> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap/templates/system/links.html.twig' --> Wed, 23 Jan 2008 18:39:05 +0000 fionta 963 at https://www.morningsidecenter.org Just the Facts https://www.morningsidecenter.org/teachable-moment/lessons/just-facts <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--title--teachable-moment-lesson.html.twig x field--node--title.html.twig * field--node--teachable-moment-lesson.html.twig * field--title.html.twig * field--string.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'core/modules/node/templates/field--node--title.html.twig' --> <span>Just the Facts</span> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'core/modules/node/templates/field--node--title.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--body--teachable-moment-lesson.html.twig * field--node--body.html.twig * field--node--teachable-moment-lesson.html.twig * field--body.html.twig * field--text-with-summary.html.twig x field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap/templates/field/field.html.twig' --> <div class="field field--name-body field--type-text-with-summary field--label-hidden field--item"><p class="byline"><b>To the Teacher:</b><br> The Florida legislature recently approved an education law that declares, "American history shall be viewed as factual, not as constructed." In short, the law implies that the facts, without interpretation, should speak for themselves. But is this really possible? Can even a specific set of events—the U.S.-Mexico War of 1846-1848, for example—ever be viewed as purely factual, not interpreted? How about a current news report?</p> <p style="text-align: left">The first reading below examines the recent Florida law; the second uses the U.S.-Mexico War as a case study of whether or not history can be viewed as "factual, not as constructed." Two accounts of the war are followed by a short quiz for students, a suggestion for inquiry, writing and discussion and applications to election campaign news reporting.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <hr> <h3 style="text-align: left; "><span style="font-weight: bold; ">Student Reading 1</span></h3> <h2>History: Can it be strictly factual?</h2> <p>"Just the facts, ma'am, just the facts."<br> <em>— Detective Joe Friday of the 1950s TV series Dragnet as he questions a woman with information about a crime</em></p> <p>The Florida legislature recently approved an education law that declares, "American history shall be viewed as factual, not as constructed." By "not as constructed" the legislature means "not as interpreted." In short, the facts, without interpretation, should speak for themselves.</p> <p>But is this possible? Everyone can agree on the fact that the Civil War began on April 12, 1861, when Confederate forces fired on Fort Sumter, South Carolina. But after nearly 150 years, do historians agree on why the Civil War occurred?</p> <p>In "History Under Construction in Florida," a critical op-ed article in the <em>New York Times,</em> 7/2/06, Cornell professor Mary Beth Norton wrote that the Florida law opposed "constructed interpretations" but "is itself an obvious construction." For example,the Florida legislature defines American history as including "the period of discovery, early colonies, the War for Independence, the Civil War, the expansion of the United States to its present boundaries, the world wars, and the civil rights movement to the present." This list, Norton argues, omits "any discussion of the religious development of the country or the transformation from an agricultural to an industrial economy."</p> <p>"The history of the United States," the Florida law declares, "shall be defined as the creation of a new nation based largely on the universal principles stated in the Declaration of Independence" and lists them as: "national sovereignty, natural law, self-evident truth, equality of all persons, limited government, popular sovereignty and inalienable rights of life, liberty and property."</p> <p>Norton wrote, "An earlier version of the law had emphasized study of the Constitution and the Declaration equally." But "the Constitution supported the continuation of slavery, thereby undermining the notion that the nation from its earliest days had adhered to Florida's list of universal principles, prominently including 'equality of all persons.' In short, a class learning about the drafting of the Constitution would confront the unpleasant reality of founding fathers who either owned slaves themselves or protected the right of others to own them... Under the guise of returning to a factual teaching of history in the state's schools, Florida's legislators have mandated an ahistorical construction that paradoxically distorts the very facts they purport to revere."</p> <p>According to Norton, the Florida law "highlights a growing tendency in the United States to substitute easily grasped absolutes for messy and ambiguous realities. (Another example of the same type of thinking is the quest of certain judges to capture the 'original intent' of constitutional clauses.) A stress on facts, not constructions, superficially appears to be ideologically neutral. Yet the choice of which facts to stress, and which to omit, is crucial. In the end, history can never be 'factual...not constructed... '"<br> &nbsp;</p> <p style="font-weight: bold">For discussion</p> <p><b>1.</b> What questions do students have about this reading? How might they be<br> answered?