At Grist, Paola Rosa-Aquino writes—The life-altering, world-ending topic they’re still not teaching you about in school:
It’s June, and that means and millions of college students are done with academic classes and free to focus on more important matters like catching up on sleep, spending time in the great outdoors … and worrying about climate change. But, with few exceptions, college courses haven’t been doing a great job preparing young people to face real-world problems and emotions related to global warming.
Professor Jennifer Atkinson is in charge of one of those exceptions, a seminar at the University of Washington, Bothell on “Eco-Grief and Climate Anxiety.” She likens the course to “boot camp, preparing students for the long, hard fight ahead.” Her class explores climate issues and environmental issues through literature, poetry, film, and the arts. As part of the Winter 2019 offering, students prepared responses from David Wallace-Wells’ grim prognosis of our climate future in ‘The Uninhabitable Earth’ and arranged outdoor experiences. As a final group project, they had to develop a climate change website, handbook, or proposed retreat to help others cope with the “anger, grief, and despair that can arise in the face of our environmental crisis.”
When Atkinson first offered the course last year, she wasn’t sure if students would be interested. But two dozen enrolled, and after word got out about the class, hundreds of messages — most of them supportive — flooded Atkinson’s inbox.
“We should be devoting more [academic] attention to climate change,” she told Grist. “Understanding climate change has become a basic literacy that’s needed to understand everything else in the 21st century.” [...]
Many recent science majors say climate change was not part of the required curricula in their high school or college courses, despite researchers having alerted the public to its importance as early as the 1980s. [...]
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“The first truth is that the liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is fascism -- ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power.” ~~Franklin Delano Roosevelt, “Message to Congress on the Concentration of Economic Power,” April 29, 1938
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BLAST FROM THE PAST
On this date at Daily Kos in 2016—Fact-checking on television: Can it even work?
This is perhaps an unintentionally depressing story about the purely technical aspects of adapting "fact-checking" journalism to work on television.
What fact-checkers online do with hyperlinks must be done on TV with graphics. These must contain every number and source the fact-checker mentions — but nothing more. This often means losing a lot of contextual information compared to online fact checks.
The uncharitable way to put it is that fact-checking needs to be dumbed down and drama-boosted to work on television, what with short attention spans and so forth, and that hosts in other countries seem to be a bit ahead of us in working out the kinks of this newfangled approach of JESUS CHRIST CAN WE JUST BE TOLD WHEN SOMEONE IS LYING TO OUR FACES HOW HARD CAN THIS—sorry, how the experiments have been going in other countries.
But the depressing part is not the technical details of how to best present "fact checks" of televised claims, but the realization that much of it is incompatible with modern American journalism as practiced.
