
Did Media Literacy Backfire? - grzm
https://points.datasociety.net/did-media-literacy-backfire-7418c084d88d#.oyyr1srvy
======
tomohawk
This is what Ben Rhodes, chief propagandist selling Obama's Iran deal had to
say:

“All these newspapers used to have foreign bureaus. Now they don’t. They call
us to explain to them what’s happening in Moscow and Cairo. . . The average
reporter we talk to is 27 years old, and their only reporting experience
consists of being around political campaigns. That’s a sea change. They
literally know nothing.”

~~~
ra1n85
That explains a lot. Curious what happened - did the business model break to
the extent that seasoned journalists that can manage foreign assignments are
no longer on payroll or sought after? Is this a consequence of cost-cutting at
news outlets?

~~~
AmVess
Yes on both counts. Media consolidation led to lots of layoffs and belt
tightening, and the internet just made things worse.

Journalism in this country has become a bit of a joke, and that's all on the
lack of oversight by lawmakers. These giant media conglomerates should never
have been allowed to form in the first place for the very reasons we are
discussing now; poor journalism and nearly worthless commodity reporting.

------
milesf
Bit of scaremongering in that piece:

    
    
        Think about how this might play out in communities where
        the “liberal media” is viewed with disdain as an
        untrustworthy source of information… or in those where
        science is seen as contradicting the knowledge of religious
        people.
    

I'm a 'religious person', and my children attend a Christian High School.
Being Canadian we tend to look upon all American media with skepticism because
it is so much more sensational than our media outlets. We are always talking
about how to discern truth from error. For example, I recently picked up this
book on logical reasoning:
[https://www.amazon.com/dp/1502713764](https://www.amazon.com/dp/1502713764)

Yes, there are other religious people out there who are terrified of
everything, but don't lump all of us together. Princeton, Harvard, Yale,
Oxford... these are all universities that were founded as theological
seminaries (and still have those departments). Sound reasoning is not only the
backbone of Science and Technology, but also Christian Theology.

~~~
JacobJans
> Yes, there are other religious people out there who are terrified of
> everything, but don't lump all of us together.

The article didn't lump all Christian together. Ironically, the quote you
pulled proves that point. The article was specifically talking about
"communities ... where science is seen as contradicting the knowledge of
people." Such communities do exist, in the U.S., and they have real political
influence.

------
saycheese
"For the past three years, my assignment has been to try to help this
newspaper live up to its own high journalistic standards as it covered a
historic presidential election, two wars, the Great Recession, violence in the
Middle East and more. I have deplored the overuse of anonymous sources, warned
against the creep of opinion into news analysis and worried about the
preservation of Times quality on the Internet. But, in truth, I have sometimes
felt less like a keeper of the flame and more like an internal affairs cop,"
said Clark Hoyt, who was departing as the public editor of The New York Times
in 2010; Hoyt had been serving as the NYT internal representative for the
readers.

Source:
[http://nytimes.com/2010/06/13/opinion/13pubed.html](http://nytimes.com/2010/06/13/opinion/13pubed.html)

------
michaelchisari
In many ways, this fake news* epidemic feels like the early days of
spam/phishing emails. The news that has problems are like marketing emails:
There's a valid question about the level of legitimacy we should afford them,
but they're not the same as "sEXy MILfS SeLL1ng V1AGrA".

I disagree with the article that media literacy was the problem. Quite the
opposite, the lack of media literacy necessary to manage a flood of new
information in the internet age is how we got here.

And like spam/phishing emails, which managed to rope in even otherwise
intelligent, logical people before they knew what it was, we're going to have
a painful adjustment period. And some people will never quite get the memo.

* _When I say fake news, I 'm not talking about stuff you disagree with, or poorly reported news or even sensationalist headlines. That's a different conversation. I'm talking about stuff that is made up from whole cloth. Stories like Trump personally rescuing 200 stranded marines with his private plane in Desert Storm. There is not an ounce of truth to that, and is not based on any verifiable facts. Yet it was one of the top viral stories of 2016._

~~~
booleandilemma
Can someone provide some links to fake news articles? I feel like the term
"fake news" became popular after the election yet I haven't actually seen any
fake news. Maybe it's because I don't use Facebook?

~~~
vowelless
> I feel like the term "fake news" became popular after the election

You're not wrong. It seemed like suddenly this phrase was everywhere.

[https://www.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%203-m&q=fak...](https://www.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%203-m&q=fake%20news)

~~~
JacobJans
The only question is why wasn't it everywhere before the election?

~~~
tomp
Because the mainstream media thought that Trump won't win, and articles
attacking him were thought to be "enough". After he won, they needed a new
propaganda strategy.

