At this week's Round Table, Maya, Skyla, and Jack spoke with Dr Seema Yasmin, Emmy Award-winning journalist, Pulitzer finalist, and a CNN medical analyst who advocates for media literacy and slowing the spread of false news. In her newest book, “What the Fact? Finding the Truth in All the Noise,” Dr Yasmin offers teens a how-to guide to build the discernment necessary to tell fact from fiction. We discussed and lamented how little media literacy is taught in schools–and how this omission contributes to the drift away from citizenship and towards polarization, fueling a vicious cycle. This is not accidental, and contributes to things like the weaponization of Critical Race Theory, leading to the banning of books and conversations that would expose young people to key information. We must ask ourselves, whose agenda does it serve to have young people lacking the skills to be critical consumers of information? This is a core challenge of our time and it can seem overwhelming BUT Dr Yasmin underscored that it’s fixable. We have evidence based strategies for how to disagree with each other, how to build bridges, and how to debunk myths. A starting place is to TEACH critical thinking to all generations and emphasize that beliefs aren’t binary. It’s important to leave your mind open to new evidence and work to develop “cognitive immunity” to create antibodies that help you resist falling for false information and propaganda. Dr Yasmin’s book WTF is meant to be a self-armoring tool to arm us to challenge systems, help us curate our media diets, and guide us in having productive arguments without challenging people’s core identity/culture/ideology. Be sure to check it out and thanks for listening!
