Transcript
Speaker: Most people that I found over the last two years when I've spoken at libraries, Ed and Bo, is, you know, honestly, not everybody wants to be taught how to search for information.
Speaker: But the truth of the matter is, we all need to be retaught how to search for good information these days because of our inner circle and the algorithms swirling around.
Speaker: Welcome to How to Have Kids Love Learning, where we explore ideas and strategies for parents and educators that help students thrive.
Speaker: I'm your host, Ed Madison.
Speaker: I'm a professor and researcher at the University of Oregon and serve as executive director of the Journalistic Learning Initiative, a nonprofit organization that empowers middle and high school students to discover their voice, improve academic outcomes, and become self-directed learners through project-based storytelling.
Speaker: And I'm Ed's co-host Beau Brusco, a former English language arts teacher and multimedia journalist.
Speaker: And it is my pleasure to introduce to you our guest today, Eric Bean.
Speaker: Eric Bean.
Speaker: holds a master's degree in journalism from Michigan State University and a doctorate in education from University of Phoenix.
Speaker: Currently, he is an ELA instructional coach in the Detroit area.
Speaker: He also is an associate research chair for the Center of Leadership Studies at the University of Phoenix, where he serves as the Leadership Perspective section editor of the Journal of Leadership Studies.
Speaker: Bean has 25 years experience teaching English composition, journalism, film studies, humanities,
Speaker: cyber communications, critical thinking, and technical writing.
Speaker: He has taught in the Detroit area at Wayne County Community College, Berkeley Public Schools, and served as an associate professor of arts and humanities at American Public University, as well as authored numerous innovative academic books for teachers and students, including social media writing lesson plans.
Speaker: In 2019, he co-wrote Ethan's Healthy Mind Express, a children's first mental health primer, a picture book that features lessons on inclusion,
Speaker: neurodiversity and internet safety.
Speaker: His most recent effort is entitled Bias is All Around You, a handbook for inspecting social media and news stories.
Speaker: And that's what we're going to get into today.
Speaker: So the word bias is, you know, kind of let's unpack that word to begin with, just by talking about what do we mean by the word bias?
Speaker: Well, you know what?
Speaker: My definition of it is it really is, you know, anyone's opinion.
Speaker: That's what bias is.
Speaker: It's your opinion.
Speaker: But is your opinion based on good information or poor information?
Speaker: So that's how I view the definition of bias.
Speaker: So it's a particular taste towards something or somebody that shies away towards something.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So in the current sort of culture wars around politics and everything else, there's a concern, I guess, from several conservative camps about educator bias, you know, in terms of teachers forcing their own agendas on students.
Speaker: And then there's the reverse concern that...
Speaker: you know, from people that are followed more progressive politics about bias that kids are coming across as they're looking at various sources of information.
Speaker: Well, you know, so there's two ways to look at this.
Speaker: First of all, my book, which came out in 2021,
Speaker: you know, is strictly nonpartisan.
Speaker: It doesn't take a side.
Speaker: The book even explains that both Republicans and Democrats can have their partialities, obviously, and so forth.
Speaker: But the other part of the equation is how one does approach, you know, information.
Speaker: So in other words, for anybody to be objective and anybody to be authentic with the information that
Speaker: they're exposed to, right?
Speaker: You know, everybody is somewhat affected based on their inner circle.
Speaker: So, and then, so then we get into the information biases, halo effect, affinity effect.
Speaker: Do we search for information based on our inner circle?
Speaker: You know, that uncle that won't back down from his position at the dinner table, and you're afraid to, you know, look for other information for the other side of the story.
Speaker: You know, that's that's part of the conundrum.
Speaker: So how we search for information based on our inner circle, we're all affected by our inner circle and what we're exposed to through algorithms, aggressive algorithms coming through our smartphones.
Speaker: that are serving us up bait and switch ads and, you know, some fake news, some real news.
Speaker: You know, it's just a whirlwind of information.
Speaker: And most people that I found over the last two years when I've spoken at libraries, Ed,
Speaker: And Bo is, you know, honestly, not everybody wants to be taught how to search for information.
