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Uni NSW Journalism lecturer gives advice on how to cleanse your news sources

Christopher Kremmer, Senior Lecturer in Literary & Narrative Journalism, School of the Arts & Media, UNSW, wants to help you shield yourself from worldviews that you don’t like, so he provides a detailed “how to” list of ways to make sure you filter out, specifically, news.com.

This man lectures in journalism. Instead of teaching journalism students on how to logically outplay and counter arguments and spot the flaws, he’s teaching them to cleanse their feeds lest they be exposed to inconvenient worldviews.

The team that has no evidence and no answers has to find a way to compensate for their intellectual vacuum.

Taking control of who gets to send us news

… before I had even typed in my search terms, it was apparent that my options had been narrowed. The news list that the aggregator threw up was dominated by websites whose idea of what constitutes news is very different to my own.

It takes a lot of effort to build an information silo:

One by one, I began blocking offending mastheads, then refreshing the browser to check the progress of my censorship. It takes a while because news websites use multiple addresses to maximise reader access. So with News Corporation, for example, I had to eliminate all their Australian regional mastheads, which provide backdoor access to stories that are often hidden behind the pay walls of their larger publications.

I would love to report that ten minutes of effort produced a remarkable change in the news of my world. But it takes more than that to curate news feeds until they perfectly match your worldview.

“News cleansing” made no difference to the top three stories that day which appeared in exactly the same order as before I tweaked my feeds.

Some of us choose who are we, others “get shaped” accidentally by the news they read:

News doesn’t just report on our world. It shapes it, and it shapes us. So the media choices we make matter. Instagram over Twitter, or The Conversation over The Daily Mail – all determine the horizon and characteristics of the known. Like it or not, we need to take control over who gets to send us news.

You have to feel sorry for those with jellyfish for brains.

If you can’t think for yourself, you’d better filter:

For digital natives, with their proclivity for tailoring their social media news feeds, this is a no-brainer. When I asked my students recently to find stories on a range of topics, most of their sources were stories on Yahoo7 and News Corporation mastheads delivered via Facebook. This stuck me as odd. Why would 18-year old undergrads with strong views on the need for action against climate change be reading The Australian? (sic)

Just let your ideology hang right out there… why would an 18 year old want to read our national masthead?

The answer is that as far as they are concerned they’re not reading The Australian. They’re reading Facebook. Yet much of their “news” reflects the attitudes of an aged generation that likes coal mines. Go figure.

Coal mines are bad, because Christopher Kremmer, polymath, genius is not just a lecturer in journalism, but a climate and energy expert, and he knows the best energy generation mix for Australia. Why don’t we just make him Prime Minister? Heck, King?

(PS: Who needs a coal mine —  it’s only Australia’s second largest export earner... with earnings equal to or greater than our entire agricultural exports.)

That Kremmer-Cleanser trusts Google to micromanage his sources tells you all you need to know.

Please — send your polite thoughts on this to Uni NSW, and add them as comments to The Conversation. Copy your comments (and screencap) and write them here too.  We want a record of the censorship of the Guide to Censorship.

We want our tax funds back too.

 

 

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