Mary Trump: Irony Dies – Again

CBS recently reported on a decade-long initiative in Finland to educate student in media literacy. This is not a separate course but, rather part of the national core curriculum starting in preschool.

Leo Pekkala, the director of Finland’s National Audiovisual Institute, explains that, “No matter what the teacher is teaching, whether it’s physical education or mathematics or language, you have to think, ‘OK, how do I include these elements in my work with children and young people?’”

The goal is to teach students how to avoid scams, identify false information, and debunk propaganda—to learn, that is, how to separate fact from fiction. What, for example, is the difference between ads and stories, between poems and publicity?

Li Andersson, former education minister, said, “I think it should be seen as a civic skill in the current society that we live in, because we all live in an information society nowadays, or it’s called an information society; but, actually some of the information is mis- or disinformation.”

The urgency of this mission has been increased by the fact that Finland has often been the target of propaganda campaigns (including the stoking of anti-migrant sentiment—sound familiar?) by its hostile neighbor, Russia, with which it shares an 818-mile border.

The rise of the internet is also a factor. According to Andersson:

It’s more about familiarizing children also with what the digital world is. To make sure that all children have a sufficient set of digital skills. And on top of that you also have to teach them how to act in the digitalized world, how to interpret different types of facts. [If kids don’t have these skills] it makes our societies very vulnerable; I think it will also polarize political discussion.

Critical thinking is a priority. The hope is that teaching this crucial skill will create a firewall against fake news in the service of protecting the truth. In other words, the goal is to arm students with resilience against false information.

According to a New York Times report, “Finland has advantages in countering misinformation. Its public school system is among the best in the world. College is free. There is high trust in the government. Teachers are highly respected.”

In a 2023 survey, Finland ranked first on the Media Literacy Index (a combination of press freedom, the level of trust in society, and scores in reading, science and math) among 41 European countries.

The United States wasn’t included in the survey, but a Gallup survey released in 2022 found that only 34 percent of Americans trusted media to report the news fully, accurately and fairly.

CBS, which is hosting the vice-presidential debate between Gov. Tim Walz and domestic terrorist JD Vance, has announced that it will not fact-check the debate in real time, although (for what purpose I do not know), “CBS News will provide real-time fact-checking via [in-house fact-checking unit] CBS News Confirmed during the debate online on our live blog and on social and in post-debate coverage.” ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

So-called moderators, Margaret Brennan and Norah O’Donnell, “will facilitate” opportunities for Vance and Walz to confront each other which sounds, on the one hand, like CBS wants a food fight and, on the other, as if its comfortable giving a huge advantage to the one debate participant—Vance—who is known, like his running mate, for being an inveterate liar.

If the First Amendment allows people to lie and spread disinformation, if media organizations refuse to perform the basic task of making sure viewers know if lies are being told during a vice-presidential debate, then it is incumbent upon us to make sure our children (and our adults) know how to spot a lie when they hear or read one. If only.