Speaker: But the truth of the matter is, we all need to be retaught how to search for good information these days because of our inner circle and the algorithms swirling around.
Speaker: So how do you approach this when you're talking about students who may be searching for information for the, you know, newly like in their sixth graders or seventh graders and they haven't really, you know, had to take on these skills before.
Speaker: How does your book or your approach address that?
Speaker: Yeah, great question.
Speaker: Well, you know what?
Speaker: It's interesting.
Speaker: I did a book signing.
Speaker: I remember just after COVID was coming down and we were all allowed to circulate.
Speaker: And I was in Lakeview, Michigan, and they opened up a brand new library about an hours north of Grand Rapids.
Speaker: And when I was there signing up books, there was a woman with the last name Bean, and she approached me and wanted to know if I was related to any Beans over there.
Speaker: To make a long story short, she was the former high school librarian because they closed down the library at the Lakeview High School, and they built this beautiful town library, which I was very impressed with and glad that they did.
Speaker: because I believe strongly in libraries.
Speaker: But she told me that, you know, the principal just told everybody to go on Google and search for information.
Speaker: And so I thought, well, my word.
Speaker: You know, if you don't teach people how to search for information from the search engines, they're not really going to know where to begin.
Speaker: And so I saw in my own students, Ed, over the last few years by teaching at Wayne County Community College,
Speaker: teaching in high school, that their sources were degrading.
Speaker: They were going downhill and they didn't understand the biases associated.
Speaker: And so with all my years of teaching, you know, I had an epiphany.
Speaker: I thought, wait a minute, information, the first step in determining the initial biases of all information is that information can be segmented into seven source types, for-profit,
Speaker: nonprofit, academic, government, watchdog, which is like a nonprofit, but they watch over the nonprofits and for-profits.
Speaker: Then you have hidden agenda, which also could be artificial intelligence now.
Speaker: And then you have individuals like you and I, I think I covered all seven of them there.
Speaker: And I think I mentioned the government.
Speaker: So those seven sources, when we get a piece of information, and I don't care where it comes from, it could be a digital format.
Speaker: It can be an analog format.
Speaker: It could be on TikTok.
Speaker: It could be over the FM radio.
Speaker: It could be in a newspaper.
Speaker: We have to say to ourselves, is the author of this piece...
Speaker: represents which one of the seven sources does the author represent could be a for-profit journalist okay journalist is supposed to be objective it could be a non-profit who is publishing an editorial we don't know and you could be the information can also be segmented into more than one group one of those seven groups so that's the first step that i teach my students ed and beau is i teach them that all information you know uh
Speaker: Media literacy has some other techniques like SIFT and CRAAP, but those don't address the very initial first step.
Speaker: And I strongly believe, based on my June 2023 peer-reviewed article in the European Journal, Media Literacy and Academic Research, that we should tell students to first look at those seven sources because they all bring their own impartiality.
Speaker: So,
Speaker: For example, when I look at academic, you know, professors have to publish or perish.
Speaker: And many of them, you know, are trying to get tenure.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And I remember years ago, I was taking a class at a school.
Speaker: This is in the mid 90s.
Speaker: And the person that I was taking the class from was showing me magazine examples from the 1960s.
Speaker: So I said to this teacher, this professor, I said, why don't you show me more recent examples?
Speaker: He said, Eric, I don't have to do anything.
Speaker: I have tenure.
Speaker: He actually said that to me.
Speaker: So I, you know, but now that doesn't mean I'm going to, you know, bad mouth the school where that came from or anything like that.
Speaker: I still had a good experience.
Speaker: But the bottom line is academic sources have a bias inherent to them.
Speaker: For profits, their partiality is they want to sell you something and they can often overvalue their products.
Speaker: But we need products, right?
Speaker: You know, and it goes on and on and on from each category.
Speaker: Well, so Eric, what I like so much about what you've done here, making these seven sort of categories or sources of partiality, is you've really given bias more nuance.
Speaker: And I think that's important because I'm going to go out on a limb here and assert something that just because something is biased doesn't always mean that it's untrue.
