Why it’s crucial we can differentiate fact from fiction
The actions at the Capitol building in Washington on Jan. 6 provoke many questions that are likely to be deliberated for years.
How could so many people, in spite of all the evidence, come to believe the election was stolen? Where did all the conspiracy theories come from and how did they become so popular?
I have no doubt there will be many answers put forth, but I am convinced that what happened that day was a unique product of our times.
Once a week, I meet with a group of women on Zoom. All of us fall generally into the generation of baby boomers, are mothers of grown children and are grandmothers as well. In one conversation, the subject turned to the television news and the comments went something like this:
“I can’t stand the way everything is called ‘breaking news’ and you’ve already heard it 10 times before.”
“It is hard to know what to believe any more. Everyone has a different opinion.”
“When I was growing up, we all watched Walter Cronkite. There’s nothing like that now.”
Indeed, it was Walter Cronkite and our city’s newspaper, the two sources we and our neighbors followed and generally trusted to bring us the news we needed to know. For local news and gossip, there was our small town’s newspaper, a less journalistic but entertaining source.
For other information we had the World Book encyclopedia, its pebbled white covers with blue trim conveying
most of the information we expected to have to know. If that failed to answer our information needs, there was the school or town library with its volumes of books cataloged for ready access.
This is not the world we live in any more, nor will it ever be again. We live in the world of the internet, information literally at our fingertips. We live in a world where you can choose your TV channel based on your political preferences.
We live in a world where political
ideologies fly about Facebook as easily as newspaper pages in a wind. And how are we supposed to negotiate this deluge and still find the information we can trust?
Before I retired, I worked for many years as a library media specialist in the Parkland School District. I loved reading stories to children and teaching them to research, but one of my more unusual lessons was on the Pacific Northwest tree-climbing octopus.
As the third-graders filed into their
seats, I projected a website with a realistic-looking image and detailed information on the creature, its characteristics and habitat. The website appeared colorful and professional, but eventually the more alert students caught on that it was fake.
Looking back, that may have been one of the most important lessons that I taught. I hope it was the beginning of an awakening for the students of how important it is to question your sources.
While the fake website I used for that lesson had been produced as a teaching tool, it would not have been much harder to find one that pretended to be legitimate. That highlights one of the major differences between books and encyclopedias and digital sources today.
Take a look at one of those old encyclopedias and you will find masses of editors. These were people accountable for what they produced, and keeping their jobs depended on it. The books that ended up on our library shelves not only went through the hands of a number of editors but were usually reviewed by experts in their field.
In the digital world, the accountability often falls on the reader, who must determine whether the producer of information has any authority on the subject.
“Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind,” wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson years ago. Now more than ever, it is crucial to teach our youth to think critically about sources of information.
Sadly, the librarians and media specialists who are best equipped to teach these skills are often the first to be eliminated when school budgets are cut. In a time when Russian hackers are infiltrating digital platforms, we need sophisticated skills to determine what is true.
When a president is capable of undermining our best journalists, we need to know how to separate fact from opinion and, moreover, fact from fiction. In a world that will continue to produce autocratic leaders, our democracy will depend on it.