The Media – Socratic Seminar NAME_____________________________

We will be engaging in a Socratic Seminar discussion called Magnetic Corners. Indicate whether or not you agree or disagree with the following statement using the Likert Scale provided. Here are the statements:

Media consolidation plays a significant role in the demise of journalism as a “watchdog” for democracy.Strongly Disagree Disagree Agree Strongly Agree

Most Americans simply do not understand how to consume media effectively. Strongly Disagree Disagree Agree Strongly Agree

Media echo chambers, social media algorithms, and lack of media education pose a threat to democracy. Strongly Disagree Disagree Agree Strongly Agree

Overall, the media has a liberal bias. Strongly Disagree Disagree Agree Strongly Agree

The state of American democracy is more fragile today than it has been in over 100 years. Strongly Disagree Disagree Agree Strongly Agree

Remember, regardless of the degree to which you agree or disagree, you will be magnetized for the discussion—you are not allowed to move into the center. The discussion is an “on the whole” debate, so it is assumed that there are truths to both sides—your job is to evaluate the sentence overall—not limiting yourself to exceptions or trivial definitional disputes. You may switch sides, however. If someone has offered an argument that has compelled you to move, so be it. Feel free to explain why you have changed your mind.

RULES:1. You must stand on either side of the room in a straight line and look at the other side. No sitting! 2. This is not about people; it is about ideas.3. Think like a LAWYER and a HISTORIAN. What would you say to the people on the other side. “I

think….I wonder…Why do you think?....”4. You have to listen to the argument. When you talk, “I heard what you said about….” Or “What I heard

you say was … I appreciate that perspective and see why you would value [x] but thought rolling around in my head is that…”

5. Once you talk, 2 more people have to talk before you can go again.At the conclusion of the debate, for the last 3 minutes, go around the room complimenting at least 2 people about their contributions/ideas. This means that you must listen carefully throughout.

Remember our Socratic Seminar group norms: Respect, Share, Challenge, Listen, and Focus.

Source 1: National Public Radio (Radio Broadcast). “The Reason Your Feed Became an Echo Chamber – And What To Do About It.” Weekend Edition Sunday. 24 July 2016

At the outset, the Internet was expected to be an open, democratic source of information. But algorithms, like the kind used by Facebook, instead often steer us toward articles that reflect our own ideological preferences, and search results usually echo what we already know and like.

As a result, we aren't exposed to other ideas and viewpoints, says Eli Pariser, CEO of Upworthy, a liberal news website. Pariser tells NPR's Elise Hu that as websites get to know our interests better, they also get better at serving up the content that reinforces those interests, while also filtering out those things we generally don't like. "What most algorithms are trying to do is to increase engagement, increase the amount of attention you're spending on that platform," he says. And while it's a nice that we have an instrument to help us cope with the fire hose of information supplied by the Internet, that algorithm also carries some downsides. "The danger is that increasingly you end up not seeing what people who think differently see and in fact not even knowing that it exists."

It's what Pariser calls a "filter bubble." And it's something he tried to break out of himself, chronicling that experience in the book The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding from You. The results were, well, mixed."I was medium successful," Pariser says. "It's hard, and that's partly because we know the people that we know, and those tend to be slanted in one ideological direction or another so you have to really work to find people who think differently."

The difficulty of bursting this filter bubble extends to matters of race too, as NPR's Gene Demby noted in an interview with Weekend Edition. "When you see poll numbers about the vast space between the way people of color feel about policing — or any number of issues around equality — and where white people stand on those issues, it can be explained in part by the fact that we are not having the same conversations," Demby said. One way to get on the same page? Maybe it's time to get off social media, Demby said — at least for a little bit."You would think that social media would bridge a bunch of divides, right?" Demby said. "But maybe the ideal way these conversations need to happen is one-on-one with people who are equally vested in the relationship between the two people."