~~~
DonaldFisk
It was a bit complacent of them, and complaining now isn't going to affect the
result. The existence of Macedonian web sites with completely made-up news
stories was known about well before the US presidential election, e.g.
[https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/aug/24/facebook-...](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/aug/24/facebook-
clickbait-political-news-sites-us-election-trump)

This should have been a big story before the election, but it seems to have
been barely reported on.

------
olivermarks
Free speech is a central tenet of western democracies, and democratic
republics like the USA.

Suppressing 'Fake News' argues against this differentiator from authoritarian
control of information by non democratic government.

Just as music radio lost its credibility and audience when Clearchannel dumbed
it down to automated playlists in the intersts of maximizing corporate
profits, 'main stream news' (MSN) has lost most of its credibility this
decade. There is no 'news', there is only information to be parsed and
compared.

The media is owned by a few large global conglomerates and there are no
investigative reporters under their employ.

~~~
specialist
_" Suppressing 'Fake News' argues against this..."_

Anyone fluffed up about 'fake news' is ignorant of the history of journalism.
It's always been yellow journalism, propaganda, pamphleteering, grinding of
axes. William Randolph Hearst?

We had brief respite from 1945 to maybe 1990. And sadly we thought the
pretense of objectivity and efforts at fact checking was the norm.

 _" The media is owned by a few large global conglomerates and there are no
investigative reporters under their employ."_

There are four styles. Ad-based, subscription/endowment supported (Economist,
CSM), reader/viewer supported (eg public radio), and whacko bloggers [0].

It's all about the incentives. "MSM" is corporate media infotainment, nothing
more.

A comment down-thread suggests that any media that is ad-supported is now
suspect. I agree.

[0] Like me. I was an activist who blogged. FOIAs, public hearings, fact
checking.

~~~
olivermarks
Your 4th media style 'whacko bloggers' disrespects the many people writing
very coherent, logical and well thought out commentaries and ideas.

Yes there are plenty of crazy people - always has been - but these days the
MSM reproduces tweets and steals from bloggers. I would argue free speech on
the internet is very important to counter all the yellow journalism, paid
promo pieces and straight up propoganda...

~~~
specialist
You have to be more than a little crazy to keep at it as long as I did.
Fighting city hall doesn't pay very well. Burnout is intense. Opportunity
costs. Family. Etc.

Some are able to make the jump to a sustainable living. Greg Palast, Mark
Crispin Miller, Glenn Greenwald, Amy Goodman, Digby? Struggling to think of
examples. Having patronage, doing the book tour circuit, selling bling,
commissions.

Actually, I don't have any ready example of other wackos like me (working on
local issues) that have been able to keep it (independently) up long term.

Edit #1: Aha, I just thought of one. Alice Woldt and the Washington Public
Campaigns crew have been plugging away for at least a decade.

Edit #2: Oops. How could I forget my bestie Garret Cobarr's privacy work. His
magnum opus book about privacy and identity should be out this spring. Gods
willing, he'll be able to pay rent doing privacy work. And, for the record,
Garret's at least as crazy as me.
[https://twitter.com/garrettcobarr](https://twitter.com/garrettcobarr)

Activist bloggers do find gigs as reporters and policy wonks.

I've seen some parlay their activism into a non-profit org 501(c)(3) that they
then run. Some friends are doing that right now with regards to education
funding. Though I doubt their org will become their full time jobs. Alas, I
wasn't able to work the non-profit angle.

------
more_original
This all reminds me of the situation in Eastern Germany just before the German
unification. In the elections campaigns in Eastern Germany just after the fall
of the Iron Curtain, politicians were lobbying for reunification with rather
overblown promises for the future of Eastern Germany after the reunification.
It should have been clear that these promises weren't realistic, and this was
in fact pointed out at the time. But people dismissed these warnings, as they
came from the (now free) Eastern German media. It seems that many people now
thought that _everything_ the old media said was a lie and dismissed as
_false_ everything they were saying. This feels quite similar to the attitudes
about the "lying press" that are currently circulating.