Speaker: And in fact, if you go back, I believe it was Soren Kierkegaard who said that in order to be passionate, one is going to be biased, right?
Speaker: Absolutely.
Speaker: I think taking that into consideration, these seven categories help us not only identify bias, but also like
Speaker: gives us a framework for, okay, what type of bias is it?
Speaker: And therefore, I think from there, you can go into sort of a more nuanced conversation about the bias, which informs the sort of caliber or quality of the information you're dealing with.
Speaker: Was that kind of the idea behind this theory?
Speaker: Beau, you nailed it.
Speaker: Absolutely.
Speaker: So once we look at the inherent partiality of those categories of any piece of information,
Speaker: Then we can drill down deeper.
Speaker: Is there a conflict of interest bias?
Speaker: The only way to know that is we have to search the author and understand who the author is, their background.
Speaker: And in the Greek rhetorical styles, that would be the ethos, the background of the author.
Speaker: And then we can search for fallacies.
Speaker: Does the piece exist?
Speaker: you know, have a fallacy embedded in it that makes it hard to follow or takes away from the real issue, straw man fallacy, for example, right?
Speaker: So no, you're absolutely correct.
Speaker: You know, we, the other types of biases that could be baked into any piece, you know, could have to do with conflict of interest, could have to do with
Speaker: any number of the 10 fallacies that I talk about in this book as well.
Speaker: But, you know, you're right.
Speaker: You have to be passionate about your topic.
Speaker: When I tell my students, when you take an argumentative thesis and
Speaker: for or against gun control, you're going to be passionate about it one way or the other.
Speaker: But I could tell you, I could say to any student, I want you to write a paper that you're against gun control, even though you're not against gun control.
Speaker: But I want you to include good information, valid statistics, and defend that thesis.
Speaker: Go do it, right?
Speaker: I could say to my students,
Speaker: And, you know, so, but no, you, we can never 100% remove all the biases from any academic paper.
Speaker: We can never remove all the biases from, you know, the experts on, on a, any given particular topic.
Speaker: But I think we all need to be open.
Speaker: And these days, you know, when I serve up a book like this, this is for all walks of life.
Speaker: And this could be used in the classroom or,
Speaker: This could be used for, you know, a person down the street, you know, who I wrote the book with the intention that that we're being victimized with all of this fake news and information swirling around.
Speaker: And we need to protect ourselves.
Speaker: So but at the same time, you can go to the tools page at Biashandbook.com.
Speaker: Take that seven question survey to see if your inner circle is
Speaker: Affects your ability to interact with the information so but you know to answer your question absolutely.
Speaker: You know we all have biases, but then is it based on good information in our experience or is it based on how we were raised and we're not willing to listen to the other side.
Speaker: You know, when I tell people I wrote a biased book, their first initial thought is, oh, it's about implicit or explicit bias.
Speaker: No, this is a book about information bias.
Speaker: And I don't.
Speaker: I didn't even write it with the intention of I'm not interested in what the topic is, but I can take any piece of information with the Greek rhetorical styles and we could apply those styles and determine the overall level of bias.
Speaker: You know, for example, an editorial is more biased than a piece that has attribution or a citation, even if the attribution or citation might not be the best, you know, attribution or citation.
Speaker: So an editorial is just somebody giving their opinion without anything to back it up.
Speaker: So, and of course, the Greek rhetorical styles would say that's, you know, would be lean more towards pathos.
Speaker: Logos is reasoning, statistics or fact and so forth.
Speaker: I was going to say, I think one of the challenges facing journalism right now is, uh,
Speaker: fragmentation of audiences that there isn't there isn't you know there are no gatekeepers like there used to be who are you know basically determining what we what we see and what we hear as news you know anyone you could start Eric your own news channel yes tomorrow on YouTube
Speaker: And there's nothing preventing you from doing that.
Speaker: And I think, you know, for some people that they consider that a good thing.
Speaker: But I mean, if there if there isn't sort of a national or at least a centralized narrative of, you know, of what we consider to be authoritative.
