Olathe schools to teachers: Tell students Fox News is fake. Anyone else see a problem?
Hating Fox News has become something of a religion these days.
But aren’t we supposed to keep religion out of public schools?
Apparently not, at least in Olathe Public Schools. The suburban Kansas City district recently slammed Fox News during in-service teacher training on “fake news,” with a presentation that singled out the network among all media for skepticism and suspicion and took direct and indirect swipes at its credibility.
The instruction to teachers in the Jan. 7 voluntary training even included a fake news “flow chart” taken from NBC’s “Meet the Press” and titled “Chain of Intentionally Bad Information,” which shows supposed disinformation percolating through various conservative sources — including The Drudge Report and Rush Limbaugh — then into Fox News and out to Facebook.
Refreshingly, although belatedly, district officials are distancing themselves from the attempt at blatant ideological indoctrination in the schools.
“Upon further review, this session did not meet district expectations of providing a balanced perspective and fell short of the high standards of the district,” an Olathe Public Schools spokesperson said in a written statement. “This session is in no way a reflection of the intent of professional development and the learning experiences provided to our students. This session will not be repeated at any subsequent professional development session.”
Mercifully, one might add. But the damage is done, the eye-popping bias stripped naked.
Under other circumstances I might find the hair-on-fire hysteria over Fox News to be pathetically amusing. As if CNN, MSNBC and other networks don’t have their own liberal point of view. CNN, the world’s leader in Trump Derangement Syndrome, has made itself abjectly unwatchable for most of us even slightly to the right of Rachel Maddow.
Moreover, the left’s intellectual jujitsu tries with all its might to make Fox News appear fringe, its viewers pathetically alone in their suffocating little conservative fog. The Obama administration tried to declare Fox News an illegitimate news organization, even invoking the Espionage Act to spy on a Fox News reporter and brand him a criminal “co-conspirator” in his attempted coverage of North Korea nuclear jockeying.
Nice try, but no dice. Fox News was the most-watched basic cable network of any kind last year — for the fourth year in a row — according to Nielsen. If that’s an outlier, it’s the size of Greenland.
Again, legions of Fox fans can normally shrug off these chronic insults. They’re used to them. But please, keep the left-wing evangelism out of public education. Olathe’s attempt at Soviet-style schooling is a patronizing insult to many of the district’s parents’ world views, and to independent thinkers everywhere.
The presentation also mangles the First Amendment and would no doubt muddle students’ minds. On one slide, it says, “Citizens cannot express their freedoms at the same time they are infringing on the rights/freedoms of other citizens.” That’s so vague as to be meaningless, and could only have a paralyzing effect on spirited souls.
In fairness to the big and diverse district, the presentation was led by just two staff members. But they obviously felt free to pepper it with one-sided assertions. Those slanted views weren’t vetted by the district, which raises the question: What other unfiltered, unbalanced opinions are flowing undetected into classrooms?
If the Olathe school district really wants to help students with their information digestion, it should abandon the barefaced bias and teach impartial media literacy — such things as obtaining news and information from a healthy variety of known, brand-name sources. Differentiating news from opinion. What skepticism and critical thinking are, and how to apply them. How and why to check facts.
Students grow up today with ubiquitous social media feeds, where high-quality journalism and unhinged conspiracy theorists all get equal billing. They need expert guidance to navigate such choppy waters of undetermined depth.
In the course of that, students could certainly be advised of news outlets’ reputed points of view — but pretending there are none on the left is wholly delusional, disingenuous and destructive to young minds.
And to the republic, if that means anything anymore.
This story was originally published January 17, 2020 at 1:58 PM.