~~~
Noseshine

      But people dismissed these warnings, as they came
      from the (now free) Eastern German media
    

As an East German who participated in the demonstrations (17 at the time),
your version is completely and utterly wrong in the main part. Yes, the
reuniuon was painted in a way too nice light. No, we East Germans did NOT vote
for it because we were mislead - the vast majority of East Germans would have
voted for it in any case! There was no alternative.

The vision of being stuck with a useless currency without any value, in the
middle of crumbling infrastructure (and whatever problems US infrastructure
may have - and I lived in the US for a decade - it's not even close to East
Germany, and yes, we had plenty of lead pipes too, in my own house for
example), incapable of traveling anywhere (no money), a dead-end society. Our
environment was a huge disaster!!

Without reunification everybody who could would have moved West. You may argue
that has happened anyway, but I would say not _nearly_ as much as what would
have happened if the GDR had remained.

As far as "cost" \- this is a somewhat silly argument on the level of an
economy. For me, yes, I have to look at my costs, same as for a business. But
in an economy somebody's cost is somebody else's income! The US does a lot of
"socialism" and planned economy via military spending. Germany did the
reunification. I think the German money was well-spend in comparison. Okay
sorry, that wasn't supposed to be an argument about US military spending, I
have no idea about its overall effects, but I know about the effects of the
German reunification.

The environmental cleanup alone was HUGE, you have no idea (it seems to me). I
lived next to a very large chemical fiber factory (where I learned too), such
filth, huge mountains(!) of ash nearby form the (horribly dirty) power plant,
the river that ran by without much life and you didn't want to touch the
water. Today: The water is near perfect, the ash-mountains gone (there is a
big new modern factory), the power plant modernized, everything is clean. Yes
there are a lot less people in the area, but overall I consider it a _huge_
plus.

The depopulation problem is not actually alone that people moved out of East
Germany: Quite a few larger cities there are gaining. A big part of it is
people moving to cities. Same reason why some areas in the US (Bay Area, where
I lived) are gaining, or Munich or Berlin in Germany, or Moscow and St.
Petersburg in Russia, while villages suffer. East Germany had been the less
populated and more rural part of Germany before too!

So no, overall what they promised about the reunification was _not_ all that
oversold. Some individuals may disagree, the majority though most definitely
does _not_ regret voting the way they did.

 _However_ , your misrepresentation of what happened _does_ remind me of what
is going on now. Trump is the work of Russian hackers! People are mislead! As
someone who feels actually pretty left (at least socially very much so, and
when it comes to risks and rewards distribution in society), I am _disgusted_
by what I have to read from "my" camp. Zero reflection, zero analysis. Trump
brought out the worst, that is true! I see a lot of it in many of those
arguing against him though.

~~~
more_original
I also was at the demonstrations and I also think that there was no realistic
alternative to a reunification.

But at the time people were discussing different ways of performing the
reunification. The SPD under Lafontaine proposed a slower approach rather than
an immediate reunification. He made the point that because of the crumbling
infrastructure and desolate state of the economy, a unification wouldn't be
easy, resulting in unemployment etc.

These warnings turned out to be true, and people should have known. But people
didn't listen and voted for CDU in great numbers, because they promised it
all. And I think one reason for this is that the warnings also came from the
old media, so many people thought "They've been lying for so long, this must
be false."

~~~
Noseshine

      proposed a slower approach rather than an
      immediate reunification
    

And that was out of the question. I too would have left the GDR immediately if
that would have happened, and pretty much everybody I know too.

It's not true, that's all. We voted for reunification because we _wanted it_ ,
that's all. A clean fast cut was the right way to go instead of continuing to
muddle through. It was impossible to do a "smoother" transition - not unless
the BRD would have disallowed people to move there and would have forced us to
remain!

~~~
more_original
> And that was out of the question. I too would have left the GDR immediately
> if that would have happened, and pretty much everybody I know too.

So what? Depopulation happened anyway due to unemployment. I'm not convinced
that substantially more people would have left if reunification had been
planned for 1995, for example.

~~~
Noseshine
There would have been no difference in outcome if it had been "planned" for
1995 - so no reason not to do it right away. Do you really believe anything
would have been better for the East German industry? It was nothing but junk,
yes even what was supposed to be the best factories.

Except for a minority in East Germany there was no reason for a delay. The
difficult and hard adaptation was inevitable! The GDR was a complete wreck.

------
akjainaj
The mass media had all the power, for some time, they controlled all the
information. They used that power to publish biased articles, half truths,
etc.