Speaker: It presents somewhat of a problem.
Speaker: I mean, I think that when there's a disaster, people still turn to New York Times or CNN or ABC News or one of the sort of dominant networks.
Speaker: But when it comes to everything else, people are sort of just sort of pick your flavor, you know.
Speaker: Well, and that's why.
Speaker: So there's a small chapter in the book called Outliers.
Speaker: which is actually an interesting term because it's the opposite, I hope of liars.
Speaker: Outliers are other sources of information that validate, you know, what's going on, you know, so we could,
Speaker: You know, for example, here in the Detroit area, we, well, in Michigan, we just passed a law saying you're not allowed to hold anything in your hand while you drive the car.
Speaker: You're not allowed to hold your cell phone in your hand.
Speaker: But I tell people, if you really want to know what the law says, you got to go to your local municipality.
Speaker: That's where a lot of the laws are created.
Speaker: Get a copy of the law.
Speaker: Read the details of the law.
Speaker: You're right, Ed.
Speaker: We can't just rely on our traditional news networks to tell us that
Speaker: And you are correct.
Speaker: I remember years ago thinking once we have the technology, anybody can have their own television station.
Speaker: But can you get people to listen to you at 2 a.m.
Speaker: in the morning while you're juggling or something?
Speaker: And, you know, and that's what everybody's doing on TikTok and Instagram.
Speaker: You know, we're all we're all just, you know, vying for attention.
Speaker: And Bo is right, too.
Speaker: We're all becoming.
Speaker: You know, some of us are becoming reluctant advertisers because we agreed to use the service.
Speaker: And then all of a sudden we might see our name.
Speaker: You know, if we like Coca-Cola in Facebook, then all of a sudden they take our face and they put it in a Coca-Cola ad because we signed off on it.
Speaker: Well, where I wanted to go with this, Eric, is, you know, you're talking a lot about sort of the dangers of people not realizing that when they go onto the Internet, it's not their window to the world anymore.
Speaker: It's their window to their world because of the nature of algorithms and echo chambers.
Speaker: And I think getting into that, we can start talking about now, what are the sort of
Speaker: dangers associated with using bias or poor quality information, in particular, maybe the mental health, the mental, the impact on mental health, diving into that.
Speaker: Well, absolutely.
Speaker: You know, I think all of us, you know, Ed, Beau, I'm sure
Speaker: You know, over the years, you've shared a piece of information in social media.
Speaker: And then maybe, maybe an hour later, maybe a couple of days later, you checked it, you really checked it and said, you know, I shouldn't have shared that piece of information.
Speaker: It was outdated.
Speaker: You know, what got me started writing the book is adults in my own social media network were sharing bad information.
Speaker: So just the innocent thought of sharing what I the metaphor I use in the book is that if you walk into a theater, if you were to purposely scream fire.
Speaker: and there was no fire, you would be arrested.
Speaker: You'd be arrested.
Speaker: So shouldn't we all use information with prudence and goodwill?
Speaker: Information, you know, my mantra that I go around, information is designed to help people, not hurt them.
Speaker: Unfortunately, we're living in a world right now where information is being used to hurt people.
Speaker: And I suppose over the last
Speaker: you know, many decades, it always has propaganda, you know, this and that.
Speaker: But but the mental health component, yes, the mental health component that I talk about in the book is cognitive dissonance.
Speaker: In other words, we all of us, if we're sharing a piece of information, we should thoroughly invent that information, inspect that information,
Speaker: for its objectivity, its authenticity, before we share it.
Speaker: If not, we should experience a little unsettling feeling.
Speaker: So Festinger in 1957 came up with cognitive dissonance.
Speaker: It's when our behaviors are different than our thoughts.
Speaker: Our behaviors are different than our thoughts.
Speaker: So our behaviors, you know, we share a piece of information, but we should know better not to really share unless we
Speaker: we understand, oh, that information is five years old.
Speaker: I better let my network know.
Speaker: This is old.
Speaker: Doesn't mean old information is bad, but I got to let my network know.
Speaker: You don't just share it.
