Wray (Trump nominee):
“Russia continues to engage in malign influence operations to this day,”
Can we please see a copy of Mr. Wray’s Loyalty Agreement… I am pretty sure this must be a violation.
As long as Pootie’s Puppet remains in the WH, nothing’s going to get better. They don’t even really have to try all that hard, because of the KoolAid dispenser in the Oval Office.
But what exactly are we going to do? For sure, something has to be done, but when you have a free press, it becomes well nigh impossible to control information, even misinformation.
It’s a horrifying problem. And to a certain extent, we’re also hoisted with our own petard because we’ve played these kinds of games for years ourselves.
“I never want to say never about anything,”
But you just did.
FBI Director Wray Says Russia Continues To Sow Discord In US
FBI Director Wray should say “Trump Continues To Sow Discord In US.”
FIFY
Did Lester Holt ask for the date on which Wray will inform Trump about any of this, or will he just continue reporting to the RNC and let them handle it?
“sow discord” is a weird way of saying “campaign on behalf of the Republican party”
Never about anything.
There, I said it for him.
I’ve been arguing for this since even before the internet took over our lives: a course in media literacy should be required in every high school curriculum. No one should come out of school not knowing how to read and understand a news report, how sourcing and credibility are established, and the methods used to create the illusion of credibility. It’s simple stuff, really, but unless people consciously think about, they tend to absorb everything that comes their way uncritically.
Well, first they have to know how to read. Period.
Many of the folks we’re trying to convince read at a fourth grade level on average - it’s why the NY Post is written in such a simplistic form.
You’re exactly right. It’s the only way to fight misinformation.
But can we do it? It doesn’t seem we’re doing so well just getting across the ABCs.
@becca656 Many of the folks we’re trying to convince read at a fourth grade level on average Yes. It’s a disaster. When I was in grad school I hung out with student fomr the EU who’d taught all over the world and his take was that public education was so bad and so meaningless in the country, someone had to have planned it.
Back to your original question: with free press protections in law the gov’t can’t control the sources, but with sufficient political will society can better prepare the recipients. I know overall literacy is not great here, but it isn’t only because they can’t read at a high level that people get hoodwinked so easily. People with advanced degrees get fooled almost as easily as the semi-literate, because the prime way to swing opinion is to harness confirmation bias, put people’s existing assumptions and resentments to work to further your own agenda. If this wasn’t so much easier to do with fear and resentment than fellow-feeling and hope, there would be almost no conservatives in power anywhere on earth, yet they know that, instinctively, and use it consistently. It’s the the main reason the Reactionary party wins so often. Voter suppression and gerrymandering work at the margins, they have to first build a mass of angry frightened people to get close enough to the finish line for those things to make the difference, and they’re very good at it, because, as I said, it comes naturally to the right; when fear is your own posture toward the world it’s easy to spread it around, and people do value sincerity in a candidate no matter what they’re actually saying.
With the multimedia means of delivery by which we absorb info nowadays, reading is only a minor part of the picture anymore. But the same skills taught to assess written sources go equally for TV news reporting. You have to engender once again the old attitude to believe half of what you see and none of what you hear, firstly, and give people tools to reveal the agendas that are slyly kept hidden from the uncritical. This attitude is best inculcated in the young, its so much harder to establish good habits of mind in adults. It’s a generations-long project, and like all such things, the time to start was yesterday.
Are they distributing witches?
Maybe that’s what Dotard has been whinging on about?