No one really needs a course to understand this. All you have to do is start watching cable news with some objectivity.
The College Fix reports:
Johns Hopkins offers summer class on ‘fake news’ for middle schoolersThe Center for Talented Youth at Johns Hopkins University is currently offering a summer class titled “Persuasion and Propaganda” that promises to teach junior high and high school students about “fake news.”The class will explore contemporary forms of propaganda, such as “bot-generated tweets, mudslinging political ads, misleading advertisements, and fact-distorting TV news reports,” according to the course description.“Without an objective distance from current events—and with ever subtler techniques for influencing opinions—how can we tell what is ‘fake news’?” it states.The class is advertised for students in eighth through 12th grades and is labeled as “advanced.” It’s one of a number of high school courses offered through the private university as part of its On-Campus Summer Programs.However, the course description did not define “fake news,” and the Center for Talented Youth did not respond to The Fix’s questions about the course and the term. The center initially responded to The Fix by promising that someone would follow up, but no one did to the initial email or a second request for comment.The course promises to help students to “become critical media consumers while learning to identify flawed premises and developing rhetorical strategies necessary to question and dissect conflicting messages.”Students will then “construct and deliver [their] own persuasive arguments in written compositions, oral presentations, brief films, and public speeches.”The term “fake news” is used by people on the left and the right, sometimes to call out media bias and other times to describe “news they don’t like,” DePauw University Professor Jeffrey McCall told The Fix in a recent interview via email.
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