What with the recent development in the supreme courts I’m feeling a necessity to do what I can with the time left, politically.
However, aside from the most rudimentary basic terms I am basically completely ignorant to all politics on a state and federal level, and while I’d love to sit here and self loathe for my idiocy of not learning before it was important I need to start catching up and figuring out what I should be voting on and why.
Of course I’m deathly afraid that indiscriminately googling will lead to me learning biased and compromised knowledge from sites that I don’t even know are biased, ending up with a skewed and inaccurate understanding.
While I know I could still be led astray by you guys, I figured it better to ask somewhere like here than to just wander off into the internet, so can anybody help me and people like me to start getting equipped?
The first step is to understand the media, which Media Bias/Fact Check and the Ad Fontes Media* are never going to teach you. The only people who are taught it are those who get degrees in marketing, public relations, political science, history, and journalism; and even then only some of them.
The new post-Trump/“post-truth” media literacy curricula won’t teach it to you either, because it was paid for and crafted by the US military-industrial complex: New Media Literacy Standards Aim to Combat ‘Truth Decay’.
This week, the RAND Corporation released a new set of media literacy standards designed to support schools in this task.
The standards are part of RAND’s ongoing project on “truth decay”: a phenomenon that RAND researchers describe as “the diminishing role that facts, data, and analysis play in our political and civic discourse.”
None of it is a secret, though, and it can be learned.
- Noam Chomsky - The 5 Filters of the Mass Media Machine
- Propaganda model
- Edward Bernays
- Walter Lippmann
- Council on Foreign Relations
- Powell Memorandum
- The Trilateral Commission’s report, The Crisis of Democracy
* I’ve criticized MBFC & Ad Fontes before:
I’d recommend starting out by reading a very biased but well researched and factually correct book, which will give you invaluable information about how it all became the way it is today, which will make it possible for you to discern who lies about what and why today:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_People's_History_of_the_United_States
Stop worrying about bias and start caring about reality. Judge every claim on the merit of the evidence presented for it. That’s all there is to it, really.
You are right, but know that it can be hard for someone to judge claims.
And to answer OP: I’d say try to read qualitative, well established newspapers. They often have various overview articles and if you read articles from a couple of them then you should get a diverse view
I just mean fundamentally understanding the way the law works from the bottom up, and trying to get a handle on the ramifications that may not be obvious when it comes to the things I can vote for, especially different government positions in local and federal.
I would hate to learn about this from a biased site that omits certain information or something so that I’m crippled in my understanding
To really do that you’d have to get a law degree. And every information source has some sort of bias. The way to go is look at stuff from a variety of sources.
I can understand that. So it seems I can find a subject that may be important, read articles from each side and be able to discern the truth from the differences between them all
Politics is always biased. That’s the point of it. There is no strictly objective reporting that has any meaning.
A similar site that lists the news-bias is:
