(Mark Pellin, Headline USA) Teachers unions are growing increasingly frustrated as public sentiment has turned against their wont to avoid in-person classroom instruction, under the guise of pandemic protocols, as well as their penchant for controlling the leftist curriculum kids are taught.
So what better way to solve the dilemma than censoring the media to regain a narrative that fits their own agenda, keeping negative stories about the detriments of perpetual remote learning and woke instruction in the shadows.
That appears to be where the American Federation of Teachers union’s new deal with NewsGuard movement is headed, reported the Washington Free Beacon:
Tens of millions of American school children will soon rely on a liberal media watchdog group to determine what counts as misinformation.
The American Federation of Teachers this week struck a deal to license NewsGuard web browser extensions to its 1.7 million union members.
Students across the country will soon rely on NewsGuard’s tools to determine the reliability of hundreds of websites. American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten said her union will use NewsGuard to help students to “separate fact from fiction” and “develop their critical-thinking and analytical skills.”
Weingarten knows all about effectively separating the “facts” from the “fictions,” as shown by her knack for peddling inaccurate studies that promote the effectiveness of mask mandates for schools.
Now the teachers union jefe has a whole system to help her and her cronies highlight stories favorable to their leftist views, and suppress anything that refutes their dogma.
While NewsGuard claims to be nonpartisan, analysis of its so-called rating system found the outcomes of what “news” it promotes skew heavily in favor of leftist media.
The Media Research Center found NewsGuard rates liberal sites 27 points higher in terms of trustworthiness than conservative outlets, the Free Beacon reported. While nine out of the 10 websites on NewsGuard’s misinformation list are conservative or pro-life websites.
Surely a coincidence, and one that the teachers union members who will now be helping to determine what stories are worthy can support.
One glaring example of NewsGuard’s bias is highlighted by its ranking of NPR, which came under fire last week for an inaccurate story about the Supreme Court, as one of its most trustworthy sites, along with other establishment media outlets.
NewsGuard founder, Steve Brill, also had tagged the New York Post’s blockbuster expose on Hunter Biden’s laptop as likely false and based on Russian disinformation, a whopper that has been wholly discredited.
Brill said that NewsGuard had a negative rating of the Post because the newspaper tended to favor Donald Trump and had “published irresponsible stuff in the past,” according to the Free Beacon.
That’s the core wisdom and blatant bias from NewsGuard that teachers unions will now be able to use to promote stories that are favorable to their own narratives and interests.