</p> <p><b>2.</b> How do you answer the question at the end of the second paragraph? Why?</p> <p><b>3.</b> Can you think of any major aspect of American history not included in the Florida legislature's—or those cited by Norton? What?</p> <p><b>4.</b> What is Norton's criticism of Florida's abandonment of an earlier version of its law that emphasized equal study of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution? Do you agree this criticism? Why or why not? Another stated principle in the Florida list is "inalienable rights of life, liberty and property." Check the wording of the Declaration, if necessary, for the accuracy of this statement of principle.</p> <p><b>5.</b> Norton writes, "The Florida law highlights growing tendency in the United States to substitute absolutes for messy and ambiguous realities." What do you understand her to mean? Do you agree? Why or why not? As an example, she offers "the quest of certain judges to capture the 'original intent' of constitutional clauses.'" To what is she referring? Do you agree? If so, why? Can you offer any other examples? If not, why not?</p> <p><b>6.</b> Do you agree with Norton's conclusion that "history can never be 'factual...not constructed'"? Why or why not?</p> <p><b>7.</b> In another article on the Florida law, Robert Jensen, a journalism professor at the University of Texas, writes that it "has its roots in fear." (<a href="http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0717-22.htm">www.commondreams.org/views06/0717-22.htm</a>), 7/19/06: What do you understand him to mean? Do you agree? Why or why not?</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <hr> <h3><b>Student Reading 2</b></h3> <h2>Case Study: The U.S.-Mexico War</h2> <p>Can American history be viewed as "factual, not as constructed"? Consider this question as you read the following two accounts of the 1846-1848 war between the U.S. and Mexico.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold">Account #1: "The War with Mexico"</p> <p>"The people of Texas declared that their territory extended as far south and west as the Rio Grande. The region which they had actually settled, however, was not so large. As soon as Texas entered the Union the United States sent an army under General Zachary Taylor to take up a position on the north bank of the Rio Grande with orders to hold the country for the United States.</p> <p>"Meanwhile President Polk developed a plan that he thought would solve the whole matter to the satisfaction of both Mexico and the United States. Polk knew that the vast region which now includes California, Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada, Utah, and part of Colorado contained very few Mexicans, although it was part of Mexican soil... Polk offered to buy that broad and almost empty country for a good price... The government of Mexico, though poor, was too proud to sell. The Mexicans refused even to listen to Polk's plan. Meanwhile some Mexican soldiers crossed to the north side of the Rio Grande, and a fight occurred between them and some of Taylor's troops. This fight brought on the Mexican War."</p> <p>—Casner and Gabriel, <em>Exploring American History</em></p> <p><b>Account #2: "The American Invasion"</b></p> <p>"The North Americans succeeded in getting Florida, Louisiana, and Oregon with but little effort. However, the rich, fertile and extensive province of Texas excited their greediness. The government...first proposed...to purchase that territory. These offers having been rejected, the American government resorted to a more perfidious policy. It defended the insurrection of the settlers [of Texas] against the Mexican government... Texas, having made itself free, the North American government recognized its independence in a treaty dated April 12, 1844, whereby the United States annexed it in such an outrageous manner that our minister in Washington asked for his passports and left the United States.</p> <p>"The Congress of the United States approved this scandalous robbery of land, and the government, not yet satisfied, gave this territory further extension by asserting that the Rio Bravo (called Rio Grande by Americans) was its boundary. By means of this brutal stratagem, supported by might, they wished to make people believe that Mexico was the assaulter while she was being mutilated contrary to all rights. For this reason war was declared about the middle of the year 1846... Mexico lost in this war a third of her territory... This rich acquisition of the United States is not going to erase the blot of iniquity which has been written into the pages of her history by this invasion."<br> — Prieto, Lessons in National History</p> <p>Source: Shoen and Hunt, <em>Sidelights and Source Studies of American History,</em> Book One</p> <p style="font-weight: bold">A short quiz</p> <p><em>Ask students to complete the quiz below, then discuss their responses.</em></p> <p><b>1.</b> How do you explain the differences in the two titles?</p> <p><b>2.</b> Before each item write an A if the two accounts agree on the facts; write a D if the accounts disagree; write an N if there is not enough information to decide.</p> <p>____ a. The Rio Grande was the border between the U.S. and Mexico.</p> <p>____ b. The U.S. offered to buy land from Mexico.</p> <p>____ c. American troops fought Mexicans soldiers who had crossed onto U.S. soil.</p> <p><b>3.</b> The accounts include opinion or judgmental words. List three such words from<br> each.