Speaker: You should digest it first and then understand the value of it to your network.
Speaker: And I think that's so the mental health component.
Speaker: We could be following fake news.
Speaker: We could be following a group of people that we think are authentic, but they're not authentic.
Speaker: That could hurt our reputation.
Speaker: I think this is all pointing towards how important it is to teach younger students media literacy because oftentimes we get caught up in looking for validation in different tribes existing on the Internet, whether it's political tribes or whatever.
Speaker: And, you know, especially on a developing psychology, that validation is so important and honestly informative to their own identity of self, right?
Speaker: And so if they have no tools wherewith to identify authentic audiences, honest intentions, and just good information like what you're talking about, I think that poses a real danger to them, a lasting danger.
Speaker: Well, that's it.
Speaker: And then also, you know, you have those traditional biases, you know,
Speaker: From the moment you're born, your family biases, your religion, your school, your community, then the outer circle, which is on Ethan's Healthy Mind Express, the book cover has all the circles.
Speaker: And then the outer circle is the internet itself, right?
Speaker: And, you know, and then you have just, you know, connotation and denotation.
Speaker: You know, I'm here in the Detroit area.
Speaker: The Detroit area has had a bad reputation, you know, for many years being in the Rust Belt, but
Speaker: But I tell people, you know, we're in the Great Lakes and we have the largest body of freshwater and the Detroit area has this and has that.
Speaker: It's, you know, there's a lot of things that are going on.
Speaker: But you're right.
Speaker: We have to teach young journalists today that, you know, to be open minded and that they have the highest responsibility.
Speaker: The young journalists today have the highest responsibility.
Speaker: to have the utmost integrity when they produce a story, you know, when people ask me, you know, how many sides there are to a story, there could be five sides, 10 sides, you know, but as a journalist, you know, I wish there was more investigative journalism today.
Speaker: I don't know if Ed could speak on this, but it, it seems like we've lost some of the days.
Speaker: I remember when, you know, there used to be specials behind the scenes, you know, for investigative pieces.
Speaker: And, but, you know,
Speaker: I know I'm rambling on, but I was even disappointed that there should have been more town halls during the pandemic, which should have been hosted by the local TV stations to help everybody make more informed decisions.
Speaker: So, but the local television stations, I know I'm going off on a rampage here.
Speaker: They were more than willing to take the brand new, the online gambling apps, which began during COVID.
Speaker: But that's a different story.
Speaker: But the bottom line is, is that the mental health component, getting back to your original question, you know, there's a lot at stake here.
Speaker: There's a lot of, there's our reputation, how we use information, how we interact with it.
Speaker: And the information we produce, which is very much a part of the media literacy process.
Speaker: You know, do we represent ourselves in a positive fashion?
Speaker: And do we understand how the search engines take our pictures, you know, take our posts?
Speaker: Are we posting publicly?
Speaker: Are we posting to our friends?
Speaker: Are we posting privately?
Speaker: All of those things are up, you know, for people to really be aware of.
Speaker: Absolutely.
Speaker: You know, one of the casualties of the No Child Left Behind podcast,
Speaker: legislation from the second Bush era was the loss of civics education.
Speaker: I think a number of states are starting to revalue and bring that back, but we lost civics.
Speaker: It certainly doesn't appear on standardized tests.
Speaker: It's not something that therefore has counted for many years.
Speaker: And so consequently,
Speaker: We've got several generations of young people who don't really understand the First Amendment.
Speaker: I was looking at one study that the Annenberg group did where they found that only 20 people surveyed in 2022 knew that the First Amendment included freedom of the press, only 20%, and that was down from 50% the year before.
Speaker: you know, the whole notion of there being a watchdog role and it's often called the fourth estate and that, you know, people understanding that journalism has a very, very specific role to play in society.
Speaker: It's, it's, it's, it's unlike any other, you know, occupation except for maybe being a judge, you know, but, but very, very specific role.
Speaker: And, and most people don't, they don't know that they don't understand it.
Speaker: Well,
Speaker: And so, Ed, on page 31 of my book, I cite Joseph Pulitzer, who said, I believe back in 1904, that if we can't separate fact from fiction, we may not have a nation anymore.
