Harvard's Drew Gilpin Faust says history should make us uncomfortable; Fresh Air, NPR, August 22, 2023

 Terry Gross, Fresh Air, NPR; Harvard's Drew Gilpin Faust says history should make us uncomfortable

"Drew Gilpin Faust is known as a historian, a civil rights activist and the first woman president of Harvard — but she was groomed to become a proper Southern lady...

Faust's new memoir, Necessary Trouble, takes its name from a quote by the late Rep. John Lewis, who Faust knew and approved of using his words. The book is about growing up in Virginia and coming of age during a period of rapid social transformation...

On the mischaracterization of slavery included in Florida's new standards of Black history education, proposed under Gov. Ron DeSantis

It's preposterous and it's extremely distressing. It's a complete distortion of the past, which is undertaken in service of the present, of minimizing racial issues in the present by saying everything's been "just great" for four centuries. Slavery was not "just great." It was oppressive. It was cruel. It involved exploitation of every sort, physical violence, sexual exploitation. We know that we have pieces of paper where slave owners wrote it down. I did a biography of a South Carolina planter who recorded in detail what his mastery of slaves entailed. And there are dozens and dozens and dozens of studies that show this...

On the notion that students shouldn't be made to feel uncomfortable about history

It's a betrayal of the commitment to truth and to fact. And it so undermines the ability of people in the present to understand who they are. How do we have history that's not uncomfortable? How do we have any kind of education that doesn't make you in some way uncomfortable? Education asks you to change. The headmistress of my girls school many years ago said to us, "Have the courage to be disturbed, to learn about the Holocaust and see what evil can mean, to learn about slavery and think about exploitation that is empowered by an ideology of race that we haven't entirely dismantled. Understand what people did in the past so that you can, in the present, better critique your own assumptions, your own blindnesses, and make a world that's a better world." If we don't acknowledge those realities, we are disempowered as human beings."

Democracy is under attack – and reporting that isn’t ‘violating journalistic standards’; The Guardian, September 4, 2022

Robert Reich, The Guardian; Democracy is under attack – and reporting that isn’t ‘violating journalistic standards’

"It is dangerous to believe that “balanced journalism” gives equal weight to liars and to truth-tellers, to those intent on destroying democracy and those seeking to protect it, to the enablers of an ongoing attempted coup and those who are trying to prevent it...

“Balanced journalism” does not exist halfway between facts and lies."

The flat-Earth conspiracy is spreading around the globe. Does it hide a darker core?; CNN, November 18, 2019

Rob Picheta, CNN; The flat-Earth conspiracy is spreading around the globe. Does it hide a darker core?

"But the alleged rapid growth of a movement so enthusiastically rejecting fundamental scientific beliefs does have some worried.

"It seems that increasingly, people don't trust scientists and experts, or their motives," Douglas says. "More research needs to be done in this area, and I'm sure there are some positive consequences to believing in conspiracy theories, but early indications suggests that they are more harm than help.""

Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t understand free speech in the 21st century; The Guardian, October 18, 2019

Siva Vaidhyanathan, The Guardian; Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t understand free speech in the 21st century

"The problem of the 21st century is cacophony. Too many people are yelling at the same time. Attentions fracture. Passions erupt. Facts crumble. It’s increasingly hard to deliberate deeply about complex crucial issues with an informed public. We have access to more knowledge yet we can’t think and talk like adults about serious things...

The thing is, a thriving democracy needs more than motivation, the ability to find and organize like-minded people. Democracies also need deliberation. We have let the institutions that foster discussion among well informed, differently-minded people crumble. Soon all we will have left is Facebook. Look at Myanmar to see how well that works."

The misinformation age; Axios, September 12, 2019

Scott Rosenberg, David Nather, Axios; The misinformation age

"Hostile powers undermining elections. Deepfake video and audio. Bots and trolls, phishing and fake news — plus of course old-fashioned spin and lies. 

Why it matters: The sheer volume of assaults on fact and truth is undermining trust not just in politics and government, but also in business, tech, science and health care as well.

• Beginning with this article, Axios is launching a series to help you navigate this new avalanche of misinformation, and illuminate its impact on America and the globe, through 2020 and beyond.

Our culture now broadly distrusts most claims to truth. Majorities of Americans say they've lost trust in the federal government and each other — and think that lack of trust gets in the way of solving problems, according to a Pew Research Center survey."

Trump Knows His Only Legal Hope Is to Win in the Court of Public Opinion; Slate, December 18, 2018

Dahlia Lithwick, Slate; Trump Knows His Only Legal Hope Is to Win in the Court of Public Opinion

"Watch for the pattern: The president is both too big and too small to be held to legal account. He is too busy and too important. But also, he doesn’t understand, and he cannot recall. The crimes weren’t “big.” The president—in this conception—exists on some astral plane that courts, and facts, cannot touch. It’s as if we’ve arrived at a point in the Mueller probe where all of federal law must be reduced to something a small child could color over a long car ride for Trump to be expected to understand it. This is a PR play that works only as long as we all accede to the central principle that this one man is above—or below—the law. That isn’t something the courts, or Bob Mueller, or Rudy Giuliani can adjudicate. It’s the thing we’ll at some point have to determine for ourselves."

The searing photos that helped end child labor in America; The Washington Post, September 3, 2018

Jessica Contrera, The Washington Post;

The searing photos that helped end child labor in America

 

"Hine’s photos showed the price: unsafe working conditions, dangerous machinery and business owners who refused to educate the children or limit their working hours.

Though there had been investigations that attempted to expose these circumstances in the past, “The industry simply dismissed those reports as — the term they would use today is — ‘fake news,’ ” said Hugh Hindman, a historian of child labor. “When Hine comes along and supplements the investigations with pictures, it creates a set of facts that can’t be denied anymore.”"

"Breaker Boys working in Ewen Breaker of Pennsylvania Coal Co." South Pittston, Pennsylvania. Photographer: Lewis Hine. Archived: Library of Congress

 

A Code Of Ethics In Research; Forbes, April 9, 2018

Scott McDonald, Forbes; A Code Of Ethics In Research

"A single-minded focus on matters of fact can still leave us blind to the ethical implications of our work...

What ethical guidelines guide the use of “secondary data” collected for some other purpose, but now used for research? What responsibility do researchers have to ensure that the data they are using were collected legally, without any deception? What rights do consumers have to know about and approve the uses to which their data are put? What obligations do researchers have to protect consumers from harm that might come from the misuse of their data? What ethical guidelines should govern profiling and highly-targeted communications?

The reality is that the ability of technology to collect data is outstripping the guidelines in place to ensure that sound business practices are being followed. Just because we can do something, it doesn’t mean we should. The Cambridge event is a reckoning, not a revelation.

Let me be clear. The issue is that we should establish and comply with ethical guidelines not to ward off government intervention, but because it is good for our business. Consumer data is not ours, it belongs to consumers, and if we possess it and use it any form, we have a responsibility to respect it – and the consumer who provided it.

To that end, the ARF has issued a call for development and establishment of guidelines and standards to govern consumer data collection and protection." 

What Flake got right — and wrong; Washington Post, January 17, 2018

Jennifer Rubin, Washington Post; What Flake got right — and wrong

"Flake gave an impressive and far-reaching speech indicting Trump’s web of lies and the damage his international pals (e.g., Vladimir Putin) are doing to freedom of the press. He correctly admonished his Senate colleagues that undermining truth strengthens the hand of despots. Give him credit — but only partial credit. Elected Republicans engage in much of the same anti-truth propaganda as the president does. The evening programming of an entire TV cable “news” network is dedicated to conspiracy theories, misleading information about immigrants and terrorists, and refusal to cover facts that contradict the president’s tropes.

Trump did not materialize out of thin air. He masterfully manipulated white grievance and anti-elite conspiracy-mongering. But the ground was plowed by many of Flake’s colleagues and by Republicans’ self-selected news outlets. Getting rid of Trump will help, but unless and until the mind-set that permeates the right is dismantled, the war on the truth will rage on."

Hillary Clinton Says Libraries Are Essential In Fight To Defend ‘Truth And Reason’; HuffPost, June 27, 2017

Hayley Miller, HuffPost; Hillary Clinton Says Libraries Are Essential In Fight To Defend ‘Truth And Reason’

"“The work you do is at the heart of an open, inclusive and diverse society,” Clinton told a crowd at the American Library Association’s conference in Chicago. “I believe libraries and democracy go hand-in-hand.”...

“You have to be on the front lines of one of the most important fights we have ever faced in history in this country: the right to defend truth and reason, evidence and facts,” she said...

The former first lady added that libraries are critical to the well-being of rural communities and provide invaluable resources to help immigrants and refugees learn English and “know their rights.”"

Scott Pelley is pulling no punches on the nightly news — and people are taking notice; Washington Post, March 26, 2017

Margaret Sullivan, Washington Post; Scott Pelley is pulling no punches on the nightly news — and people are taking notice

"Pelley, and others at CBS, declined to comment for this column, saying the work speaks for itself. There is clearly every wish to avoid setting up CBS as anti-Trump or as partisan.

But, accepting Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite Award last November, Pelley tipped his hand: “The quickest, most direct way to ruin a democracy is to poison the information.”"

"Facts. Shmacts"; GoComics.com, March 3, 2017

Wiley Miller, Non Sequitur via GoComics.com; "Facts. Shmacts"

The Russification of America; New York Times, February 21, 2017

Roger Cohen, New York Times; 

The Russification of America

"I’m skeptical of Trump ever running a disciplined administration. His feelings about Europe are already clear and won’t change. The European Union needs to step into the moral void by standing unequivocally for the values that must define the West: truth, facts, reason, science, tolerance, freedom, democracy and the rule of law. For now it’s unclear if the Trump administration is friend or foe in that fight."

Museums and libraries fight ‘alternative facts’ with a #DayofFacts; Washington Post, February 17, 2017

Sarah Kaplan, Washington Post; Museums and libraries fight ‘alternative facts’ with a #DayofFacts

"First the National Parks went rogue, sharing climate change data on Twitter. Now museums and libraries have taken up arms — or at least typing fingers — to fight on behalf of facts.

