Develop your skills to evaluate the way media sources are presenting information to you.
Ask yourself:
- Who benefits materially from this information?
- Whose biases does it indicate?
- What is my personal relationship to this information?
- What material impacts will it have on my life and on others?
As an example, check out this tweet accusing China of being the “world’s worst polluter:”
Now consider the historical cumulative data, along with considering the historical and present material conditions of the West versus China:
And factor in the per capita data:
So, who benefits from perceiving China as the world’s worst polluter?
This is but one example of how easily we can be misled and manipulated by media. 90% of media in the US is owned by six giant companies, which are themselves owned by billionaires. So as you evaluate information that is being disseminated by these news sources and then onto social media, ask yourself: “How will it affect others? Who benefits from the opinion this article seems to want me to form?”
Pay attention how these feeders of information are politically swayed and how they’re trying to sway you.
Links to article pictured in tweet, and related information below:
Africa, China, and U.S. imperialism