Speaker: Richard Dreyfuss, and if he's listening to our podcast right now, one of my favorite childhood stars...
Speaker: of Jaws and American graffiti.
Speaker: He just, he just published a book on civics because he's fed up.
Speaker: I saw him on Tik TOK and he's, you know, he's fed up Richard.
Speaker: You know, if you can hear me, you know, let's let's go together and talk about bias and let's talk about civics.
Speaker: But along with Ed and his mission and Bo's mission here with the journalistic initiative, because, you know, you're right, Ed, uh, civics, uh, students don't even know what, uh,
Speaker: You know, how local laws are created, you know, commissions, planning commissions, board meetings.
Speaker: You have to have a quorum, enough people in order to vote to be able to put a law on the table and talk about the law, you know, at those local meetings because local journalism has died.
Speaker: Absolutely.
Speaker: You know, it's a problem.
Speaker: a result of the way news is digested today, I don't think people realize how fast outrage spreads.
Speaker: Outrage spreads at lightning speed compared to actual news and due process of the law, for example.
Speaker: I remember when George Floyd's video went viral, in an instant the world, at least the country, knew about it before anything was published.
Speaker: And I don't think we take into consideration sort of the sensationalism behind how we are now not only consumers of media, but we are the media now.
Speaker: And it's very disorienting, I think, for a lot of us who don't have that understanding of how these systems were designed to operate.
Speaker: And one place I want to go with this, Eric, talking about bias and maybe sort of
Speaker: ending on a positive light on the subject is, you know, I believe that we are all subjects to subjectivity.
Speaker: We all, in our human condition, we can't rid ourselves of bias, of our perception, right?
Speaker: Because to do so, we'd have to separate ourselves from ourselves, you know, so it's impossible.
Speaker: But I think the redeeming truth is,
Speaker: behind bias is that because we are all susceptible to bias, to getting lost in our passions, to getting caught up in groupthink, for example, is that we're all susceptible to it.
Speaker: And I think because of that, we have a wonderful opportunity to empathize with our fellow man, regardless of what sort of different reality they're living in.
Speaker: You know, I liken this, the conversation now to
Speaker: to the fallacy of hasty generalization.
Speaker: So I think if there's one thing we can all do for our fellow mankind, you know, for everybody, for everybody, is that we all need to practice and to avoid hasty generalization.
Speaker: So in other words, when we hear something, you know, just because we hear it or see it on the internet doesn't mean it's true.
Speaker: We need to really take a deep breath, use critical thinking, but take a deep breath and, you know,
Speaker: Wait, you know, and get more information before we share it or make a final decision.
Speaker: Now, obviously, you know, if there's a gas leak in your community, that's a different story.
Speaker: We need to react real fast.
Speaker: And we hope that it's real news that there really is, you know, if there is a gas leak, it's true.
Speaker: And so forth.
Speaker: And we need to know where to go and what to do.
Speaker: But in general, what I'm saying is, is that we can all be a victim of hasty generalization, you know, by people just quickly creating rumors, all going back to the days of rumors.
Speaker: Or we could all, you know, we all need to take a step back so that we don't misuse information like that hastily, you know, on a positive note.
Speaker: So and that's all part of the biases all around you.
Speaker: You know, one I was at one library and a woman said, you know, Mr. Bean, you should rename your book.
Speaker: Lies are all around you, you know.
Speaker: And I thought, well, maybe maybe I would get more attention if I if I said that.
Speaker: But I stuck to the word bias because you're right, Bo, you know, bias can be a positive thing.
Speaker: to help people, but it also can be misused too as well.
Speaker: Well, that's probably a great note to end on.
Speaker: Thank you so much, Eric.
Speaker: This has been a delight and we look forward to further work from you and opportunities to collaborate.
Speaker: Thank you.
Speaker: I can't wait.
Speaker: How to Have Kids Love Learning is produced by the Journalistic Learning Initiative.
Speaker: For more information about our work, please visit journalisticlearning.com.
