> It seems to me that students’ main takeaway from this course would be to trust NPR, NYT and the like, rather than viral content. Which is of course great for

> It seems to me that students’ main takeaway from this course would be to trust NPR, NYT and the like, rather than viral content. Which is of course great for NPR. I had some minimal education on scrutinizing sources in high school and that's pretty much what it was. I think we spend maybe 10min talking about yellow journalism. Topics such as evaluating which parties have what direct conflicts of interests or ancillary motivations and how that may affect their reporting were simply not covered. It would have been trivially easy to dig up a few non-controversial historical examples of people peddling very wrong narratives for the benefit of those who fund them.