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People Who Know How the News Is Made Resist Conspiratorial Thinking (arstechnica.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Conspiracy theories, like the world being flat or the Moon landings faked, have proven notoriously difficult to stomp out. Add a partisan twist to the issue, and the challenge becomes even harder. Even near the end of his second term, barely a quarter of Republicans were willing to state that President Obama was born in the U.S. If we're seeking to have an informed electorate, then this poses a bit of a problem. But a recent study suggests a very simple solution helps limit the appeal of conspiracy theories: news media literacy. This isn't knowledge of the news, per se, but knowledge of the companies and processes that help create the news. While the study doesn't identify how the two are connected, its authors suggest that an understanding of the media landscape helps foster a healthy skepticism.
[...] "Despite popular conceptions," the authors point out, "[conspiratorial thinking] is not the sole province of the proverbial nut-job." When mixed in with the sort of motivated reasoning that ideology can, well, motivate, crazed ideas can become relatively mainstream. Witness the number of polls that indicated the majority of Republicans thought Obama wasn't born in the U.S., even after he shared his birth certificate. While something that induces a healthy skepticism of information sources might be expected to help with this, it's certainly not guaranteed, as motivated reasoning has been shown to be capable of overriding education and knowledge on relevant topics.
[...] As a whole, the expected connection held up: "for both conservatives and liberals, more knowledge of the news media system related to decreased endorsement of liberal conspiracies." And, conversely, the people who did agree with conspiracy theories tended to know very little about how the news media operated.
[...] "Despite popular conceptions," the authors point out, "[conspiratorial thinking] is not the sole province of the proverbial nut-job." When mixed in with the sort of motivated reasoning that ideology can, well, motivate, crazed ideas can become relatively mainstream. Witness the number of polls that indicated the majority of Republicans thought Obama wasn't born in the U.S., even after he shared his birth certificate. While something that induces a healthy skepticism of information sources might be expected to help with this, it's certainly not guaranteed, as motivated reasoning has been shown to be capable of overriding education and knowledge on relevant topics.
[...] As a whole, the expected connection held up: "for both conservatives and liberals, more knowledge of the news media system related to decreased endorsement of liberal conspiracies." And, conversely, the people who did agree with conspiracy theories tended to know very little about how the news media operated.
The Birth Certificate was verified by the Republican Governor of Hawaii personally, something no Governor had ever done before. The inconsistencies didn't exist. And more than one site proving them was proven to have introduced them themselves, just to point them out.
There is lots of evidence he was born in HI, and no evidence he wasn't. Even if he wasn't born in HI, the law today would have granted him citizenship at birth (And yes, you can retroactively apply that to a birth before a law change). So, he was born in HI. All the evidence says he was. No evidence exists that he wasn't. And even if he wasn't, he'd still have been eligible to be president.
Learn to love Alaska
Sometimes the conspiracies are true and worse than we ever imagined.
No. I'm being serious. Having a deep understanding of yourself, having an identity that goes beyond "I am for X" & "I am against Y" provides an bulwark against propaganda and conspiracies. Watch kids. They start out believing everything parents tell them. Once they take on traits that their parents don't have, you can see them begin the first phases of critical self-assessment.
All of this can be achieved in many ways. The best comes in the form of exposure. Exposure to philosophy. Exposure to culture. Exposure to other people and their lives.
You want to stop conspiracies and propaganda dead in its tracks? Get your kids out of your comfort zones and into the real world.
When you look at the "conspiracy nuts" you will notice a pattern. It is usually people who feel that they are "left out", that they're not in an "in" circle in whatever way that may be defined. Usually, it means that they're left out of being one of the "knowing ones", the ones that share a secret or at least something that elevates them above the others, something that gives them an "edge", if only a perceived one.
And a conspiracy theory allows them to feel that they belong to the "knowing ones" for a change. Because they now know something, something "secret", that everyone else doesn't know. And they knew it first!
Funny enough, whether that's true or even possible doesn't really matter. What matters is that they know it, and they knew it before the "smart" people did.
This is a powerful motivator. Because it lets you feel superior. You "get" it, you understand, you are one of the knowing ones, and the others, those sheeple, they don't. They are clueless, they don't understand, they don't know.
If you're usually the clueless one who neither knows nor understands, this can motivate quite a bit. And it can motivate you to cling to it, no matter what. Because letting go would require you to admit that you've, as usual, been the clueless idiot.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
It's not quite that simple. It isn't that they are mouthpieces for corporate PR, so much as that they don't always look too carefully at the PR blurbs that corporations send out, nor apply a healthy enough dose of skepticism.
The problem fundamentally is that at the local level, journalism doesn't pay very well, and only a few people are lucky enough to make it to the top tier TV/radio/newspaper outlets where it does pay well. This means most of the best and brightest tend to avoid the whole field unless they are really motivated. You have to assume that most of the people doing the reporting and investigating did not double-major in anything, and have no deep knowledge of any other subject besides communications, lack solid grounding in statistics, and so on, which makes them easier to mislead. And by the time they get old enough to be cynical enough to distrust the corporate PR stuff, they're too expensive to keep on the payroll.
Of course, eventually even a blind squirrel finds a nut once in a while, and there are a lot of journalists out there, so in aggregate, mistakes tend to be self-correcting eventually, but it's a very real problem, and IMO is getting worse with each passing year.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
And not just friends who think like you do. Get out of your comfort zone, away from your echo chamber. Find something in common with people who are different from you. Play racquetball at the gym with that liberal hippie neighbor. Go on camping trips with the conservative guy from work. Go rock climbing with your old roommate's gay cousin. Talk with them, get to know them, become friends with them.
Once you do that, you start to learn that we all have more in common with each other than differences. A lot of the propaganda will then become transparent - the usual MO is to dehumanize the "enemy" prior to tearing them down. But if you see, no, if you know those people are human, it's impossible to dehumanize them.
In North Korea, China, Russia, Turkey, Syria, Sweden, Iran, Germany what could go wrong?!
Sweden and Germany rank substantially better at press freedoms than the US:
https://rsf.org/en/ranking_tab...
It's facile to put them in the same grouping as North Korea and so on.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
and they'll fade away on their own
Or they elect the president of the United States of America.
Because Pizzagate. And Benghazi. And Kenya. And communism.