Fight media bias by teaching journalism

When I go to Reseda Charter High School this month for the 70th anniversary, I’ll interview the school’s librarian. (The interview will be in a future issue of my newsletter. You can subscribe here.) One of the things we’ll discuss is media literacy and the importance of identifying bias.

When I was at Reseda in the 1970s, there were only three commercial television networks and PBS, along with several daily newspapers, and AM news radio stations. All of them had dedicated newsrooms that followed strict journalism practices and ethics. While each competed to scoop each other with the latest news, they also had to make sure it was accurate to avoid embarrassment or getting sued for libel. As a result, the news was able to give us an objective reality that exposed the failures of the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal. As the saying goes, “Everyone has the right to their own opinion, but not their own facts.”

Fifty years later, reliable sources of news are nearly impossible to find. The multitude of cable news channels and social media platforms aren’t designed to inform people, but to tell them what they want to hear. Watch Fox News or MeidasTouch, and you’ll get a completely different picture of reality. This problem is further exacerbated as once dependable media outlets are controlled by large conglomerates that are either aligned with the…