</p> <p>Discuss student responses to the quiz.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <hr> <h4><b>For inquiry, writing, group work and discussion</b></h4> <p><b>1. Create a factual account of the U.S.-Mexico War</b></p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>The Florida law calls for a purely factual account of such developments as "the expansion of the United States to its present boundaries." What would be a "factual" and not a "constructed" or interpretive account of how the U.S. obtained territory from Mexico?</p> <p>Have students consult at least two other history books dealing with the war and then write a précis that provides a "factual" and not a "constructed" account of how the territory of the U.S. expanded as a result of the war with Mexico. Before students begin, establish with students a definition of "a factual account." An example: A factual account is one that is verifiable and excludes judgmental words.</p> <p>When students have completed this assignment, divide them into small groups. Ask each student to read his or her précis to the group. Afterwards, group members may ask clarifying questions and discuss them briefly. When all papers have been read, the group is to select for reading to the entire class the précis it regards as best.</p> <p>When all papers have been read to the class, students might vote on what they view as the best one. Does this précis meet the Florida legislature's standard for a "factual" and not a "constructed" account? Why or why not?</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p style="font-weight: bold">2. Analyze new accounts for "fact" versus "construction."</p> <p>Like historical accounts, news reports of the "same" event may agree on some basic facts, but often differ substantially. What is included, what is stressed, what is omitted, where the story is placed, judgmental statements and inferences are inevitably different, at least to some extent. "Construction" is inevitable.</p> <p>Assign students to collect, read, and analyze two accounts of the same election event—for example, a candidate's discussion of a campaign issue—in newspapers and/or on the internet. (TV election news reports might be included, but students will need to take detailed notes and consider additional elements such as the nature and impact of film imagery.)</p> <p>In their written analysis comparing the reports, students should address significant differences in wording, inclusions and exclusions, objectivity, opinion words, story placement, and length.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p style="font-style: italic">This lesson was written for TeachableMoment.Org, a project of Morningside Center for Teaching Social Responsibility. We welcome your comments. Please email them to: <a href="mailto:lmcclure@morningsidecenter.org">lmcclure@morningsidecenter.org</a></p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <h4>&nbsp;</h4> <p>&nbsp;</p> </div> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap/templates/field/field.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--uid--teachable-moment-lesson.html.twig x field--node--uid.html.twig * field--node--teachable-moment-lesson.html.twig * field--uid.html.twig * field--entity-reference.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'core/modules/node/templates/field--node--uid.html.twig' --> <span> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'username' --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'core/modules/user/templates/username.html.twig' --> <span>fionta</span> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'core/modules/user/templates/username.html.twig' --> </span> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'core/modules/node/templates/field--node--uid.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--created--teachable-moment-lesson.html.twig x field--node--created.html.twig * field--node--teachable-moment-lesson.html.twig * field--created.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'core/modules/node/templates/field--node--created.html.twig' --> <span> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'time' --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'core/modules/system/templates/time.html.twig' --> <time datetime="2006-08-30T14:39:07-04:00" title="Wednesday, August 30, 2006 - 14:39">August 30, 2006</time> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'core/modules/system/templates/time.html.twig' --> </span> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'core/modules/node/templates/field--node--created.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'links__node' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * links--node.html.twig x links.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap/templates/system/links.html.twig' --> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap/templates/system/links.html.twig' --> Wed, 30 Aug 2006 18:39:07 +0000 fionta 1013 at https://www.morningsidecenter.org Thinking Critically about Internet Sources https://www.morningsidecenter.org/teachable-moment/lessons/thinking-critically-about-internet-sources <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--title--teachable-moment-lesson.html.twig x field--node--title.html.twig * field--node--teachable-moment-lesson.html.twig * field--title.html.twig * field--string.