Using the hashtag #DayofFacts, more than 280 scientific and cultural institutions are devoting Friday to dropping 140-character truths on Twitter. Many of the facts seem pointedly political — like the National Museum of American Jewish History's tweet about a George Washington letter affirming religious freedom in the country, or a placard held up in a video by Chicago's Field Museum that stated “Climate change is accelerating the extinction of plants and animals.”"

Russians No Longer Dispute Olympic Doping Operation; New York Times, 12/27/16

Rebecca R. Ruiz, New York Times; Russians No Longer Dispute Olympic Doping Operation:

"Russia is for the first time conceding that its officials carried out one of the biggest conspiracies in sports history: a far-reaching doping operation that implicated scores of Russian athletes, tainting not just the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi but also the entire Olympic movement.

Over several days of interviews here with The New York Times, Russian officials said they no longer disputed a damning set of facts that detailed a doping program with few, if any, historical precedents.

“It was an institutional conspiracy,” Anna Antseliovich, the acting director general of Russia’s national antidoping agency, said of years’ worth of cheating schemes, while emphasizing that the government’s top officials were not involved."

TV for the fake news generation: why Westworld is the defining show of 2016; Guardian, 12/7/16

Paul MacInnes, Guardian; TV for the fake news generation: why Westworld is the defining show of 2016:

"Westworld is a hit. Viewing figures released this week confirmed that the first season of HBO’s sci-fi western drama received a bigger audience than any other debut in the channel’s history...

The producers deliberately reached out to an audience that enjoys obsessing. They knew some fans would watch the show again and again on their laptops. They knew they would freeze-frame the screen and zoom in on details that would pass the casual viewer by. From there the fans would try to make connections, to unravel the mysteries, to find deeper meaning. Things were left uncertain enough that people could believe what they wanted. Whether a theory was “true” was less important than the fact that someone believed in it. Sound familiar?

I’m not calling HBO a purveyor of fake news, and neither am I suggesting that Westworld has been captured by the alt-right like Pepe the Frog. But the drama has certainly tapped into an audience of young people who love video games and cracking codes, and understands both technology and identity politics."

SOLVING THE PROBLEM OF FAKE NEWS; New Yorker, 11/30/16

Nicholas Lemann, New Yorker; SOLVING THE PROBLEM OF FAKE NEWS:

"What we are now calling fake news—misinformation that people fall for—is nothing new. Thousands of years ago, in the Republic, Plato offered up a hellish vision of people who mistake shadows cast on a wall for reality. In the Iliad, the Trojans fell for a fake horse. Shakespeare loved misinformation: in “Twelfth Night,” Viola disguises herself as a man and wins the love of another woman; in “The Tempest,” Caliban mistakes Stephano for a god. And, in recent years, the Nobel committee has awarded several economics prizes to work on “information asymmetry,” “cognitive bias,” and other ways in which the human propensity toward misperception distorts the workings of the world.

What is new is the premise of the conversation about fake news that has blossomed since Election Day: that it’s realistic to expect our country to be a genuine mass democracy, in which people vote on the basis of facts and truth, as provided to them by the press."

Tim Berners-Lee warns of danger of chaos in unprotected public data; Guardian, 11/1/16

Alice Ross, Guardian; Tim Berners-Lee warns of danger of chaos in unprotected public data:

"Asked about whether open data could have security vulnerabilities, Berners-Lee said criminals could manipulate open data for profit, for example by placing bets on the bank rate or consumer price index and then hacking into the sites where the data is published and switching the figures.

“If you falsify government data then there are all kinds of ways that you could get financial gain, so yes,” he said, “it’s important that even though people think about open data as not a big security problem, it is from the point of view of being accurate.”...

Berners-Lee said during a presentation that a key challenge, particularly in the era of Brexit and Donald Trump, was making reliable data available to people who felt disenfranchised: “How can we help everyone in the country feel that they have access to good quality information … whether they get it on the web or not – maybe they get it through TV and radio? How can we restore a culture and civilisation based on knowledge … and a democratic system based on knowledge, based on facts and truth?”"

As fake news takes over Facebook feeds, many are taking satire as fact; Guardian, 11/17/16

Nicky Woolf, Guardian; As fake news takes over Facebook feeds, many are taking satire as fact:

"Facebook has a serious fake news problem, a major contributor to what has been called the “post-truth” era...

In a way, the problem is not a new one. Publications such as the National Enquirer in the US have long bent the truth, often shamelessly. But now, a fake story can much more easily masquerade as real because in Facebook’s walled garden all the posts look largely the same.

Even the most savvy news consumers can be tricked this way."

‘Post-truth’ named 2016 word of the year by Oxford Dictionaries; Washington Post, 11/16/16

Amy B. Wang, Wahington Post; ‘Post-truth’ named 2016 word of the year by Oxford Dictionaries:

"Oxford Dictionaries has selected “post-truth” as 2016's international word of the year, after the contentious “Brexit” referendum and an equally divisive U.S. presidential election caused usage of the adjective to skyrocket, according to the Oxford University Press.

The dictionary defines “post-truth” as “relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.”"