Still, Pariser says, you can try to beat the algorithms to see the other side. Just make sure you actually want to read those opposite viewpoints, because the algorithms can tell when you don't. "I think these algorithms are very good at seeing are you following someone but never listening to them, or are you actively engaging and talking to them?" Pariser says. "So for me, one of the best things has been actually seeking out and finding folks who don't think like me who I'm genuinely interested in, as people and thinkers."

Source 2: "Confidence in American Institutions." Pew Research Center, 2016. Issues & Controversies, Accessed 30 Oct. 2017.

Source 3:

Source 4: VIDEO NOTES for “Media, Journalism, and News Coverage: An Overview”

________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________Source 5: Fake News: Does fake news pose a significant problem for democracy?” Issues and Controversies. 2 March 2017

Supporters Argue: Fake News Must Be Stopped

Supporters of cracking down on fake news argue that it is a dangerous phenomenon. "This isn't your typical disinformation or misinformation—generated by the government, or foreign adversaries, or corporations—to advance an agenda by confusing the public," historian Neal Gabler wrote on billmoyers.com in November 2016. "And because a democracy relies on truth—which is why dystopian writers have always described how future oligarchs need to undermine it—

Opponents Argue: Fake News Outcry is Misguided

Opponents of cracking down on fake news argue that such efforts are misdirected and that false stories are nothing new. "We have long lived in a post-truth society, with political propaganda dominating the 'mainstream' news media, and contributing to disinformation campaigns aimed at manipulating public opinion," Anthony DiMaggio, an assistant professor of political science at Lehigh University, wrote for the website Counterpunch in December 2016. "In an era of record

fake news is an assault on democracy as well."

Fake news has the insidious effect of casting doubt on all sources of information, advocates of taking action to end it argue. "Fake news and the proliferation of raw opinion that passes for news is creating confusion, punching holes in what is true, causing a kind of fun-house effect that leaves the reader doubting everything, including real news," New York Times journalist Sabrina Tavernise wrote in December 2016.

To compare inaccuracies in mainstream news to fake news is a false equivalency, proponents contend. "Journalism is an inherently imperfect profession," columnist Ruth Marcus wrote in the Washington Post in December 2016. "We write the first rough draft of history—as best we can, subject to correction and revision. But there is a difference between inevitably flawed and intentionally false. To deliberately blur this distinction is to seek to undermine the central role of media in a free society."

"Partisans on each side have been fed a steady diet of stories about the outrages perpetrated by the other side's presidential candidate," journalist Timothy Lee wrote in Vox in November 2016. "Our [political] system is based on compromise, and compromise becomes more difficult if partisans on each side have their heads stuffed with false conspiracy theories about the crimes committed by the other side."

Whether Facebook will admit it or not, proponents of cracking down on fake news argue, the social media site has become a tool for spreading mistruths. "As Facebook has become the favorite online home for Americans, it has also become host to a wide array of hyperpartisan content machines that publish mountains of misleading or outright fabricated stories that are explicitly designed to be widely shared among people who are more inclined to believe them," journalist Abby Ohlheiser wrote in the Washington Post in November 2016. "Although Facebook has over the years denied that its algorithms are part of the problem, the fact remains that ideological polarization on Facebook is getting worse at a time when the site has never been more important to how people consume information."

Facebook should revise its algorithms, proponents argue, to make it harder for fake news producers to reach an audience. "The company tries to choose posts that people are likely to read, like, and share with their friends," Vox's Lee wrote. "This would be a reasonable way to do things if Facebook were just a way of finding your friends' cutest baby pictures. But it's more troubling as a way of choosing the news stories people read. Essentially, Facebook is using the same criteria as a supermarket tabloid: giving people the most attention-grabbing headlines without worrying about whether

mass distrust of the media, efforts to identify propaganda as merely the work of 'others' are hopelessly out of touch with growing public anger at officialdom and the officially-allied media propaganda we euphemistically call 'news.'"

