Teachers Union Partners With Progressive Organization to Further Indoctrinate Children – Opinion

The debate surrounding progressive indoctrination of K-12 students has focused largely on the teachers incorporating Critical Race Theory (CRT), concepts into their lessons. However, the hard left isn’t the only one trying to influence children. Recent developments suggest that they also want to prevent students viewing material in direct opposition to woke doctrine.

American Federation of Teachers (AFT), announced Tuesday it would be partnering with NewsGuard. NewsGuard has a bias in favor of left-leaning news ratings site. The collaboration is ostensibly designed to promote “media literacy” among students who are susceptible to being influenced by “misinformation.” The announcement reads:

Under the terms of the pathbreaking licensing agreement, coinciding with National News Literacy Week(link is external), the AFT’s 1.7 million members, tens of millions of kids they teach, and their families, can now receive free, real-time “traffic light” news ratings and detailed “Nutrition Label” reviews, via a licensed copy of NewsGuard’s browser extension, whenever they search the web for news and information.

For years, educators have fought battles against suspect sourcing, with their students often misled by dubious outlets and spam sites posing as “news.” NewsGuard offers a practical solution, alerting students and educators to those sites while also providing a valuable lesson in media literacy.

The “traffic light” news rating and “Nutrition Label” are supposedly designed to inform news consumers of the accuracy, honesty, and reliability of a given news site. NewsGuard created these tools to help people avoid being deceived by “misinformation,” which, as you already know, is defined as “any opinion that conflict with the left.”

The Media Research Center (MRC) conducted a study in December 2021, in which it found “extraordinary left-wing bias” in NewsGuard’s rating methodology. The average difference between right-wing and left-wing websites was 27 points. Can you guess which side is scoring higher?

MRC’s assessment showed NewsGuard rating left-wing site the Nation, and Jacobin, an unabashedly Marxist site, at 93 percent while the average rating for conservative outlets like Fox News, Breitbart News, and the Washington Times66%. These disparities can be easily interpreted as a deliberate attempt to make the left-leaning outlets seem more trustworthy than the ones on right. Randi Weingarten is the union boss of AFT. It is obvious that she is working to prevent students from being exposed to progressive outlets more often than left-leaning ones.

The browser extension would show a green checkmark for sites NewsGuard deems to be “credible” and a red exclamation point for those that “fail to meet the basic standards of credibility.”

“For years, educators have fought battles against suspect sourcing, with their students often misled by dubious outlets and spam sites posing as ‘news,’” the AFT announcement declared. “AFT President Randi Weingarten hailed the deal as a game-changer for teachers and families drowning in an ocean of online dishonesty.”

Weingarten lauded NewsGuard as “a beacon of clarity to expose the dark depths of the internet and uplift those outlets committed to truth and honesty rather than falsehoods and fabrications.”

However, the MRC report showed that the outlets NewsGuard has rated favorably aren’t so deserving of their positive ratings. The Nation, in particular, published a piece titled “In Defense of Destroying Property,”It was in this context that it justifiably justified the George Floyd Riots.

Jacobin published a piece titled, “Why You Should Be a Socialist – and a Marxist,”The author claims that Marxism shouldn’t be called authoritarianism. “Marxists have ‘had too little regard for the importance of individual liberty.’ This is certainly true for Stalinism, but it’s hardly a fair picture of the rich democratic-socialist tradition inspired by Marx,” he wrote.

Mother Jones received an 87.5 percent rating. It was one of many outlets to publish the Steele dossier. Buzzfeed received the same rating, but has not changed its reporting.

On the other hand, MRC’s report notes that conservative sites are typically given lower ratings:

By comparison, The Federalist, posted in the “right” AllSides list, was scored the worst with a ridiculous “12.5” on NewsGuard. A predominant reason for the abysmal rating, according to NewsGuard, was that The Federalist questioned the efficacy of mask mandates for COVID-19, even though liberal CNBC (not on the AllSides list, but has a “95” NewsGuard rating) cited a study showing that cloth masks were only 37 percent effective at filtering out virus particles. Another August preprint study did not find an “association between mask mandates or use and reduced COVID-19 spread in US states.”

People like Weingarten have no problem with attempting to indoctrinate children into hard-leftist ideology – they tend to believe the ends justify the means. As many on the left, Weingarten believes, along with others, that the children you give to them are yours and they are the property of the state. The AFT will censor any opinions they don’t agree with, so it is not surprising. If their objective is to create a new generation of progressive activists, they can’t have those pesky conservative ideas seeping into children’s brains while they are supposed to be learning reading, writing, and ‘rithmetic, can they?