People got tired of that, and therefore, started distrusting the mass media.
And now the mass media says "this hurricane of fake news, this has to be
stopped!"

The mass media forgets: this is all your fault. This monster, you created it.
In this past election, most newspapers decided to side with Clinton. Why would
you do that? Now all Trump supporters and even some Clinton supporters hate
you and won't trust you again for a long time.

You had the power and the responsibility to tell the truth. You decided to
publish half truths because you had certain interests. Money, power. People
got tired and they went for the ONLY alternative that there is: the tabloids,
the liars.

It's ALL your fault. You are shameless scoundrels, writing a title that says
that "media literacy backfired". No, your strategy of manipulating the public
backfired. Now deal with it.

~~~
tps5
I don't think there's such a thing as "truth" in the idealistic way you mean
it.

When you seek to describe something as complicated as the economy of a
gigantic country or some event involving millions of people, you necessarily
create abstractions that capture only a tiny fraction of "truth." And yes,
which fraction you end up capturing probably depends on your own personal
biases.

You postulate conspiracy: that "[the media] decided to publish half truths
because you had certain interests." I think these "half truths" (AKA
inaccuracies) are a necessary result of any attempt to describe complex
things.

In my opinion, the rational way to live in a world like this is to read widely
and take everything with a grain of salt. Or unplug completely. But don't
expect or accept any single source of truth.

~~~
vowelless
> You postulate conspiracy

Your use of the word "conspiracy" there has a larger consequence than you
think / intended.

------
whatshisface
The author argues that when 'the plebs' (look, we know what you're getting at)
come up with independent beliefs, serious mistakes can happen. There are some
arguments about expertise, but the part that will stick out to most readers is
the argument against "individuality."

I'd like to point out that millions of _perfectly aligned and polarized_ poor
critical thinkers is a far more terrifying prospect.

~~~
cloakandswagger
A smattering of "fake news" stories that need to be debunked is a really small
price to pay if it means we gain a larger portion of the population that
actually attempts to think for themselves, question sources and stories
critically, etc.

I think back to the MSM "glory days" of the early 2000s. Independent sources
were nearly nonexistent, and it felt like the entire country happily accepted
whatever narrative they were given (see: WMD in Iraq, invasion)

------
Jizzle
I think when clicks equal money, there's a lot less room for ethics in
journalism.

See: [https://www.spj.org/ethicscode.asp](https://www.spj.org/ethicscode.asp)

Still, as the article points out, efforts to sanitize reporting will fail. But
I think that's OK. I'd rather see a populace interested and misinformed, than
one uninterested and uninformed.

~~~
bostik
> _I 'd rather see a populace interested and misinformed_

Really? Isn't that the _worst_ possible combination for making it easier to
spread propaganda?

Quoting Confucious - To study and not think is a waste. To think and not study
is dangerous.

------
carsongross
As a counterpoint to this article, I recommend Nassim Nicholas Taleb's
"Intellectual, Yet Idiot" piece:

[https://medium.com/incerto/the-intellectual-yet-
idiot-13211e...](https://medium.com/incerto/the-intellectual-yet-
idiot-13211e2d0577#.96um3vb31)

Elites, heal thyself.

~~~
pdpi
That's some top notch ranting. the ad hominem-to-factual argument ratio is
through the roof, and the amount of bare assertions is splendid.

It's fine if you don't agree with the post, but if that's the case you do your
position a disservice by posting this inanity.

~~~
mst
I regard Taleb as a useful source of "possibilities to think about", generally
presented in an entertaining way.

If you're reading it expecting _evidence_ for said possibilities, then, yes,
you'll be disappointed - but this tends to be true of pop sci style writing in
general.

------
jordanb
This obsession with fake news is predicated on the assumption that the
electorate in the Midwest voted for Trump because they were misinformed or
confused.

I think that for very many people, enough to cost Clinton the election, the
choice to support Trump or to stay home came not from confusion or
misinformation or racism or xenophobia but from the realization that Clinton
is going to do absolutely nothing to help them, and that while Trump will
probably not help them either, there is at least a chance he might. At one
point he asked "what have you got to lose?" I think that's a line that
resonated very well in the Midwest.

This obsession with fake news on the left is disturbing to me for two reasons.
One, quite frankly, is the notion that fake news was only deployed by the
right to hurt Clinton, and only being transmitted from "disreputable" news
sites (with ties to Putin of course) across Facebook.

