Anew Illinois law allows high schools to teach media literacy to students in all subjects. In case skeptics are tempted to portray this as some kind of underground conspiracy to indoctrinate kids, it’s exactly the opposite. There’s no agenda here other than to arm young people with better tools to distinguish fact from fiction and to be on the lookout for deliberate misinformation.
This is an age where computer programs can generate video or alter photographs to make it appear that something concocted digitally actually happened in real life. There are thousands of people out there who have nothing better to do with their lives than to make up stories disguised as actual news. Before anyone has a chance to debunk such social media postings, an item might have already gone viral by being shared and shared again. That’s how QAnon got started.
Today’s political context is rife with examples. But the manipulation of media for surreptitious goals goes way back to include the John F. Kennedy assassination, U.S. moon landings and even the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. And because some people will believe anything, professional manipulators like Infowars’ Alex Jones gladly feed their conspiratorial appetites with nonsense, such as that the 2012 massacre of little kids at Sandy Hook Elementary in Connecticut was faked and that grieving parents were just actors. Jones, at long last, faces multimillion-dollar court judgments for the harm he inflicted on the real parents of real Sandy Hook victims with his lies.