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'core/modules/node/templates/field--node--title.html.twig' --> <span>Thinking Critically about Internet Sources</span> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'core/modules/node/templates/field--node--title.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--body--teachable-moment-lesson.html.twig * field--node--body.html.twig * field--node--teachable-moment-lesson.html.twig * field--body.html.twig * field--text-with-summary.html.twig x field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap/templates/field/field.html.twig' --> <div class="field field--name-body field--type-text-with-summary field--label-hidden field--item"><p class="byline"><b>To the Teacher:</b><br> The internet has become the reference source of choice on just about everything. It is invaluable, but just as students need to learn how to examine critically information presented conventionally in newspapers, books and magazines so they need to apply those skills to the cyberspace world.</p> <p>The reading below offers a student introduction to some of the skills needed to use the internet critically. Also available on this website are the following sets of materials bearing on the teaching of critical thinking: "<a href="https://www.morningsidecenter.org/teachable-moment/lessons/teaching-critical-thinking-believing-game-doubting-gamehttps://www.morningsidecenter.org/teachable-moment/lessons/teaching-critical-thinking-believing-game-doubting-game">Teaching Critical Thinking</a>," "<a href="/teachable-moment/lessons/plagiarism-perplex">The Plagiarism Perplex</a>," "<a href="/teachable-moment/lessons/how-stop-cheaters">How to Stop Cheaters,</a>" "<a href="/teachable-moment/lessons/essential-skill-crap-detecting">The Essential Skill of Crap Detecting,</a>" and "<a href="https://www.morningsidecenter.org/teachable-moment/lessons/thinking-questioning">Thinking Is Questioning</a>."</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <hr> <h3><span style="font-weight: bold; ">Student Reading:</span></h3> <h2>Questioning Websites</h2> <p>Your teacher assigns a paper on undocumented immigrants, a major issue likely to be hotly debated during the 2006 Congressional election campaign. You have narrowed the subject to the following questions: Should the U.S. government allow all undocumented immigrants in the country to enter a path toward citizenship? Why or why not?</p> <p>Soon you are in front of a computer to begin an internet search. You begin by going, perhaps, to Google. Keep in mind: "The efficiency of today's search engines arises from their ability to analyze links among websites," and Google leads "in ranking sites by how often they are linked to other highly ranked sites... Instead of looking at which papers are cited most often in the most influential journals, it measures how often web pages are linked to highly ranked sites—ranked by links to themselves." (Edward Tanner, "Searching for Dummies," <em>New York Times,</em> 3/26/06)</p> <p>You type in "undocumented immigrants" and up comes a long list of websites. You try one at random, the Center for Immigration Studies (<a href="http://www.cis.org">www.cis.org</a>), and see that it provides a lot of information. But before you begin, you need to ask some questions:</p> <p><b>1.</b> What, if anything, does the website say about its purpose?<br> <b>2.</b> Does the website include information and commentary that has to do with your questions?<br> <b>3.</b> Who writes the material on the website?</p> <p><b>4.</b> Are there sources cited for the information provided?<br> <b>5.</b> What are their qualifications?<br> <b>6.</b> What is their point of view on the subject? Do they take into account other points of view?<br> <b>7.</b> If not, does this omission and possible bias mean that the website is useless for your purposes?</p> <p>Websites usually include a statement about their purpose,mission, or vision. By clicking on "About CIS," you will learn that this organization has a "pro-immigrant, low immigration vision which seeks fewer immigrants but a warmer welcome for those admitted." What does this tell you about how CIS would view making it possible for some 12 million undocumented immigrants to become citizens?</p> <p>Among the CIS writers is its director Steven Camarota. Googling his name will provide his educational background, publications, and reports of testimony before Congressional committees. From a sampling of them you can get a sense of his point of view, possible biases and the usability of what he has to say.</p> <p>At <a href="http://www.immigrationforum.org">www.immigrationforum.org</a> you will find the National Immigration Forum. Click on "Inside the Forum" and note a point of view different from that of CIS. The NIF says that it wants to "legalize the status of hardworking immigrants caught in legal limbo." Click on "Board of Directors" and you will have a list of Forum activists, some of whom you can check as you did Camarota.</p> <p>Both websites quickly reveal a point of view and possible bias on the issue of undocumented immigrants that you need to keep in mind as you read and take notes on their materials. Questions for you to consider include:</p> <p><b>1.</b> What facts and reasons does the website provide to support its position?</p> <p><b>2.</b> Does the website report facts accurately?</p> <p><b>3.