One would think that reporters and media commentators would have learned by now that they are vulnerable to being used as the vehicles for politically-motivated propaganda. The mainstream media, wittingly or unwittingly, not infrequently promote political agendas without checking out the background of guest speakers, “research reports”, press releases and identifying them to the public.
I recently caught venerable NPR providing an hour of air time to Mike Ratliff, senior vice president of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI), in an hour-long discussion of ISI’s misleading study, which appears to have been designed to persuade the public that higher education is failing to turn out informed citizens. Read the exposé,
which I not only put in the Commonweal Institute’s newsletter, but also sent to each of the other panelists and the program’s host, Michael Krasny.
It was worth taking that extra step. One of the two academic commentators on the panel replied:
[M]ost interesting and you may be right. And no we were not so informed. I guess [the other academic] and I were so convinced that the study was flawed in its execution that we overlooked the obvious possibility that it was intended to be biased. Thanks for the heads up. And a lesson learned.
No matter how obvious the Right’s scamming may be to the cognoscenti, we can’t assume that it’s that obvious to others. Fortunately, friendly tips can sometimes go a long way toward developing healthy skepticism.