Complete Story
11/09/2017
Making media literacy great again
From The Columbia Journalism Review
Professor Carl T. Bergstrom began his first lecture for INFO198 at the University of Washington with a declaration about America. “There is so much bullshit,” he said, looking up at 160 students last spring. “We are drowning in it.” Bergstrom’s audience didn’t seem surprised or outraged by his phraseology. They had surely heard that word before, but they no doubt also recognized it from the title in the course catalog: “Calling Bullshit in the Age of Big Data.”
As Bergstrom spoke, a picture of Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump appeared on a screen behind him, followed moments later by a photo of a young woman typing on her phone. “The average American spends nearly an hour a day on Facebook,” he said. “Doing what? Mostly spreading bullshit.” The students laughed. Then Bergstrom shouted, “Enough! Enough bullshit! We are tired of this.”
That roughly explains how Bergstrom, an evolutionary biologist, wound up in a lecture hall declaring war on fake news. He and his colleague Jevin West, a data science professor, launched the class this past spring, not long after hoax stories, Russian bots, and clickbait headlines wreaked havoc on the US electoral process. The professors were also concerned about misleading science stories, journalism by press release, and the way interest groups and corporations twist data. The class filled up in less than a minute, with several hundred students turned away.
“We wanted to teach students how to evaluate the onslaught of information in their lives,” West tells CJR. “There’s information warfare going on right now.”