I recall the fake news about Bernie supporters throwing chairs in Nevada being
broadcast on NPR, then in the evening NPR broadcasting that they knew it was
fake (on on-the-media I believe) then the following morning, mentioning it
again as if it were true.

The implication here is that if we could just keep all the news transmission
in the hands of "responsible gatekeepers" in the media then fake news could be
eliminated. But if NPR isn't a responsible gatekeeper, then who is?

Secondly I'm disturbed to watch my party, the party I want to see win
elections, go down a navel gazing rabbit hole rather than addressing the very
real fundamental structural problems with its operation.

How the least popular politician in America, clouded by scandal, became the
Democratic nominee is a question the party should be asking. Why the party
managed to disconnect so thoroughly with its base is a question that should be
asking. How the party could run such lousy campaigns with such horrible
management of resources not just at the presidential level but in congress at
at the state level, that's something the party leadership needs to explain,
and we who support the party need to demand accountability for.

If the Democratic party and Democratic supporters keep going off into the
weeds and obsessing about things that aren't pertinent like "fake news" or
sneering at all the xenophobic voters then they're going to keep on losing
elections and the Republicans will have carte blanche to push whatever agenda
they want.

~~~
altoz
Well said. There's this assumption that when people don't do what you would
do, that they're misinformed, when in fact, they may very well have the same
information, it's just that they disagree with you. In other words, different
people have different values and vote accordingly.

------
tmuir
I see it as Trump, the master negotiator, knowing the one thing the media
can't afford to point out, and then Trump the politician doing just that:
Manufacturing Consent.

------
chatmasta
I don't understand the obsession with finding the perfect news source, the one
source of truth, devoid of any bias. It will never happen.

During the election, I would go back and forth between super left wing and
super right wing news sources. I found that was the best way to filter out the
bullshit.

This is the only way to read the news. By reading many _different_ sources of
news, each with their own wild biases, you can triangulate the actual facts.

We should just be grateful that in the modern world we have access to so many
different sources, instead of just a few.

------
mandelbulb
Overall the cause of the issue can be, in my opinion, summarized as cognitive
isolation. People either never learn to or stop challenging their own views
and knowledge.

This ranges from rather simple cases where people live in less advanced areas,
living hard but repetitive lives, to the well-educated and experienced who
stopped debating with people of the same level of mastery of some subject,
thus, constantly amplifying their perception of a subject and eventually also
ceasing to pick up nuanced disagreements from those who at least challenge a
small part of the respective topic. The intent being, at best, to win an
argument and validate one's perspective rather than letting others to convince
oneself

In simpler terms, many people--whether educated by well-grounded or misleading
sources--do not understand or neglect that even if you have trained, studied,
researched in-depth for years, you are quite rarely capable of considering and
addressing enough of the relevant approaches to a certain matter and that you
have to continue to "peer-review" your own points of view your whole life.

Misconception of that often leading to the misinterpretation of the importance
and the nuanced workings of trust in our societies which a whole new world of
dangerous paths one can take.

------
devoply
Maybe fake news is a blessing in disguise in that it makes you distrust
everything. Which is a good thing. Because despite what some people want to
believe, media as it is today is a healthy dose of garbage shoveled down your
throat by people with various interests. All focused on self-interest without
considering the broader implications of their actions. Fake news is the lowest
form of this, but we have many higher forms that pass without ridicule.

------
adolph
_People believe in information that confirms their priors._

This is one way to look at the problem and one that fits in with the
contemporary interest in cognitive bias. An alternative explanation is that
people more easily intake information that activates their schema.

------
failrate
What every news consumer should consider is that every source has a bias. Only
by considering multiple sources can you have something approaching "truth".

------
niftich
This is a good read. It's from danah boyd, whom I've disagreed with on some
points before, but this article looks at why certain people distrust
mainstream media or the opinions of experts, and traces it back to America's
individualist message taught to children early on coupled with an ever more
acute class conflict, as opposed to a more condescending conclusion typically
implied by previous analyses.

------
milesf
Have a look at this segment of an interview with John Pilger on the state of
journalism:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o1Ho8OrBzig&feature=youtu.be...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o1Ho8OrBzig&feature=youtu.be&t=408)