Fake news stories are not nearly as significant a problem as bias and inaccuracies in mainstream reporting, opponents of a crackdown argue. As columnist Barton Swaim wrote in the Washington Post in December 2016:

Which is more dangerous—the entirely fabricated story your ornery uncle links to on Facebook, or the story we read in a respectable news source containing an important and substantially false claim? The fabricated story that exercises your uncle is dangerous in its way, but it's unlikely to sway anyone's opinion about the subject. The only people inclined to believe the hoax headline "FBI Agent Suspected in Hillary Email Leaks Found Dead in Apparent Murder-Suicide" are those who already loathe Clinton. The story may intensify hatred, but it doesn't alter opinion or allegiance.

Biases or misleading statements in mainstream news, Swaim claimed, are actually more insidious than "fake news" because such stories masquerade as accurate and objective. "Maybe the story consists of mostly true statements, but it's built on an egregiously false premise," Swaim wrote. "Or maybe it includes a key line that infers far more than the facts allow. Or it presents a tendentious interpretation of the facts. I suspect one of the chief reasons so many Americans prefer harrowing Internet rumors to mainstream news is that they've grown impatient with journalists' pretense that their assertions involve only truth, only facts unmediated by opinion or partiality."

Critics of the outcry over fake news stress that the Internet has democratized publishing, giving anyone with a computer and Internet connection the ability to be heard, and they warn that attempts to crack down on fake news could reverse that progress. Michael Rosenblum, founder of Current TV, wrote in the Huffington Post in November 2016 that the press used to be "closed" and "controlled" before the Internet "blew away the barriers. So now Mark Zuckerberg is going to decide what is 'real news' and what is 'fake news?' This is a very slippery slope indeed. Facebook as the Ministry of Truth? I don't think so."

Rather than focus their outrage at fake news, critics argue, journalists should examine their own profession more closely. "[T]here's been an abundance of hand-wringing over the 'fakenews' that supposedly is rampant on social media," Katrina Trinko, managing editor at the Daily Signal, the newspaper of the conservative think tank the Heritage Foundation, wrote in December 2016. "Yet missing has been any kind of serious searching among the mainstream media about whether it could

articles are fair, accurate, or important." learn any lessons from this election—and whether reporters and editors are holding themselves accountable to their supposed values of objectivity and rigorous reporting."

Some also question the charge that Facebook is to blame for partisan hostilities. "[S]ocial media have not created a fragmented world," author Kenan Malik wrote in the New York Times in December 2016. "They merely reflect and amplify one that already exists, a world in which the authority of traditional institutions has eroded, in which old vehicles of political change disappeared and in which there is often a welling of anger without a conventional political outlet."

Source 6: Lebowitz, Shana and Samantha Lee. “20 Cognitive Biases That Screw Up Your Decisions.” Business Insider. 26 Aug 2015

Source 7: Graph, Pew Research Center, 2014

Source 8: “Is the Media Outlet’s Science Coverage Mostly Driven by Evidence?” American Council on Science and Health. 5 Mar 2017

Source 9: VIDEO NOTES for The Colbert Report satirical segment on “Truthiness.” 17 Oct 2005.

Truthiness is the belief or assertion that a particular statement is true based on the intuition or perceptions of some individual or individuals, without regard to evidence, logic, intellectual examination, or facts. Truthiness can range from ignorant assertions of falsehoods to deliberate duplicity or propaganda intended to sway opinions.

The concept of truthiness has emerged as a major subject of discussion surrounding U.S. politics during the 1990s and 2000s because of the perception among some observers of a rise in propaganda and a growing hostility toward factual reporting and fact-based discussion.[3]

American television comedian Stephen Colbert coined the term truthiness in this meaning[5] as the subject of a segment called "The Wørd" during the pilot episode of his political satire program The Colbert Report on October 17, 2005. By using this as part of his routine, Colbert satirized the misuse of appeal to emotion and "gut feeling" as a rhetorical device in contemporaneous socio-political discourse.[6]He particularly applied it to U.S. President George W. Bush's nomination of Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court and the decision to invade Iraq in 2003.

Truthiness was named Word of the Year for 2005 by the American Dialect Society and for 2006 by Merriam-Webster

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Source 10: "Can You Spot Fake News?" Tribune Content Agency Graphics, 2017.