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What are some good places to start getting acquainted with American politics in as unbiased a manner as possible? (kbin.run)

submitted 4 months ago by all-knight-party@kbin.run to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml

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What with the recent development in the supreme courts I'm feeling a necessity to do what I can with the time left, politically.

However, aside from the most rudimentary basic terms I am basically completely ignorant to all politics on a state and federal level, and while I'd love to sit here and self loathe for my idiocy of not learning before it was important I need to start catching up and figuring out what I should be voting on and why.

Of course I'm deathly afraid that indiscriminately googling will lead to me learning biased and compromised knowledge from sites that I don't even know are biased, ending up with a skewed and inaccurate understanding.

While I know I could still be led astray by you guys, I figured it better to ask somewhere like here than to just wander off into the internet, so can anybody help me and people like me to start getting equipped?

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[–] davel@lemmy.ml 27 points 4 months ago (1 children)

The first step is to understand the media, which Media Bias/Fact Check and the Ad Fontes Media* are never going to teach you. The only people who are taught it are those who get degrees in marketing, public relations, political science, history, and journalism; and even then only some of them.

The new post-Trump/“post-truth” media literacy curricula won’t teach it to you either, because it was paid for and crafted by the US military-industrial complex: New Media Literacy Standards Aim to Combat ‘Truth Decay’.

This week, the RAND Corporation released a new set of media literacy standards designed to support schools in this task.

The standards are part of RAND’s ongoing project on “truth decay”: a phenomenon that RAND researchers describe as “the diminishing role that facts, data, and analysis play in our political and civic discourse.”

None of it is a secret, though, and it can be learned.

* I’ve criticized MBFC & Ad Fontes before:

[–] all-knight-party@kbin.run 3 points 4 months ago

I appreciate the information provided. I'll look into it and keep a critical mind