We do not have many journalists anymore. We have too many anti-journalists.

------
hugh4life
"Wherever I go, my first object, if I wish to find out the truth, is to get
hold of the Free Press in France as in England, and even in America. But I
know that wherever I get hold of such an organ it will be very strongly
coloured with the opinion, or even fanaticism, of some minority. The Free
Press, as a whole, if you add it all up and cancel out one exaggerated
statement against another, does give you a true view of the state of society
in which you live. The Official Press to-day gives you an absurdly false one
everywhere. What a caricature—and what a base, empty caricature—of England or
France or Italy you get in the "Times," or the "Manchester Guardian," the
"Matin," or the "Tribune"! No one of them is in any sense general—or really
national.

The Free Press gives you the truth; but only in disjointed sections, for it is
disparate and it is particularist: it is marked with isolation—and it is so
marked because its origin lay in various and most diverse propaganda: because
it came later than the official Press of Capitalism, and was, in its origins,
but a reaction against it."

[http://www.gutenberg.org/files/18018/18018-h/18018-h.htm](http://www.gutenberg.org/files/18018/18018-h/18018-h.htm)

"Partly it [the Teflon-like ability of some to resist the charge of
“irrationality” or “extremism”] is a matter of a general cynicism in our
culture about the power or even the relevance of rational argument to matters
sufficiently fundamental. Fideism has a large, not always articulate, body of
adherents, and not only among the members of those Protestant churches and
movements which openly proclaim it; there are plenty of secular fideists. And
partly it is because of a strong and sometimes justified suspicion by those
against whom the charge is leveled that those who level it do so, not so much
because they themselves are genuinely moved by rational argument, as by
appealing to argument they are able to exercise a kind of power which favors
their own interests and privileges, the interests and privileges of a class
which has arrogated the rhetorically effective use of argument to itself for
its own purposes.

Arguments, that is to say, have come to be understood in some circles not as
expressions of rationality, but as weapons, the techniques for deploying which
furnish a key part of the professional skills of lawyers, academics,
economists, and journalists who thereby dominate the dialectically unfluent
and inarticulate. There is thus a remarkable concordance in the way in which
apparently very different types of social and cultural groups envisage each
other’s commitments. To the readership of the New York Times, or at least that
part of it which shares the presuppositions of those who write that parish
magazine of affluent and self-congratulatory liberal enlightenment, the
congregations of evangelical fundamentalism appear unfashionably
unenlightened. But to the members of those congregations that readership
appears to be just as much a community of pre-rational faith as they
themselves are but one whose members, unlike themselves, fail to recognize
themselves for what they are, and hence are in no position to level charges of
irrationality at them or anyone else."

[http://askonasi.com/2015/12/alasdair-macintyre-on-the-
trump-...](http://askonasi.com/2015/12/alasdair-macintyre-on-the-trump-
phenomenon/)

------
fdsaaf
The old media has been lying for years, especially about race, gender, and
sexuality. People saw through these lies, because the reality asserts itself
to anyone who sees and hears, but most felt trapped, unable to report the
evidence of their eyes without losing friends, family, and jobs. When these
people saw new media come along that told the truth about the things they saw
with their on eyes, people felt a sense of relief and began believing
everything these new media reported, even things about which old media has
been truthful and about which new media is lying.

The lesson here is that if you have a platform and social trust, don't abuse
that platform to lie, even in the name of "social justice". It's tempting, but
it won't work. The truth will come out, and you'll have irreversibly damaged
your reputation.

~~~
salmon30salmon
Are you able to point to any academic papers or even concrete examples of the
old media lying about race, gender or sexuality? I am legitimately curious
about this claim.

Thanks!

~~~
defen
> Are you able to point to any academic papers or even concrete examples of
> the old media lying about race, gender or sexuality

The fact that you would ask such a question belies a fundamental
misunderstanding of how things work. You are thoroughly embedded in the system
and don't realize it yet :) The academy (which is overwhelmingly left wing
outside of the hard sciences, math, and engineering) _establishes_ the "truth"
regarding matters of "race, gender or sexuality" \- whereby "truth" means the
opinions you may express without being exiled from polite urban society,
without losing your job, without being vociferously attacked by an enraged
mob.

Note that the old media is staffed by people who were all educated by the very
academy you are expecting to perform a truth-checking function! To be clear,
there are no "marching orders", but everyone understands the game, and
everyone is incentivized to say what they are supposed to say. You may as well
ask for Soviet academic papers giving concrete examples of Pravda lying about
industrial production!