</b> How clearly and well does the website support the reasons for its point of view? To what extent does it include verifiable information? opinions supported with evidence? unsupported generalizations? anecdotes rather than evidence? words with strong, even inflammatory, connotations?</p> <p><b>4.</b> Compare two or more websites: Do they agree on what the important facts are? If not why not? Do they agree on how these facts are to be interpreted? If not, why not? Do they ignore facts and arguments that support another position? If so, what inference might you draw?</p> <p><b>5.</b> How fair do you judge each website to be in its presentation? Take into consideration that you yourself may well have a point of view and a bias in making such judgments.</p> <p>Your internet search will probably turn up Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia containing a great deal of information. But you need to read carefully what Wikipedia says about itself: "...anyone with access to an Internet-connected computer can edit, correct, or improve information throughout the encyclopedia, simply by clicking the edit this page link (with a few exceptions... )"</p> <p>Wikipedia then describes its "strengths and weaknesses" (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:About">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:About</a>). This information is important as you consider the reliability of what Wikipedia has to say about undocumented immigrants. "Wikipedia's reputation and internal editorial process would benefit by having a single authority vouch for the quality of a given article," wrote Randall Stross in the <em>New York Times,</em> ("Anonymous Source Is Not the Same as Open Source, 3/12/06). For while Wikipedia has many virtues, he says, "anonymity blocks credibility."</p> <p style="font-weight: bold">&nbsp;</p> <hr> <h4 style="font-weight: bold; ">For discussion</h4> <p><b>1.</b> What questions do students have about the reading? How might they be answered?</p> <p><b>2.</b> Check the websites of the following organizations and take notes about them. Come to class prepared to comment on the point of view represented on each website and to explain how you came to your conclusion.</p> <p>Migration Policy Institute (<a href="http://www.migrationpolicy.org">www.migrationpolicy.org</a>)<br> American Patrol (<a href="http://www.americanpatrol.com">www.americanpatrol.com</a>)<br> American Friends Service Committee (<a href="http://www.afsc.org">www.afsc.org</a>)</p> <p><b>3.</b> Go to <a href="http://www.wikipedia.org">www.wikipedia.org</a> and find what Wikipedia has to say about undocumented<br> immigrants in the US Come to class with notes and prepared to respond to the following questions:</p> <ul> <li>Does Wikipedia report on undocumented immigrants factually and objectively? What makes you think so?</li> <li>Does the Wikipedia report include any opinion words? If so, what are they?</li> <li>What evidence does Wikipedia cite to support them?</li> <li>How do you judge the strengths and weaknesses of the Wikipedia report? What evidence from the report supports your view?</li> </ul> <h4 style="font-weight: bold; ">&nbsp;</h4> <p style="font-style: italic">This lesson was written for TeachableMoment.Org, a project of Morningside Center for Teaching Social Responsibility. We welcome your comments. Please email them to: <a href="mailto:lmcclure@morningsidecenter.org">lmcclure@morningsidecenter.org</a></p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <h4>&nbsp;</h4> <p>&nbsp;</p> </div> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap/templates/field/field.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--uid--teachable-moment-lesson.html.twig x field--node--uid.html.twig * field--node--teachable-moment-lesson.html.twig * field--uid.html.twig * field--entity-reference.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'core/modules/node/templates/field--node--uid.html.twig' --> <span> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'username' --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'core/modules/user/templates/username.html.twig' --> <span>fionta</span> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'core/modules/user/templates/username.html.twig' --> </span> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'core/modules/node/templates/field--node--uid.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--created--teachable-moment-lesson.html.twig x field--node--created.html.twig * field--node--teachable-moment-lesson.html.twig * field--created.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'core/modules/node/templates/field--node--created.html.twig' --> <span> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'time' --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'core/modules/system/templates/time.html.twig' --> <time datetime="2006-08-28T14:39:05-04:00" title="Monday, August 28, 2006 - 14:39">August 28, 2006</time> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'core/modules/system/templates/time.html.twig' --> </span> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'core/modules/node/templates/field--node--created.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'links__node' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * links--node.html.twig x links.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap/templates/system/links.html.twig' --> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap/templates/system/links.html.twig' --> Mon, 28 Aug 2006 18:39:05 +0000 fionta 1014 at https://www.morningsidecenter.org