Exposing “Media Literacy” for What it is: Far Left Propaganda

Government schools plug courses that teach students to discern fact from fiction, but what they really do is push leftist ideology under the guise of “fact-checking.”

“Facing History and Ourselves” is an organization that provides free resources to teachers regarding “media literacy curriculum,” claiming to help students navigate fake news from truth. The problem is Facing History and Ourselves is a far-left group that focuses on curriculum such as the false 1619 Project and lessons that advocate for reparations. They further push the narrative that police are racist and prejudicial by nature. Facing History and Ourselves is a great example of fake news, yet they are now moderators of the topic in classrooms across the country.

Many school districts across the nation use an online platform called Actively Learn for English Language Arts (ELA), social studies, and science curriculum. Media literacy is a topic heavily pushed through this platform, but students are presented with very biased information.

One assignment instructs students to read an article about how to be more news literate. Under the topic “How is News Made,” students are taught that both sides of a position don’t always need to be presented:

When a news producer does a story on global warming, they support the argument for global warming with actual evidence. To make a global warming story balanced, news producers would have to use evidence that doesn’t actually exist. There is no evidence that global warming isn’t real. Trying to find evidence to support that side is false equivalence.

If global warming is real, why has the term been changed to climate change? An alternative view could easily be presented, yet that wouldn’t fit the leftist narrative of Actively Learn’s publisher, McGraw Hill. (Incidentally, Restoration News reports extensively on climate change and could certainly provide students with a fact-based analysis that counters global warming alarmism.)

Actively Learn also pushes students to use fact checking sites like FactCheck.org, which is funded by a foundation that supports far-left groups. Snopes is another organization touted for fact-checking—in 2021 it was discovered that the co-founder of Snopes was plagiarizing materials on the site. Yet Snopes continues to be sourced as experts on “misinformation.”

Not only do these extremist curriculum providers push their own opinions rather than facts, but parents are also concerned about the ability for student information to be tracked and abused. Throughout the Actively Learn curriculum, students must answer online surveys as part of their assignments. One lesson discusses the dangers of firearms and asks students to report how many guns they have in their home. That should send a chill down the spine of every supporter of the Second Amendment. Who gets this data?

Democrat-Controlled Censorship

California now requires by law that public schools teach media literacy. California Democrat Marc Berman shared concerns over students accessing uncensored information online such as “climate denial and vaccine conspiracy theories.” Yet elected Democrats attack anyone who want to filter pornographic books in school libraries. Berman admitted what most Democrats are thinking—they don’t want censorship unless it’s Democrat-controlled censorship. They want their own Orwellian “ministry of truth.”

The California Department of Education touts the Marxist American Library Association and the anti-Israel United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) groups as resources in their media literacy campaigns.

A leading teachers’ union, the National Education Association (NEA), believes educators are the ones to decipher fake news from fact for students. Unfortunately, the NEA has politicized education so much that teachers are assumed to have a liberal bias. NEA conventions focus on abortion, transgender issues, and giving sexually explicit material to children. This is why parents have a hard time trusting teachers. It would certainly be nice if students were taught how to think and not what to think, but left-wing bias has taken hold in curriculum and classrooms across the nation.

In 2022, Democrat Sen. Amy Klobuchar (MN) introduced the Digital Citizenship and Media Literacy Act that would give federal funding to K–12 schools and veterans for media literacy education to help identify online “misinformation.” Since most media literacy curriculum has left-wing bias, it’s the perfect way for Democrats to indoctrinate children and to push veterans toward their skewed version of “truth.” (So far, the act has not passed—thankfully.)

But Democrats’ best tool for censoring and controlling speech they disagree with is the leftist media. The Associated Press (AP) Stylebook has been used by journalists for decades as the guidebook on spelling, terminology, grammar and more. Radical changes were recently made to this AP guide in favor of leftist ideology—no longer should a journalist use the term “homeless,” for instance, because it could be stigmatizing. The AP also seems firm in its stance that transgenderism is not an ideology and that sex is not a biological fact. It’s unfortunate that the AP has gone to the dark side rather than sticking with good, fact-based journalism.

Parents, when you send your kids to government schools, be ready to deprogram them from the “fact-checking” they will receive through Orwellian media literacy curriculum.

(READ MORE: What Kid Needs Parents When Government Schools Dish Out Everything From Dinner To Hormones?)